"The poems in Incorrect Astronomy by Steven L. Peck are exploratory in important ways, leading in a multitude of directions through a wide and penetrating range of subjects, from "Wyoming Rabbit Hunts" and "A Walk by the Duck Pond" to "The Five Known Sutras of Mechanical Man" and "The Dead Mouths on My Toes." The poetry in this book is factually beautiful and accurate, often witty, often profound, often touching, and rich with originality." Pattiann Rogers Author of Wayfare and Fire Keeper: New and Selected Poems  “If you’re expecting Steven Peck to choose a theme and stick with it, think again. Incorrect Astronomy serves up nothing if not variety: kingfishers and antlions, dark matter and white dwarfs, aliens and angels and robots that soak in soup. These poems, both comic and cosmic, encourage us to look afresh at our darkling world and sing about what we see.” Lance Larsen Utah Poet Laureate; Author of Genius Loci

Incorrect Astronomy

Literature & Fiction

Peck, Steven L.

Poetry

Aldrich Press

The cold of interstellar space is again closer than you think as eleven authors -- including New York Times bestseller Larry Correia, Nebula winner Eric James Stone, Amazon #1 bestseller Michaelbrent Collings, and multiple Hugo nominee Howard Tayler -- explore what happens when space opera meets Lovecraftian cosmic horror. Contents: A Darklight Call’d on the Long Last Night of the Soul – Michaelbrent Collings Dead Waits Dreaming – Larry Correia The Implant – Robert J Defendi Plague Ship – Steven L. Peck From Within the Walls – Steven Diamond Space Opera: Episode Two—The Great Old One Strikes Back – Michael R. Collings The Queen in Shadow – David J. West The Humans in the Walls – Eric James Stone Seed – D.J. Butler Full Dark – Nathan Shumate Fall of the Runewrought – Howard Tayler

Space Eldritch II: The Haunted Stars

Tayler, Howard

Collings, Michaelbrent

Correia, Larry

Defendi, Robert J.

Butler, D.J.

Shumate, Nathan

Collings, Michael R.

West, David J.

Stone, Eric James

Genre Fiction

Cold Fusion Media

Believers and scientists have long wrestled over the relationship between science and faith. Acclaimed Latter-day Saint author and scientist Steven L. Peck demonstrates that both are indispensable tools we can use to navigate God's strange and beautiful creation. Evolving Faith: Wanderings of a Mormon Biologist is a collection of technical, personal, whimsical essays about Mormon theology, evolution, human consciousness, the environment, sacred spaces, and more. With the mind of a scientist, the soul of a believer, and the heart of a wanderer, Peck provides companionship for women and men engaged in the unceasing quest for further light and knowledge.

Evolving Faith: Wanderings of a Mormon Prophet

Religion & Spirituality

Neal A. Maxwell Institute

A Short Stay in Hell

An ordinary family man, geologist, and Mormon, Soren Johansson has always believed he’ll be reunited with his loved ones after death in an eternal hereafter. Then, he dies. Soren wakes to find himself cast by a God he has never heard of into a Hell whose dimensions he can barely grasp: a vast library he can only escape from by finding the book that contains the story of his life.

United States

Strange Violin Editions

As a faithful Mormon, Soren Johansson has always believed he'll be reunited with his loved ones in an eternal hereafter. Then, he dies. Soren wakes to find himself cast by a God he has never heard of into a Hell whose dimensions he can barely grasp: a vast library he can only escape from by finding the book that contains the story of his life. In this haunting existential novella, author, philosopher, and ecologist Steven L. Peck explores a subversive vision of eternity, taking the reader on a journey through the afterlife of a world where everything everyone believed in turns out to be wrong.

