Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 298
December 12, 2013
Thursday of Sword & Sorceress 28: the Elisabeth Waters & Michael Spence interview
As I have done for several years in the past, I will be running interviews with my fellow contributors to Sword & Sorceress 28.
It’s fun to do, and a good chance for the writers to talk about themselves and their work. This week’s interview is with Elisabeth Waters & Michael Spence.
###
1.) Tell us about yourself.
EW says:
Elisabeth Waters is a science fiction/fantasy author and editor. She won the Gryphon Award in 1989 for her first novel CHANGING FATE. Since then, she has published a large number of short stories, and she currently edits the anthology series Sword and Sorceress and co-edits Darkover anthologies with Deborah J. Ross (STARS OF DARKOVER is due out in June 2014). She’s still doing so much of the work that she did while Marion was alive that she calls Secretary to Mrs. Bradley “the job that will not die.”
MS says:
I’m an editor, writer, copyeditor, proofreader, and voice actor currently living in the northern Twin Cities. (As distinct from the southern Twin Cities—Dallas and Fort Worth, which was a while back—and Matt Wallace’s Failed Cities [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2334498.The_Failed_Cities_Monologues].) My most recent solo work is “The Music of the Spheres,” in the anthology Music of Darkover. I’ve also narrated several audiobooks, including two novels by Marion Zimmer Bradley and most recently When the Carny Comes to Town, a mystery by Elaine Orr; when this interview is posted I will probably be well into its sequel, Any Port in a Storm. You can find these at Audible.com, Amazon.com, and iTunes.
2.) Tell us about your S&S 28 story, “A Drink of Deadly Wine.”
EW says:
Michael and I have been collaborating on the Treasures of Albion stories for sometime now. This is the tenth story, but it’s only the second one that uses Chinese Treasures instead of Western ones. This can be explained by the fact that our local museums had another joint exhibit this past year. The first exhibit “Power and Glory” (Ming Dynasty) was the inspiration for “Daughter of Heaven” in S&S 23 (2008). This year we both got the Terracotta Warriors exhibit. I spent so much time in the gallery that I can now recognize the Archer from seeing part of his back. The title, as usual, comes from my daily reading of the book of Psalms. I get the most interesting titles that way.
MS says:
Lisa and I have both been fascinated recently by two aspects of Chinese cultural history, each of which, as it happens, has also been featured in exhibits that traveled to our home cities of San Francisco and Minneapolis. One is Chinese art, including calligraphy. The other is the terracotta warriors of Qin Shi-huang. “A Drink of Deadly Wine” features both.
No one knows exactly why China’s first Emperor created an army of terracotta warriors to be buried with him near the city of Xi’an. The current Emperor has brought a number of them to his residence in the Palace complex in the Forbidden City, where they can be studied and also appreciated as art. But three of them have vanished from the Palace, appearing here and there in the outer city, causing chaos and frightening the populace.
Laurel, honored graduate of the College of Wizardry at the University of Albion, now serves far from home, in the Imperial Court as Guardian of the Scholar’s Pin. She will need her scholarly talents to deal with this situation and more: A fourth warrior has also been spotted in the outer city, but its sightings are far less haphazard. It is headed toward the Palace … and a confrontation with Laurel.
3.) Can you share an excerpt from your story?
Zhan stepped forward. When he spoke, everyone but Laurel and the Fist gasped. This was clearly not something the others had done. “If I may beg the Son of Heaven’s indulgence, may I examine this Wine of Life?”
From his throne the Emperor nodded, and extended his hand, palm upward, to Lady Mei-ying. Powerless to refuse, she placed the bottle in his hand, and he held it out to Zhan. The archer took the bottle, held it up to the nearest lamp to judge its translucency, and then unstoppered the bottle and held it under his nose. Then he replaced the stopper, and made as if to dash the bottle to the floor, holding himself back barely in time. Clutching the bottle, he did something that made the courtiers fall to the ground in horror.
He howled. It was the howl of a savage battle’s last survivor; of a man who has discovered the burning ruin of his village. It froze the blood in Laurel’s veins—or at least she would have sworn it had.
