by Mike Shea on 29 June 2005
Today I registered and built BobShea.net. This is a tribute and preservation website for my father, Robert J. Shea, and his work.
Thanks to a friend of my father's, I was able to get a hold of the digital copy of the introduction / outline / summary / short story for a sequel of Shaman called Children of Earthmaker. I decided to release this short story under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-commercial, No-derivatives license so anyone can copy it, read it out loud in a public square, email it to their mother, or copy it onto every computer on earth.
I am working to get more digital copies of the rest of his work. I am in contact with his agent to begin thinking about e-books and print-on-demand copies of his out of print novels. I also have the six .mp3 files of Robert Shea's Starwood discussions but I cannot yet release them. Instead, the cassette tapes are available for a modest price.
I do not yet know how I want to release the rest of his works. The money isn't important to me but I don't want to be stupid either. Most importantly, I want his work to survive and allow people to find it and read it. I want his voice to live on.
So I will be updating that site with more material as I acquire it. I may add a photo album. I hope to add scans of his first published short story: The Helpful Robot and an interview with him in Science Fiction Review back in the 1980s. I paid for the bobshea.net domain name for ten years. It's a fun project to see his work breathe life once again.
If anyone stumbles on this page and has any of his works, articles, interviews, or pictures, I would greatly appreciate an email to mike@mikeshea.net.