"Wandering Realities gathers together much of the Mormon-themed short fiction of perhaps Mormondom's best living writer," says Michael Austin. "The collection is strange, wonderful, eye opening and amazing. It is a book of revelations and spiritual gifts from an immensely talented author to his religious community, which has long needed somebody to show us how strange and wonderful (and strange) we can actually be." "Wandering Realities is perfectly satisfying, a treat from beginning to end," says Steven Evans. "It is alternatively touching and funny and poignant, with horrors and wonders. Steven Peck is a gift to Mormon literature, and any opportunity to read his stories is not to be missed." "This collection is one of the freshest, most engaging, and most entertaining contributions to Mormon literature that I've seen in a long while," says Jonathan Langford. "Steve Peck is an alien. . . . That's the only explanation I can come up with for how, in this set of 16 stories, he so consistently manages to provide such startlingly different, yet at the same time deeply insightful, perspectives on the culture and religion he has adopted for his own." Peck's highly imaginative stories run the gamut from Mormons reverting to a medieval society on Mars to a bishop who is killing the neighborhood dogs. These stories not only entertain and delight, but they challenge and provoke as well. This collection includes several award-winning stories, including: <ul>
<li>"Two-Dog Dose"—best short story of 2014, Association for Mormon Letters</li> <li>"A Strange Report from the Church Archives"—second place, Irreantum fiction contest</li> <li>"Avek, Who Is Distributed"—first place, Four Centuries of Mormon Fiction Contest 2012</li> <li>"When the Bishop Started Killing Dogs"—second place, Four Centuries of Mormon Fiction Contest 2012</li> </ul>
"Every story Steven L. Peck writes seems to lead Mormon fiction in exciting and innovative new directions," says Scott Hales. "I hate hyperbole, but Peck might be the Moses of Mormon letters in the twenty-first century." Wandering Realities "may be the book of the year," says Andrew Hall. Peck is "perhaps the most interesting contemporary author of Mormon fiction." "Peck is the best LDS science fiction writer currently out there," says Steven Evans. "Wandering Realities is an immensely enjoyable and powerful collection of short fiction, one that highlights both the possibilities and inevitabilities of Mormonism."

Wandering Realities: Mormonish Short Fiction

Short Stories & Anthologies

Zarahemla Books

Does science have anything to contribute to Mormon theology? Peck argues that it does, and offers this book as an attempt to start a conversation on that notion. But fair warning: The theology ahead will be chaotic, emergent, ecological, and evolutionary. There will be few answers and much with which to argue. If you find yourself arguing with the book as you read it, the book’s purpose will have been fulfilled. Peck hopes the questions you are left with will leave you curious, excited, or angry enough to keep the conversation going.

Science the Key to Theology: Volume One: Preliminaries

By Common Consent Press

Az the King of Babylon's Jeweler has been inspired to make a strange and curious compass. but to make it, he must defy the king. Should he risk his life? And if he does, what is to be done this this strange device?

The Gift of the King's Jeweler

Covenant Communications,Inc.

2011 Best Novel, Association for Mormon letters 2011 Finalist, Montaigne Medal, Eric Hoffer Awards What happens when a two-headed cowboy, a high school dropout, and a poet abducted by aliens come together in 1970’s Moab, Utah? The Scholar of Moab, a dark-comedy perambulating murder, affairs, and cowboy mysteries in the shadow of the hoary La Sal Mountains. Young Hyrum Thayne, an unrefined geological surveyor, steals a massive dictionary out of the Grand County library in a midnight raid, startling the good people of Moab into believing a nefarious band of Book of Mormon thugs, the Gadianton Robbers, has arisen again. To make matters worse, Hyrum’s illicit affair with Dora Tanner, a local poet thought to be mad, results in the delivery of a bouncing baby boy who vanishes the night of his birth. Righteous Moabites accuse Dora of the murder, but who really killed their child? Did a coyote dingo the baby? Was it an alien abduction as Dora claims? Was it Hyrum? Or could it have been the only witness to the crime, one of a pair of Oxford-educated conjoined twins who cowboy in the La Sals on sabbatical? Take a blazing ride with Hyrum LeRoy Thayne, the Lord’s Chosen Servant and Defender of Moab. His short rich life spans the borderlands of magical realism where geology, ecology philosophy, and consciousness collide, in Steven L. Peck’s rip-snorting tale The Scholar of Moab. Steven L. Peck knows Moab, inside out. An evolutionary ecologist at Brigham Young University, Peck teaches the philosophy of biology. His scientific work has appeared in American Naturalist, Newsweek, Evolution, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Biological Theory, Agriculture and Human Values, Biology &amp; Philosophy. Steven also co-edited a volume on environmental stewardship. His creative works include a novel, The Gift of the King's Jeweler (2003 Covenant Communications). His poetry has appeared in Dialogue, Bellowing Ark, Irreantum, Red Rock Review and other magazines. Peck was nominated for the 2011 Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award. Other awards include the Meyhew Short Story Contest, First Place at Warp and Weave, Honorable Mention in the 2011 Brookie and D.K. Brown Fiction Contest, and Second Place in the Eugene England Memorial Essay Contest. Steven Peck has imagined a world ever-so-slightly tweaked from this real one, butwell, why wouldn’t conjoined twins have an independent consciousness, bumblebees be more dependent on faith than wings, and Einstein sing German nursery rhymes? The Scholar of Moab explores the otherworld of nature, imagination, and mind.” Brooke Williams, Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness "It’s satire of the best sort: biting what it loves, snuggling up to what it hates." Scott Abbott, Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Director of Integrated Studies, Utah Valley University "Peck moves easily from the lyrical to the grotesque, and sets his multi-voiced tale in the ideal place: Moab, Utah--where red rocks and surprising arches provide the ideal backdrop for anything in or out of the world, including space ships and kidnapped babies." Margaret Blair Young, President: Association for Mormon Letters "Peck convincingly merges the genre of magical realism with American West fiction by invoking the power of personal testimonynot his own, but by presenting the recorded testimony of his characters in letters, journals, poetry, and interview transcripts. Using these disparate voices, Peck concocts a strange and tragicomic brew of naivety, philosophy, faith, discovery, and loss." Blair Dee Hodges, Standing on the Promises, The Association for Mormon Letters