4.) Would you say fantasy needs to reflect real life, or offer an escape from it?
EW says:
Both. Which one I’d prefer at any given moment depends on my mood. Actually I think that all writing needs to reflect real life. If it didn’t, how could the reader identify with it? And how could a writer create something that did not reflect real life?
MS says:
Fantasy DOES reflect real life.
I won’t go into how I discovered this, although it’s one of those “if it were a snake it woulda bit me” things. Other authors are well aware of it, though; for example William Gibson, who said that he wrote his novel Neuromancer about the world of 1984, when it was published. Never mind that all the gee-whiz consumer technology didn’t exist then, nor did companies stage actual commando raids to acquire employees from their competitors. These were the attitudes present in 1984, and he was fairly accurate about them, just as Ray Bradbury was in 1953 when he told us what happens when entertainment becomes mass entertainment, in Fahrenheit 451. “If this goes on—,” indeed.
Let me also cite one of my heroes, sf writer/fantasist/historian/equestrian Judith Tarr, who talks about this in an intriguing discussion on worldbuilding at SF Signal (http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2013/08/mind-meld-the-rules-of-worldbuilding/):
“In historicals I call [one aspect of worldbuilding] ‘period sense.’ In works of speculative fiction, it’s world view, attitude, basic cultural assumptions. It’s the psychological and social and cultural underpinnings of the world—and the vast majority of the time, these reflect, more or less uncritically, the attitudes of the writer’s own time and place.
“When we study history, we say that a historian’s work reflects not so much the time he’s writing about as the time he’s writing in. His priorities are those of his own time and place, and he brings the attitudes and the judgments of his own culture to the events of the past.”
She’s not endorsing this phenomenon, just observing it. I might add, though, that in commercial fiction some degree of it is inevitable: if we can’t somehow identify with the milieu of a story, we won’t buy into it—and we won’t buy it.
Let’s look at an example of this reflectance: Star Trek vs. Star Trek: The Next Generation. Both series were hyper-optimistic about the future of humanity, but the original series far more so. It was the late 1960s; we were headed to the moon and after that, the sky was the limit. We furthermore (at least we Trekkies) were so sick of our interracial enmities that we welcomed the assurance that we would one day outgrow them. We were ready to put the problems of our world aside and make some progress, by gum!
By contrast, the Next Generation was far more conscious (and from the get-go they had Q to remind them) that whether we liked it or not, many of those problems weren’t going anywhere, and we had to spend time getting our collective house in order as well as search for “new life and new civilizations.” Some television critics proposed that TNG viewers were what TOS viewers had become by growing up, and that the series showed the difference. Perhaps. And perhaps the success of the 2009 Star Trek film suggests that we’re once again weary of the socioeconomic quicksand we envision around us and the feelings of paralysis that won’t let us take action. We’ve had enough of merely “engaging”; it’s time to “punch it!”
We could also consider 1978’s Superman: The Movie vs. 2013’s Man of Steel. Unlike the 1978 film, the 2013 one shows our preoccupation with energy sources and the environment (the Kryptonians did their world in through the energy-mining technology that ultimately killed it), and, on the other side of 9/11, leaves behind the globally distasteful idea of “truth, justice, and the American way” in favor of survival and protection of one’s home from those whose creed compels them to destroy it. —And wrecked buildings. Lots and lots of wrecked buildings.
5.) What are your preferred tools and environment for writing? (Typewriter, computer, pen, coffee shop, and so on.)
EW says:
I use the computer, preferably alone and in silence. I’m not one of those writers who can give you a soundtrack to go with their book. I can tune out pretty much anything if I’m involved enough in what I’m writing, but it’s easier not to have to. I try to set my iPod to beep every 30 minutes to remind me to stand up and stretch, because when I forget to move, prying myself out of the chair several hours later is painful. I would hate trying to write in a coffee shop, not just because of the noise and distractions but also because the smell of coffee makes me queasy.
MS says:
At the moment it’s not so much preference necessity. I use a computer because (a) Lisa and I work in either Google Docs or RTF files, (b) I can type faster than I can write by hand, and (c) if I find myself writing a story in a different setting (say, at work when proofreading jobs are slow to come in), I can send it to myself at home and continue there. Coffee shops? I wish. Neither the time nor the budget for them, alas.
