In my quest for gathering blurbs, I turned to Mike Stackpole too. I’ve known Mike for maybe 20 years, and when I was fresh out of college, Mike was already chasing down the kind of career I wanted for myself. He’d started out as a crackerjack game designer, both for tabletop and video games, and he parlayed that into a stellar run as a New York Times bestselling novelist. He started with the first Battletech novels and later moved on to writing some of the early Star Wars novels and from there into his own original material.
As I followed in Mike’s wake, I often cornered him at conventions and drilled him with all sorts of questions. This was long before he set himself up as a writing teacher with his author’s newsletter, The Secrets, but even back then he was always happy to share everything he’d learned along the way. The summer my first mass-market novel – Secret of the Spiritkeeper – came out, I had the honor of being on a panel at Gen Con with Mike and another bestselling gaming author, Tracy Hickman. One of the reasons I do so many panels myself at shows is because Mike long ago showed me how important it is to share what you know with others – if only so that they don’t make the same mistakes as you.
In his continuing efforts to lend me a hand, Mike gave me a fantastic blurb:
In Amortals, Matt Forbeck does what all great science fiction authors do: weave thought-provoking concepts through a cracking good story. The morality of immortality is a fascinating idea with which Matt Forbeck deals deftly. If you are looking for a great story with action, politics, great characters and an eye toward what might well be our future, Matt Forbeck’s Amortals is not to be missed!
– Mike Stackpole
