“Shades of Isaac Asimov Appear”

Charles Freedom Long has written an exceptional book in Dancing With the Dead. The writing is crisp, clear, and powerful. The science fiction world he creates contains sufficient remnants of today to capture readers with honesty, believability, and trust.  In this respect, shades of the great SF writer, Isaac Asimov, appear. I once asked Asimov, over lunch, how he could create his worlds of the future with such honesty. He told me to read the non-fiction university textbooks he wrote.  Truth is always borne of reality. Even piercing the veil of death, Charles Freedom Long manages to hold our credibility. He coats the sometime-overbearing spiritualism of the afterlife with intelligence, change, growth, and love. He turns Scandinavian traits into an alien race of goddesses. And because his writing approaches literary magic, he makes us believe in languages we have never heard and ideas we can only hope to grasp. Well done, Charles Freedom Long. (Temple Emmet Williams, former editor at The Readers Digest, award-winning journalist and author.)  December 9, 2015