Edward Ashton's Blog, page 16
December 3, 2015
Cover reveal: GOLDENFIRE by A.F.E. Smith
Today is the official cover reveal for Goldenfire, the...
Today is the official cover reveal for Goldenfire, the second book in the
Darkhaven series. It will be released by Harper Voyager on 14 January, but if you want to
read it sooner, you can enter the giveaway below for your chance to win an advance ebook
copy!
In Darkhaven, peace doesn’t last long.
Ayla Nightshade has ruled Darkhaven for three years. With the help of Tomas Caraway, her
Captain of the Helm, she has overcome her father’s legacy to find new confidence in herself
and her unusual shapeshifting abilities.
Yet three years ago, a discovery was made that could have profound consequences for the
Nightshade line: a weapon exists that can harm even the powerful creatures they turn into.
And now, that knowledge has fallen into the wrong hands.
An assassin is coming for Ayla, and will stop at nothing to see her dead.
Preorder Goldenfire:
HarperCollins
Amazon
Barnes
& Noble
Google play
iBooks
Catch up with Darkhaven:
HarperCollins
Amazon
Barnes
& Noble
Google play
iBooks
Kobo
Enter the giveaway:
a
Rafflecopter giveaway
November 26, 2015
The Hole
“Huh,” Mack says, and reaches up to scratch the broad, bald dome of his head. “That is not what I expected to happen.”
He looks down into the hole. Dory steps up beside him.
“How far down do you think it goes?”
He shrugs.
“Dunno.”
The hole, which had not been there moments before, now runs arrow-straight toward the center of the Earth. It’s two feet wide. The walls are smooth as glass.
The wreck is scattered across the desert around them. The chunk they’ve been working on is a tapered cylinder, twelve feet long and maybe half that wide. The access panel that Mack’s just finished prying loose has followed whatever fell out of the space behind it down the hole. The exposed compartment is empty.
“What’s that sound?” Dory asks.
“Wind,” Mack says. “It’s going down the hole.”
He’s right. The hole is sucking air, and the noise of it is growing into a rising roar. Dory’s long blonde hair flutters in the strange, downward-blowing breeze.
“Do you think it’ll keep going?” Dory asks. “I mean, will it just keep sucking stuff in forever?”
Mack shakes his head.
“Not forever.” He looks up. The sun is a hot white glare in a cloudless blue sky. “Pretty soon, I’m guessing there won’t be anything left to suck.”
#
The artificial singularity falls through the Earth with little more difficulty than it would have fallen through vacuum. It slows slightly while passing through the dense iron core, drawing in matter and throwing off hard radiation, enough so that it fails to reach the floor of the Indian Ocean before falling back again. The rotation of the Earth turns the path it describes through the planet into a complex series of interlocking arcs, like the petals of a flower traced out in negative space. Each pass bleeds off more energy, and each arc peaks slightly lower, until the singularity’s motion is reduced to an oscillation within the core. Finally, it comes to rest.
And then, like a spider at the center of its web, it begins to eat.
#
“So,” Dory says. “What happens now?”
They’re in a booth in an Applebee’s in Elko, Nevada. Mack looks down into his half-empty beer, then drains it in one pull.
“Well,” he says, and belches hugely. “First thing is, we quit worrying about the credit card.”
He waves down their waitress, waggles his empty glass and holds up one finger.
“Really,” Dory says. “What do we do? I mean, we ought to tell somebody, right?”
Mack gives her a blank stare. The waitress puts a fresh beer down in front of him. He drinks half of it down, then shakes his head.
“Tell somebody what?” he asks. “That the world’s about to end, and it’s our fault? How, exactly, do you see that playing out?”
Dory’s eyebrows knit over the bridge of her nose.
“It’s not really,” she says. “Is it?”
Mack shrugs.
“Don’t know for sure, I guess.” He belches again, then drinks most of what’s left in his glass. “But did you see what came out of that wreck? Did you feel it pull at you when it fell?”
As if to emphasize his point, the room shudders. Their shadows dance around them as the lamp above the table swings wildly. Across the room, a waitress drops a full tray of plates and glasses into a trucker’s lap. His friends burst out laughing.
“Yeah,” Mack says. “I’d say we’re screwed.”
#
Dory’s known Mack for almost twenty years now. They met on a cruise ship, when they were paired for a kayaking trip up a Norwegian fiord. They spent most of that day in companionable silence. They’ve spent most of the past two decades in companionable silence, truth be told. On this night, though, as they’re making their way out of the Elko Applebee’s through ever-worsening tremors, Dory has a flash of memory. They were standing at the rail of the ship on the night they met, watching the northern lights snake across the sky. Mack touched her face, brushed her hair back, ran one finger from her ear down along the line of her jaw. Dory turned to him then, looked into his eyes and said, “You know, I’ve got a feeling you’re gonna get me in trouble some day.”
#
Mack reaches back to help Dory to the top of the bluff. The moon is high and bright overhead. The town below is still lit up in places, but the power is failing, block by block. The tremors are almost constant now, and getting stronger by the minute. Dory pulls out her phone. Mack takes it from her, rears back, and chucks it over the edge.
“Hey,” she says. “What the hell, Mack?”
“You’ve got an hour left on Earth,” Mack says. “You really want to spend it checking Facebook?”
Dory scowls, takes two steps away from him. The ground lurches beneath them, and she sits down hard in the dirt.
“I don’t know,” she says as he drops down beside her. “What else is there to do?”