6.) How many drafts of a story or novel do you typically write?
EW says:
As many as it takes. It can vary a lot. I’ve lost track of the number of drafts I’ve written of MENDING FATE, the sequel to my first novel CHANGING FATE (1994). Short stories don’t usually need more than two or three.
MS says:
Stories: I’ll often do one draft but then swap out chunks until it’s arguably not the same draft—rather like the proverbial axe whose owner replaced the handle five times and the head three times but insisted it was the same axe he’d brought over from Ireland. I haven’t yet published a story of which I had written one draft, then trashed it and rewrote it differently from the beginning. This isn’t my advice for new writers, and if someone wants to suggest that my work could stand to be trashed and redone, I won’t dispute it too energetically.
Novels: I’ll let you know after I’ve finished one. I’m still working on the first draft of Crown’s Jewel.
6.) Have you tried any self-publishing projects yourself?
EW says:
Yes, although most of them have been for the MZB Literary Works Trust. Also, most of them have been backlist, so there’s a built-in market. We just finally got all twelve of the Darkover anthologies MZB edited back in print, and we’re working on the eBook versions next. We use CreateSpace for physical books, and I like it; it’s user-friendly. I tried Lightning Source and gave up on it. Life is too short to fuss with all their requirements. For eBooks we started with Fictionwise and then added KDP (Kindle). The Trust has just joined Book View Café, and our debut book THE COMPLETE LYTHANDE will be out in early November, about the same time as S&S 28.
MS says:
Not yet, although many of my friends in the podcasting community have. Their success has been small overall, and I only know three who have gained national-media attention—and that’s after their self-pub efforts won them contracts with traditional publishers. Whoops, make that four: at this writing, Mur Lafferty has just won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer [of fantasy or sf], and I’m hoping she’ll get considerably more attention. She’s earned it.
7.) If offering advice to a new writer, would you suggest they pursue traditional publication or self-publication?
MS says:
Here I’ll defer to Lisa, who’s done both.
EW says:
I would start by asking with their goal is. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. Traditional publication isn’t what it used to be, and the bias against self-publishing has been greatly diminished. There are also a lot of small presses that offer almost a hybrid of the two.
Some authors still want the validation of having a traditional publisher pay actual money for their work, while others just want to see it in print. The one thing nobody really needs these days is a vanity press. You can publish your own work for free. (Note: This does NOT excuse you from the obligation to copy-edit and proofread your work, or to have someone competent do this for you.) The good thing about self-publishing is that anyone can do it, and the bad thing about self-publishing is that anyone can do it.
If you go with a traditional publisher, readers can assume your work is at least competent, even if it’s not the sort of thing they like. If you self-publish, you will need to convince the reader of this yourself. (I don’t buy Kindle books from authors I don’t know without reading the sample first.) I think that self-publishing would be difficult for a new author who isn’t comfortable with self-promotion and social media, because new authors have to convince readers that their work isn’t part of the pile of badly-produced self-indulgent garbage it’s mixed in with. I’m an introvert and use Facebook only under duress, so I’m not sure how well I’d do if I were starting my career now. Things were much simpler back when I first started selling–not necessarily better, but definitely simpler.
###
Thanks, Elisabeth & Michael, for the interview.
Check out our interviews with past S&S contributors – , , , Sword & Sorceress 25, Sword & Sorceress 26, andSword & Sorceress 27.
And the novel featuring my Sword & Sorceress character, spy and assassin Caina Amalas, is now available for free in all ebook formats: Child of the Ghosts.
print books
I’ve been half-heartedly experimenting with print books over the last year, and I now have eight books available in print. (DEMONSOULED, SOUL OF TYRANTS, SOUL OF SWORDS, CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, GHOST IN THE FLAMES, GHOST IN THE ASHES, GHOST IN THE MASK, and FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT.) They tend to sell only a few copies a month, so I haven’t paid close attention to them.
