March 28, 2024
Annapolis, US 50 F

Local author named finalist in Compton Crook Award

Author T. C. (Ted) Weber has been nominated as a finalist for the 2017 Compton Crook Award, given annually by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society (BSFS) for the “best first novel of the year written by an individual author in the Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror genre.”

Weber’s novel, Sleep State Interrupt, is a cyberpunk thriller set in a near-future dystopian Maryland, where a giant media corporation controls nearly all information and politicians do their bidding. An unemployed bipolar journalist, with the help of a fugitive teenage hacker, seeks to change all this, but has to evade an army of pursuers and break into one of the most secure facilities ever built. Uncannily relevant to today’s political setting, Sleep State Interrupt was described as “a thoroughly enticing tale” by John DeDakis, former White House correspondent, CNN editor, and author of Bullet in the Chamber, Fast Track, Bluff, and Troubled Water. The novel is available in paperback and e-book formats from most online outlets.

“I’m very honored to be nominated for this award,” Mr. Weber said. “I wrote Sleep State Interrupt to be an entertaining thriller with a diverse, unconventional cast and elements of cyberpunk, a favorite genre of mine. The novel also illustrates the dangers of corporate rule and information control. Democracy is a lot more fragile than you might think. The recent moves by the Trump administration and Congress to overturn net neutrality and eliminate privacy protections  are the first steps toward the information oligarchy depicted in this novel.” 

Ted Weber has pursued writing and music since childhood, and studied physics, filmmaking, and ecology at the University of Florida. By day, he works as a conservation scientist for a national non-profit and has had papers published in a number of scientific journals. He is a resident of Annapolis, Maryland where he lives with his wife Karen. 

Sleep State Interrupt is set in Baltimore, DC, and rural Maryland, areas that I know well,” Weber said. “I interviewed various experts to get the technical details right, much as writers do for non-fiction,” he added.

The Compton Crook Award was created in 1983 and is named in memory of the late Towson State College Professor of Natural Sciences Compton Crook, who wrote under the name Stephen Tall.  The prize will be presented on Memorial Day at Balticon, the four-day annual science fiction convention produced by BSFS.

Readers can find an excerpt of the novel and other information at http://savethereefs.wix.com/sleepstateinterrupt.

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