Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 289

FROSTBORN: THE FIRST QUEST now free on Amazon (and a few other places)

I am pleased to report that FROSTBORN: THE FIRST QUEST is now available for free at Amazon, Amazon UK, Kobo, iTunes, Google Play, and Smashwords.

If you’ve been curious about the FROSTBORN series, but haven’t given it a try, now is an excellent time!

I’m working on getting it free on Barnes & Noble. If you don’t want to wait for that to happen, if you download the EPUB file off Smashwords and sideload it to your Nook device (directions available here), you can read it immediately.

-JM

GHOST IN THE MAZE progress report

13 chapters down, 9 to go. A brief excerpt:

“Tell me,” he said at last, “what do you think of Istarinmul?”

Caina decided to tell the truth. “My first night here, I was so depressed I almost drank myself to death.”

He laughed.

“I wasn’t joking,” said Caina.

“I fear the fair city of Istarinmul,” he said, “often has that effect upon visitors.”

-JM

GHOST IN THE MAZE update

FROSTBORN: THE MASTER THIEF is the fourth FROSTBORN book, and every time I release a FROSTBORN book, invariably the same question follows: when is the next GHOSTS book coming out?

Fortunately, I have good news on this front. I’ve started the rough draft GHOST IN THE MAZE, and I’m currently on Chapter 12 of 22. If all goes well, I hope to have it out in late June or early July.

Now, a brief excerpt:

He set his wine cup upon the table. “I have been observing your exploits with great interest, Balarigar. Robbing the master slavers? Clearly you are a man of great intellect, cunning, and boldness. But you are just one man.”

“You,” said Caina, “could not be more wrong.”

-JM

FROSTBORN: THE MASTER THIEF now available!

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I am pleased to report that FROSTBORN: THE MASTER THIEF (the fourth book in the FROSTBORN series) is now available at Amazon, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, and Smashwords.

Availability on iTunes should come within a week or so.

FROSTBORN: THE MASTER THIEF is also available in a print edition.

You can click here to read a sample chapter from FROSTBORN: THE MASTER THIEF.

I’d like to thank everyone who has read the FROSTBORN series so far, along with the related short stories and the prequel novel. As of August it will have been one year since I started FROSTBORN, and starting a new series is always a tricky proposition. But it has done quite well.

-JM

AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND, by John C. Wright

AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND, written by John C. Wright and published by Castalia House (the publisher founded by Hugo-nominated SF/F writer Vox Day), is set in the world of THE NIGHT LAND, a science fiction novel written William Hope Hodgson, who unfortunately died in battle a few months before the end of World War I. Hope’s THE NIGHT LAND takes place upon a far-future Earth a billion billion years in the future, so far in the future that the sun and the other stars have burned out and the Earth is overrun by mutated abhumans and eldritch horrors of the outer darkness. Mankind only survives in the Last Redoubt, a seven-mile tall pyramid fortress sustained by technologies refined over a billion years of struggle, while the rest of the earth, overrun by darkness, is called the “Night Land”. The remnant of mankind fights against the horrors of the final darkness, even knowing that one day their power supplies will fail and their enemies will destroy them, that entropy and evil shall inevitably triumph.

AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND is a series of four linked novellas taking place over the last five million years of the Last Redoubt’s history, as the Earth and mankind draw ever closer to their final destruction. The first novella deals with a man venturing into the horrors of the Night Land to save his friend, the second with a brother and sister concocting an audacious and dangerous plan to tame some of the mutated beasts of the Night Land, the third is the tale a man venturing into the Night Land to rescue the spirit of his father, and the fourth centers around a 20th-century big-game hunter awakening from cryosleep on a spaceship that is hurtling towards the final instant of the universe as all of space and time and matter collapse into nothingness.

AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND is a dark book, but not in the adolescent, cartoonish sense one sees in much GAME OF THRONES inspired fantasy or BREAKING BAD-esque contemporary dramas. Instead it is the darkness of utter despair, of wondering if the universe is in fact a prison of ultimate entropy and decay from which there can never be any escape. Or if the universe is in fact ruled by powers of darkness that reincarnate men over and over to torment them again and again, delighting in their pain over uncounted thousands of incarnations. In the world of the book, the sinister powers of the Night Land, led by the terrifying and enigmatic Silent Ones, rule the Earth, and indeed the entirety of the universe. Only the Last Redoubt stands free, and its inhabitants know it will inevitably fall and be consumed by the eternal darkness.