But in December they’ve had a big sales spike. The logical conclusion is that people are buying them as Christmas gifts. Which is so nice! That means someone liked the book enough to give it to someone else. That doesn’t happen every day.
So, thank you, holiday gift shoppers! (Instead of thinking of the ebook version and the print version, I may have to think in terms of the “ebook version” and the “holiday gift version.”)
-JM
December 10, 2013
Free Fiction Tuesday – KNIGHTS’ QUEST
This week’s Free Fiction Tuesday story is actually two shorter stories bundled as one!
Available at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, and Amazon Canada.
Featuring two short stories, KNIGHTS’ QUEST shows how far two men are willing to go to complete their quests.
In CRAVINGS, a knight undertakes a daring and bold quest for the sake of his wife, braving tremendous perils and dangers.
In CREATIVE PROCESS, an artist needs inspiration to create a masterwork – and exposes himself to tremendous dangers in a strange and twisted world.
December 7, 2013
GHOST IN THE SURGE table of contents
I’ve been making good progress on GHOST IN THE SURGE. So let’s have a look at the Table of Contents!
Chapter 1 – The Lord Governor’s Ball
Chapter 2 – Disciple of the Moroaica
Chapter 3 – The Champion and the Gladiator
Chapter 4 – To End The War
Chapter 5 – Death Warrant
Chapter 6 – Puppets
Chapter 7 – The Renegade
Chapter 8 – A Dead Heart
Chapter 9 – A Mask of Scars
Chapter 10 – The Lord Ambassador
Chapter 11 – The Venatorii
Chapter 12 – The Great Work
Chapter 13 – Voyage
Chapter 14 – New Kyre
Chapter 15 – A Mask of Gold
Chapter 16 – Dark Dreams
Chapter 17 – A Mask of Mirrors
Chapter 18 – A World Reborn
Chapter 19 – Balarigar
Chapter 20 – The Golden Dead
Chapter 21 – The Gate of Hell
Chapter 22 – The Netherworld
Chapter 23 – They Shall Pay For What They Have Done
Chapter 24 – Father and Daughter
Chapter 25 – Storm
Chapter 26 – If Not For Her
Chapter 27 – Closed Circle
Epilogue
-JM
GHOST IN THE SURGE tablet of contents
I’ve been making good progress on GHOST IN THE SURGE. So let’s have a look at the Table of Contents!
Chapter 1 – The Lord Governor’s Ball
Chapter 2 – Disciple of the Moroaica
Chapter 3 – The Champion and the Gladiator
Chapter 4 – To End The War
Chapter 5 – Death Warrant
Chapter 6 – Puppets
Chapter 7 – The Renegade
Chapter 8 – A Dead Heart
Chapter 9 – A Mask of Scars
Chapter 10 – The Lord Ambassador
Chapter 11 – The Venatorii
Chapter 12 – The Great Work
Chapter 13 – Voyage
Chapter 14 – New Kyre
Chapter 15 – A Mask of Gold
Chapter 16 – Dark Dreams
Chapter 17 – A Mask of Mirrors
Chapter 18 – A World Reborn
Chapter 19 – Balarigar
Chapter 20 – The Golden Dead
Chapter 21 – The Gate of Hell
Chapter 22 – The Netherworld
Chapter 23 – They Shall Pay For What They Have Done
Chapter 24 – Father and Daughter
Chapter 25 – Storm
Chapter 26 – If Not For Her
Chapter 27 – Closed Circle
Epilogue
-JM
December 6, 2013
sign up for my newsletter and get a free story for Christmas
If you haven’t signed up for my new release newsletter yet, this is a great time to do it – I’m giving away a story for free to newsletter subscribers!
-JM
December 5, 2013
Thursdays of SWORD & SORCERESS 28 – the Steve Chapman interview
As I have done for several years in the past, I will be running interviews with my fellow contributors to Sword & Sorceress 28.
It’s fun to do, and a good chance for the writers to talk about themselves and their work. This week’s interview is with Steve Chapman.
###
Tell us about yourself.
I’m an engineer by training and a publisher of technical nonfiction by profession. I live with my wife and daughter at the New Jersey shore, and when I’m not commuting in and out of Manhattan I write fiction.
