Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 254

CLOAK GAMES: SHADOW JUMP table of contents

Here’s the Table of Contents for CLOAK GAMES: SHADOW JUMP.

Side joke: I was watching some episodes of TOP GEAR while writing this book, so it is amusing to imagine Jeremy Clarkson shouting the title to Chapter 9 at the top of his lungs: HORSEPOWAHHHH!!!

-JM

CLOAK GAMES: SHADOW JUMP book description

Here’s the official book description for CLOAK GAMES: SHADOW JUMP:

Nadia Moran is an illegal wizard, an expert thief, and an occasional killer.

So robbing the mansion of the Elven noble Lord Castomyr should prove no challenge at all.

Except another thief has an eye on Lord Castomyr’s treasures, a thief with magical abilities Nadia does not understand.

And unless Nadia outwits this master thief, she’ll be the one left holding the bag…and among the Elves, the punishment for theft is death.

-JM

FROSTBORN: THE KNIGHT QUESTS now available on all ebook platforms!

FROSTBORN: THE KNIGHT QUESTS, the collection of FROSTBORN short stories, was originally available only Kindle, but I’ve brought it out on all the other ebook platforms. Links below!

Available at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iTunes, Google Play, and Smashwords.

RIDMARK ARBAN is the Gray Knight, questing to stop the return of the terrible Frostborn to the High King’s realm.

Yet he did not undertake the quest alone.

Here are the tales of those who accompanied him into the terrible dangers of his quest…

Originally published as the novellas THE KNIGHT’S TALE, THE PALADIN’S TALE, THE MAGE’S TALE, THE THIEF’S TALE, THE SOLDIER’S TALE, and THE ASSASSIN’S TALE, and the short stories THE ORC’S TALE and THE SOULBLADE’S TALE.

-JM

GOD, ROBOT, an anthology edited by Anthony Marchetta

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I rather liked this anthology.

It’s a play on Isaac Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics: 1.) A robot can’t injure a human being, 2.) A robot must obey orders, so long as it doesn’t conflict with the First Law, and 3.) A robot must protect itself from harm, so long as this doesn’t conflict the first two laws.

The idea of Asimov-style humanoid robots seems quaint nowadays, like a future where domed cities would be built on the Moon in the 1980s…but when you think of recent advances in artificial intelligence and weaponized drone aircraft, the notion of Three Laws becomes suddenly much more relevant.

GOD, ROBOT is a though experiment that adds another layer to the Three Laws. Specifically, it cites The Greatest Commandment from Matthew 22, when the lawyer asks Christ about the greatest commandment of the Law, and Christ answers:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

So how would robots act if they were programmed to love their neighbors as themselves? It could be an appealing prospect, or terrifying – the AI in THE MATRIX movies might have argued that they had imprisoned mankind in the Matrix for their own good.

GOD, ROBOT is structured as a frame story. In the year 6000 AD, a cop named Thesus tracks down the notorious criminal William Locke to an isolated monastery in the Alpha Centauri star system. When Theseus at last finds his quarry, the aged Locke surrenders without a fight, but first wants to tell Theseus a story – specifically, the story of the “theobots”. In the universe of GOD, ROBOT, a group of scientists decide to add the two commandments mentioned above to the Three Laws, creating a new kind of android called a “theobot”. Locke’s story (structured in the contributors’ story to the anthology), tells the history of the theobots, from their inception in early 21st century America, their spread into space, their part in the rise and fall of the tyrannical World State, and their gradual journeys into interstellar space.

I definitely enjoyed it – I think my favorite stories were the ones featuring the bumbling scientists who lived in terror of their boss, and the final story, when a woman prepares to unleash a long-prepared genocide, but has doubts at the final moment. The best speculative fiction always asks the “what if” question, and this anthology does a good job of that.

-JM

CLOAK GAMES: SHADOW JUMP editing underway!

Editing is underway for CLOAK GAMES: SHADOW JUMP, so let’s take a look at the cover image!

-JM

FROSTBORN: THE GORGON SPIRIT now available in print

I am pleased to report that FROSTBORN: THE GORGON SPIRIT is now available in print!

So I now have 7 of the 10 FROSTBORN books in trade paperback form. Of course, I’m soon going to write the eleventh one, so it’s like a race with myself.

-JM

Wraith Wolf

I think I shall call the CLOAK GAMES short story WRAITH WOLF, and I’ll give WRAITH WOLF away for free to newsletter subscribers when CLOAK GAMES: SHADOW JUMP comes out.

I’ve written about 50 books and a bajillion short stories, but I don’t think I’ve ever written a scene where two characters have an excruciatingly awkward first date. Turns out it’s extremely entertaining to write!

For me, anyway – less so for the characters.

-JM

The School Internal Homes Of Magic And Sorcery

The phone/tablet Google Translate app has this very useful feature that allows you to point your device’s camera at a page of text, and the app translates the text to the language of your choice upon the screen.

If you work with a lot of computers configured to use foreign languages, as I do, this is extremely useful.

However, sometimes the translation is a bit inaccurate, as the following translation of the book description of Harry Potter from Spanish to English shows:

Though, to be honest, if the government did operate a School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, it would probably name that school the “School Internal Homes Of Magic And Sorcery”.

-JM

 

CLOAK GAMES: SHADOW JUMP rough draft finished!

I am pleased to report that the rough draft of CLOAK GAMES: SHADOW JUMP is finished! It’ll be slightly longer than CLOAK GAMES: REBEL FIST.

Next up is a project called CURRENTLY UNTITLED CLOAK GAMES SHORT STORY, and I’ll think of a better title for it at some point. I’ve never written a CLOAK GAMES short story before, but I’ll want one for the (eventual) CLOAK GAMES OMNIBUS ONE edition. Since all the CLOAK GAMES books are written from Nadia Moran’s 1st-person perspective, I think I’ll write the short story from Riordan’s POV. It will be interesting to see Nadia from another character’s perspective, since she does have a very specifically cynical way of looking at the world.

Once that’s done, it will be time to start editing CLOAK GAMES: SHADOW JUMP. Hopefully I can start doing that next week, and then it will be on to FROSTBORN: THE FALSE KING.

-JM

another CLOAK GAMES: SHADOW JUMP excerpt

Time for another excerpt from CLOAK GAMES: SHADOW JUMP!

He hesitated. “Have you ever been in love?”

I sat in silence for a while.

“Yes,” I said. “It didn’t end well.”

 “What happened?”

“Let’s just say it’s the reason that apartment building blew up,” I said.

-JM