He wraps an arm around her shoulder, pulls her tight against him. She pulls back at first, then leans her head against his shoulder. They sit like that for a while, holding tighter when the earth moves, relaxing when it’s still.
“It’s too bad,” Dory says finally.
“Yeah,” Mack says. “But what’re you gonna do?”
The bluff shudders beneath them. The valley floor buckles with a sub-sonic groan, and the last of the lights in the town wink out.
“Dory?” Mack says.
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry your last meal was from Applebee’s.”
She takes a deep breath in and wraps her arms around his chest. He smooths her hair down, then kisses her forehead. She looks up as the bluff drops away beneath her. The stars stare back at her from an ink-black sky, cold, and clear, and unconcerned.
###
November 18, 2015
Fun Science Fact #28: Compassion is not a zero-sum game.
In the few days since the Paris attacks, I’ve seen a half-dozen or so posts arguing that we shouldn’t be helping Syrian refugees, because there are other folks here at home who are more deserving of our compassion. These are mostly repurposed older posts that originally argued that we shouldn’t be helping undocumented immigrants. They include pictures of a hungry kid, or a sad puppy, or a homeless person sleeping on a steam grate, and come with a tag line saying that Syrian refugees (or whoever the demonized group of the week happens to be) get free health care and welfare benefits, while returning veterans (or whoever the valorized group of the week happens to be) are left to die in the streets.
Apparently, this is a pretty compelling argument, because these posts all seem to have a long trail of comments along the lines of “Yeah!” and “Disgraceful!” and “I also agree that we should not help those refugees!” However, this is in fact a profoundly stupid argument. It’s a classic example of what we refer to as a false choice. We don’t actually have to decide whether to be nice to refugees, or to be nice to veterans. The fact that some veterans are treated badly doesn’t mean that we should also treat refugees badly. It means that we should treat all veterans well.
“But wait,” I can almost hear you arguing. “Our government is broke! We’re deep in debt! We can’t afford to be nice to everyone, or we’ll end up like Greece!”
Well, no. Actually, that’s a crock too. Here in the United States, we have what is known as a fiat currency. Greece does too, of course, but they don’t have control over their own monetary policy. That means, in essence, that unlike Greece, we have exactly as much money as we choose to have. That’s how we can spend a trillion dollars blowing things up in the desert, hand over another trillion to our grandparents, and still cut taxes.
There are limits, of course. Eventually, if we keep printing dollars, we’ll get to the point where our currency will begin losing value. That point, however, is apparently a long, long way away, because even after several rounds of quantitative easing over the past seven years, inflation remains practically nonexistent. Moreover, the amount of money it would take to re-settle a few thousand refugees (or to provide basic healthcare for the undocumented workers who allow huge sectors of our economy to function, for that matter) is trivial in a country that spends five billion dollars a year on deodorant.
This is not to say, of course, that the government ought to be handing out satchels of money on every street corner. We absolutely should not, however, cry poverty as an excuse not to do something that needs to be done. At the end of the day, the people sharing these post and liking them aren’t worried about increasing the national debt, and they’re probably not actually all that worried about the fate of homeless veterans either. What they are is crap-their-pants frightened of people who look slightly different, speak with an accent, or pray to a different God.
The thing is, though—if there is a God out there somewhere, I’m pretty sure he’s not handing out bonus points based on whether we picked out the right skin tones to discriminate against. There are a whole lot more verses in the Bible about taking care of the downtrodden than there are about all the sex stuff that people seem to like to focus on. You might want to consider that the next time you’re deciding whether to hit the “share” button.
November 13, 2015
November 6, 2015
Flash Fiction Frenzy!
Got a fun piece and a very short author interview up on Space Squid this evening.
November 4, 2015
Aidan is prone in his hunting blind the first time he sees her, twenty feet up in the branches of a...
Aidan is prone in his hunting blind the first time he sees her, twenty feet up in the branches of a poplar. It’s maybe an hour before dusk, and the sun is low in the trees behind him, making the early autumn leaves around him over in a blaze of reds and browns and yellows. She’s no more than fifty yards away, slipping like a shadow from trunk to trunk, passing through the underbrush without so much as disturbing a leaf. He settles his right eye against the scope of his rifle, places the crosshairs on a curl of white-blonde hair slipping out from beneath the knit cap at her temple. He hasn’t made a sound, he’s sure of it, but still she freezes, and her head turns just far enough then for her to meet his gaze. His finger slides from the guard to the trigger. Her eyes are a flat, empty blue. They narrow, and in that instant he realizes he’s been seen, and judged, and found wanting. He knows he should fire, knows she’s Altered. She has a grace to her movements and a silence in her stillness that are far beyond human. And yet…
A bead of sweat drips into his lashes. Aidan squints, then blinks. When he opens his eyes again, she’s gone.
October 27, 2015
Daily Science Fiction :: The Terrible by John Wiswell
Think I’ll just present this one without comment.
October 25, 2015
Reasons to reconsider immortality
1. That “Rocky Mountain High” tattoo? It’ll look stupid when they’re not anymore.
2. The phrase “it gets old” applies to everything eventually.
3. Hitting the ground at terminal velocity really, really hurts.
4. The fountain of youth will be expensive. Do you really want to spend eternity with Donald Trump?
5. Having to die sucks. But honestly? It might be nice to have the option.
October 17, 2015
Reading and Conversation with Edward Ashton, author of Three Days in April
If you happen to be in Rochester, NY on Monday night…
