About this Event
Event Highlights:
✨ Live lecture and conversation with Dr. Rick Wilber
🖼️ Access to Imagine Museum’s Sci-Fi Exhibition during the event
🌍 Insights from a sci-fi author
💬 Intimate, high-value experience designed for curious minds and leaders
Event Details:
📅 Date: May 9
⏰ Time: 6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.
📍 Location: Imagine Museum
- Add ons - book sold seperately
The Experience:
Rick Wilber is an award-winning science-fiction writer, editor, and creative writing professor who has published more than seventy short stories in major markets, seven novels and short-story collections, and has edited or co-edited three anthologies and authored or co-authored five college textbooks on writing and the mass media.
A major interest of his work is the idea of deep space exploration and colonization. His recent novella, “Ghosts of Goldilocks,” is the third of a planned quartet of stories about a generation ship sent to colonize a remote world, light years from Earth. The first story of the series, “The Hind,” won the Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine Readers’ Award and the prestigious Canopus award for best interstellar fiction-short form. This most recent story won praise from a notable reviewer who said “This story will make my short list for Best Novella Hugo next year!”
The novella was the cover story of the March/April issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. Co-authored with the prolific best-selling author and producer of the Dune movies and television spinoffs, Kevin J. Anderson, the story explores the moral and ethical aspects of mankind’s urge to explore and colonize distant planets, while also spotlighting underappreciated but important members of the ship’s complement, including an adult with Down syndrome who is critical to the colony’s survival.
Wilber has also written a number of stories and novels about the S’hudonni Empire, an alien mercantile empire that seems benevolent even as it comes to Earth to control it for profit for its homeworld of S’hudon. The first novel in the series, Alien Morning, was long-listed for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of 2016. He is at work for the third and concluding novel in the series, Alien Night, where the S’hudonni empire has established a human colony on the distant world where the humans prosper, not realizing they are in the path of the encroaching enemies of S’hudon and are meant to slow the enemy’s advance to buy time for S’hudon’s defense. Comparisons to the British, Dutch, and other mercantile empires of the 18th and 19th and early 20th centuries are welcome.
Wilber is also notable as an award-winning and prolific writer in the field of baseball fantasy, with dozens of baseball-themed stories published in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Spitball, Gulf Stream and elsewhere and three short-story collections reprinting many of the stories.
His most recent collection, Rambunctious (WordFire Press, 2023) connects his deep interest in interstellar exploration with baseball fantasy, and is available to be signed. The Coode Street Station podcast called Wilber “The dean of science fiction baseball.”
.Wilber teaches in the low-residency Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University. A longtime journalism and creative-writing professor, Wilber is director and co-founder with Sheila Williams, long-time editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, of the Must Read Books Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy
Writing, awarded annually at the Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, Florida for the past thirty-two years. He lives in St. Petersbug, is married and has two adult children.
🎟️ Reserve your seat now and be part of an unforgettable night of science, art, and perspective that extends far beyond our planet. Space is limited.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Imagine Museum, 1901 Central Avenue, St. Petersburg, United States
USD 20.00 to USD 40.00