And yet…

If that was all there was to the book, I would not have finished it and would not be writing about it now.

There is a literary technique called “eucatastrophe”. Just as a catastrophe is a complete and utter disaster, a reversal of fortune for the worse, a eucatastrophe is a sudden and utter triumph, usually worked by an outside force over which the protagonists have no control. J.R.R. Tolkien coined the term, and used as his example the Resurrection, when Christ triumphed over death and hell and saved mankind. In his fiction, the most obvious examples are  in THE LORD OF THE RINGS with the unexpected victory of the Host of the West at the Black Gate of Mordor when Gollum falls into the fire with the Ring, or in THE SILMARILLION when the Valar arrive to overthrow Morgoth Bauglir and destroy his realm at the end of the First Age. (Or more simply but more emotionally, the hobbit Pippin frozen with joy when he hears the horns of Rohan during the Siege of Gondor.) Tolkien himself put it like this in his essay ON FAIRY-STORIES:

At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite — I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist’, nor ‘fugitive’. In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.”

However, writing a eucatastrophe is really, really hard to do well. Like, almost impossible, since the iron logic of stories demands that the protagonist succeed at least partly through his own efforts. Otherwise it seems cheap, like the author waving his magic wand at the end of the story to make things right. So a eucatastrophe done badly comes across as a deus ex machina, like Scotty saving the Enterprise in the last five minutes of the episode by reversing the polarity of the warp core or whatever. But done well, it is nothing short of amazing. Think of how much tension and darkness there is in THE LORD OF THE RINGS before the Ring falls into the fires of Orodruin.

Ah, how to discuss this without spoilers? Suffice it to say, despite the dark nature of AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND (especially the story of Antigone, Polynices, Draego, and Dracaina), you will not be disappointed if you read to the end of each novella, and especially if you read to the end of the entire book.

To summarize, AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND is an amazing and powerful book, science fiction, fantasy, and horror all blended together in one superb story.  Recommended without reservation or caveat.

As a final point, the mere existence of AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND proves some points I have made earlier, that the mainstreaming of ebooks has been an unmitigated good for both writers and readers. I believe Mr. Wright wrote most of the book long before ebooks ever went mainstream, but ebooks have helped AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND achieve a vastly wider audience than it would have otherwise. Traditional publishing has, with some exceptions, become moribund, ossified, and conformist (SF/F publishing is particularly bad in this regard), and I suspect the reaction of most acquiring editors at a major publisher to AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND would involve the word “apoplexy”. Ebooks have cracked open the old stranglehold of traditional publishing, and made it possible for worthy books like AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND to achieve a far wider audience than they could otherwise.

-JM

Meat crackers & Frostborn

Apparently Nabisco makes bacon-flavored Ritz crackers now, and they are delicious. I am eating them as I finalize and prepare to upload the files for FROSTBORN: THE MASTER THIEF and an accompanying FROSTBORN short story.  Since subscribers to my new-release newsletter get the short story for free, this makes it an excellent time to sign up for my newsletter. Just follow the link here!

-JM

Coming very soon

Next week, as a matter of fact!

-JM

a thank you to Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I read a lot of blogs, but I generally do not comment on them, because I am not a very talkative man (said the writer who has published three novels and two technical books in 2014). Reading a blog post is easy, but taking the time to write one is much harder.

That said, I was sad to see that Kristine Kathryn Rusch is finishing up her “Business Rusch” series of posts on the business of writing. I have read the posts every Thursday for the last three years, and always found them informative and helpful. If you’re a new writer just starting out, or a veteran looking for some new tips, you could do much worse than to read her entire series of posts or to pick up a copy of her The Freelancer’s Survival Guide.

-JM

FROSTBORN: THE MASTER THIEF sample chapter

I’m planning to have FROSTBORN: THE MASTER THIEF out in the first week of May. So that means it’s time for a sample chapter! Click the link to read.

-JM

Caina: Mac or PC?

A reader emailed inquired as to what kind of computer Caina Amalas would use, should she happen to live in the modern era. Mac or PC?

The answer, of course, is neither. Caina would likely use a custom-built Linux distribution, encrypted and specifically built for the maximum amount of security. She would scoff at anything so trivial as passwords, and insist upon two-factor authentication and key-based encryption for everything. And likely her computer would have a bomb rigged inside the case to explode in the event of any security breaches. (I suspect she would likely be one of those Linux people who run six miles every morning and then bicycle to work.)

Mazael Cravenlock, if he needed anything done online, would just make Molly do it.

-JM