The Scholar of Moab

Torrey House Press

Like those three dimensional objects that look entirely different depending on the angle from which you view them, this novel presents a number of faces. From one direction you will see a conventional adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear set in the American West. However, if you view the book a few steps to the north, you will see a novel that is more Margaret Atwood than Shakespeare: a post-climate-change-catastrophe tale about a transgenic-goat rancher named Leere, the self-styled King of the La Sals Mountain Range in Utah. And from another angle still, the novel becomes a meditation on ecology, land, place, and consciousness! And like most of the really great adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, there are transgenic porcupines and semi-sentient BattleDredge attack robots. Funny, tragic, and timely, King Leere explores futures that may materialize sooner than we think. 
PRAISE FOR KING LEERE
Readers will instantly be won over by this wildly creative blend of stunning speculation, terrifying warning, and fraught relationships. —PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY STARRED REVIEW
"Is there room in a King Lear adaptation for battle droids? How about singing gene-modified porcupines and a demon narrator? Enter Peck’s post-apocalyptic world populated by a land baron, his fractious progeny, and his herd of transgenic skin goats. In this futuristic dystopia, the real tragedy is that in a world warped by climate change, most of the characters are still fueled by consumerist greed, except for Delia and her lover, Ellie. But we all know what happens to the good guys. Or do we? Brilliant, imaginative, and wildly entertaining, Peck’s adaptation of Shakespeare will appeal to hardcore bardolaters and those who wouldn’t be caught dead in a theatre. This book is clever, funny, deeply thoughtful, and ambitious. A riot of a read."—Dayna Kidd Patterson, Co-editor of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry
“'I always speak the truth, even if I must lie to do so.' Thus speaks Steven Peck’s omniscient narrator Asmodeus. And he tells a hell of a story. King Leere is set in the near future in Utah mountains ravaged by climate change (the “koch catastrophe”) and populated by Shakespearean Mormons, human-skinned goats, and battlebots. Asmodeus has been reading Nietzsche and Kierkegaard while adjusting to physical reality in Castle Valley, Utah. He’s a savvy narrator who buries an encomium on a mule’s hoof in a footnote so as not to impede the flow of his fantastic, apocalyptic, and exquisitely romantic narrative. Peck writes with scientific precision and poetic bravura (Leere himself speaks in blank verse!) and his marvelous cautionary tale leaves a reader richer on both counts."—Scott Abbott, Professor of Integrated Studies, Philosophy and Humanities Utah Valley University
"I read the action-packed and oft-humorous Tragedy of King Leere with a deep recognition, not because of my familiarity with Shakespeare’s King Lear, but because of my familiarity with the La Sal Mountains."—Mary O'Brien

The Tragedy of King Leere, Goatherd of the la Sals

Literary

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Peck, Steven L.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Peck, Steven L.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Peck, Steven L.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Incorrect Astronomy

Space Eldritch II: The Haunted Stars

Evolving Faith: Wanderings of a Mormon Prophet

A Short Stay in Hell

A Short Stay in Hell

Wandering Realities: Mormonish Short Fiction

Science the Key to Theology: Volume One: Preliminaries

The Gift of the King's Jeweler

The Scholar of Moab

The Tragedy of King Leere, Goatherd of the la Sals