S. Andrew Swann's Blog, page 4

Me Out on the Web

Now that Marked has come out, I’ve been doing some e-mail interviews with blogs out there on the Interwebs. Today one of my interviews has appeared on Paul Semel’s blog. I get to talk about Marked, zombies, airships, alternate timelines, where it came from, and who I’d cast in the TV series.

As if being a cop wasn’t hard enough, imagine doing it when you can visit alternate dimensions but also have to deal with zombies. Such is the life of Dana Rohan, the hero of S. Andrew Swann’s new noir-infused, paranormal urban fantasy novel Marked. In the following email interview, Swann discusses where he got the idea for this story, what inspired it, and which actress he’d like to typecast by having her star in the TV series…if she and some TV executives are so inclined, of course.

Continue to Paul Semel’s blog

What the Punk?

So a few days ago Slate published an article in what has become a distressingly common subgenre we could call “People are writing SF wrong! Here’s what we must do to fix it!” It seems to have been inspired by an earlier article in Vox about “Hopepunk,” a nascent literary movement whose name was coined by Alexandra Rowland in 2017. In fact, the original clickbaity title seems to have been “Hopepunk can’t fix our broken science fiction.” The current title is, “Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction: Why can’t we move past cyberpunk?”

For anyone who was around when William Gibson published Neuromancer,  the article is somewhat amusing. There is a central failure of reasoning that permeates the entire article, and it is this: the assumption that every genre that has been granted the suffix -punk has evolved from, and is thematically connected to, cyberpunk. The author’s entire thesis is based on this assumption,  without which the premise of the article collapses.

Maybe we can call this the homeopathic theory of literary movements.

Hell, steampunk is only called “steampunk” because Gibson and Sterling wrote a Victorian cyberpunk novel called The Difference Engine. That’s the sole point of contact. Atompunk and dieselpunk are even further removed, being only named by analogy with steampunk. Hopepunk itself has more to do with reaction against cynical dystopias and grimdark fantasy than anything to do with cyberpunk as a literary movement.

Literally, most -punk offshoots have as much to do with cyberpunk as Gamergate has to do with breaking into hotels for political espinoge.

Today’s the Day

Get it here.

Today is the release date for my genre mash-up novel Marked. (You can now get it on Amazon.) Follow Detective Dana Rohan as she slips into alternate pasts and futures and faces the Shadows living in the Chaos. Publisher’s Weekly called it “… an entertaining, occasionally raucous romp.” And SFRevu said “… it takes the reader in a wonderfully unexpected direction and reveals some of the most interesting worldbuilding I have come across.”

What other book will give you a zombie gun battle on a Napoleonic airship? Or drive a Dodge Charger into an alternate Civil War with Confederate biplanes?

Zombies, Steampunk & Time-Travel, Oh My…

Guess who’s got a new book out.

On January 15th, my new novel Marked will officially hit the shelves. DAW’s given it a nice trade paperback treatment, with a kick-ass cover by Chris Gibbs. And yes, the title of this post is not clickbait. In this book you will find steampunk (Napoleonic airships anyone?), zombies (of a sort), and time-travel (you have to get to those airships somehow). It’s all great fun. But you don’t have to take my word for it, SFRevu said:

Marked does an impressive job at blending magic in an everyday setting, and taking the reader to new and strange worlds, all the while maintaining a coherent story. With so many different genres present, it would be easy for the reader to feel disconnected between different parts of the book, but I was happily surprised to discover that this was not the case. […] [I]t takes the reader in a wonderfully unexpected direction and reveals some of the most interesting worldbuilding I have come across.

So if you like steampunk, zombies, time-travel, alternate history or Dodge Chargers, I have a suggestion to add to your bookshelf in the new year.

Discovery

Well, I got a chance to see the first two episodes of the new Star Trek and here are my thoughts:

If you obsess about canon, this series will trigger you hard. There is no way you can sensibly integrate this into the same universe as TOS without serious mental violence so my suggestion is just let it go.
This series is dark.  Not just thematically, but in terms of palette.  If you prefer the historical Trek aesthetic, you may be better off watching The Oriville.
I don’t think I can judge the series itself because it has yet to establish a status quo. The first two episodes are really a prologue setting up the main character’s backstory.
If we judge by the first two episodes, this will be a Trek where blowing ships up is going to be a regular thing.
I don’t like the design of the new Klingons, and that seems to be a common sentiment.
Still it’s watchable, and I liked the main characters…
…but not enough to pay for yet another streaming service just for the one show.

Latest Good News

It seems there’s a very good chance I’ll be doing a new game with Choice of Games.  Looks like it will be more of a fantasy outing this time. Watch this space for more news as I have it.

Self-Destructive Writerly Sins

Don’t be this Book

I’ve written before about the self-destructive urges writers get. Plagiarism needs to be near the top of the list.  Penning sexist rants about your greatness to an agent is another. And, of course, there’s always the venerable Internet meltdown.

Now we have another example of something authors really shouldn’t do to boost their career: Try to game the NY Times Bestseller list.

Last week, Handbook For Mortals by Lani Sarem, knocked Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give off the No. 1 spot of the Times‘ YA bestseller list.  Now this may happen occasionally with a debut novel, but usually that means the fans have heard some advance buzz about the book.  This one, nada.  Another red flag? Brand new publisher.  Final red flag?  To quote Phil Stamper on Twitter:

This is what I’m referencing. A book that’s out of stock on Amazon and is not currently in any physical B&N in the tri-state area.

Suspicious to say the least.  Then you have the weird fact that the author is listed as playing the lead in an “in development” movie of the book. WTF?  It gets better:

It turns out the author worked as a band manager before she decided to write YA books. One of the bands she managed? Blues Traveler. Yep.

The band tweeted about the author on its official Twitter account: “yes, this is weird but not surprising…We fired her for these kind of stunts. Her sense of denial is staggering!”

So apparently this scam involved a lot of strategic bulk buys of a book that barely existed in order to promote a movie. And, unsurprisingly, when real people finally got their hands on a copy, the writing was really, really bad.

Also, unsurprisingly, the NYT pulled it from its list.

Probably Lani Sarem though having a “NYT Bestseller” attached to her film project would generate some financing. Maybe it would have. But she went about it in such a stupid, sleazy way she probably killed her own project with this spectacular and well-deserved failure.

And We’re Back Up!

After about a week of website problems, I finally got the site back up and running. Pro-tip for all you sysadmins out there, if you “fix” something, document precisely what you did, just in case you didn’t fix the problem or, in fact, made things worse. That way the next sysadmin will be able to respond when a frustrated user starts asking you to undo what the last person did.  Fortunately, I figured it out myself. Not a really big fix, but I had to restore some things I did when I first set up WordPress on this domain years and years ago. . . needless to say, not being a WordPress guru, I only had fuzzy memories of what that was. (i.e. time to RTFM.)

How to make me feel old.

So far my Facebook group, Swann’s Lounge, seems to be a success. But it comes at a price. On one of the more popular threads people are listing “obscure” SF/F titles. There’s a lot of good stuff in there.  But apparently it’s been long enough for Jack L. Chalker’s Well of Souls, and Julian May’s  Saga of Pliocene Exile to become obscure to some folks. Given that I bought both these series as they came out. . .  Let’s just say it made me feel my age.

Lounging About

I just want to let people know about my continued effort to integrate myself into the social media landscape (or other buzzwords to that effect) I have launched myself a Facebook group called Swann’s Lounge. So, for those of you on Facebook, you can join a bunch of like-minded folks to discuss reading & writing genre fiction, particularly Science Fiction and Fantasy. Come on and join the discussion, or start one of your own.