Tell us about your S&S 28 story.
”The Vine Princess” is my fourth S&S story about the trouble-prone Princess Shada of St. Navarre. This time around Shada’s pursuit of a dangerous assassin leads her to inadvertently conjure a murderous doppelganger – who seems rather better at being a Princess of St. Navarre than Shada ever has been.
Can you share an excerpt from your story?
She was staring at herself.
This second Shada wore an emerald-studded dress the color of her eyes. Her hair, brushed out and radiantly blond, fell perfectly to her shoulders. A necklace of violet gemstones encircled her throat. She was beautiful.
Shada stood frozen, as if in a dream. She felt a punishing wistfulness, like she was looking at something wonderful that had been hers, but she’d long ago mislaid.
Five young soldiers, joking and laughing, vied for her double’s attention. Shada knew all of them vaguely. They seemed to be having such a good time.
And if you see yourself, run.
This doppelganger had nothing to do with deGroat. Shada had created it herself, by staying too long in the Passages. It had tried to murder her and now it had taken her place.
A mixture of fear and anger rose like bile in her throat. She was going to make this creature terribly sorry it had chosen her for its game.
Bells chimed. Four soldiers headed through the opposite door, her double following. One boy remained. She tried to remember his name. Westin Charles.
She let the others depart then slipped inside. “Westin.”
“Princess?” He blinked in the direction her double had left.
She drew him away from the door, feeling acutely aware of what a mess she looked. “How long have I been acting strangely?”
“Strangely?” His gaze took in her clothes, her hair. “What happened?”
“The girl you were flirting with tried to kill me,” Shada said. “How long have I been dressing like my sister?”
Westin stared into her eyes. It was inappropriate and unnerving but she needed an answer.
“Since the Solstice Blessing.”
The vine girl had taken over Shada’s life for a fortnight and no one had noticed.
“It’s a changeling from the Passages,” she said. “Pretending to be me.”
“Princess Shada.” Westin looked at her too intently. “Forgive me, but how am I to know that she, rather than you, is the imposter?”
Shada registered this like a punch to the throat. “She’s that convincing?”
“Utterly.”
“Ask me about things we’ve done together.”
“She knows all that. We were joking yesterday about last year’s tournaments.”
Shada felt a new sort of fear, a fist of ice at the base of her spine. The vine girl had her memories as well as her aspect?
But Westin believed her, Shada realized, and then she understood why. “You like her.” Her laugh sounded like a sob. “You never liked me. That’s the difference.”
Would you say fantasy needs to reflect real life, or offer an escape from it?
Good fantasy provides the frission of coming at the things we fear or yearn for from an oblique angle. By making metaphors literal fantasy can dig beneath the surface of real life in unexpected – and pleasurable – ways.
What are your preferred tools and environment for writing? (Typewriter, computer, pen, coffee shop, and so on.)
I do most of my writing in my home office (MacBook Pro, coffee) or in hotel bars (iPad, wine).
How many drafts of a story or novel do you typically write?
I usually do only 2-3 formal drafts, but I revise constantly as I move forward, then take a break and do ruthless draft for length and logic at the end. I try to avoid doing that final pass in hotel bars.
Have you tried any self-publishing projects yourself?
I haven’t – at the moment the time commitment required to edit/layout/marketing would eat deeply into my writing time.
If offering advice to a new writer, would you suggest they pursue traditional publication or self-publication?
I think it depends both on individual proclivities (do you enjoy self-promotion? Do you have the time?) and on whether you can find traditional markets for your work. For writers whose work doesn’t fit into traditional slots, self-publication seems like the logical move.
###
Thanks, Steve, for the interview.
Check out our interviews with past S&S contributors – , , , Sword & Sorceress 25, Sword & Sorceress 26, andSword & Sorceress 27.
And the novel featuring my Sword & Sorceress character, spy and assassin Caina Amalas, is now available for free in all ebook formats: Child of the Ghosts.
December 4, 2013
The Unexpected Enlightenment Of Rachel Griffin, by L. Jagi Lamplighter
Last year I wrote that the PROSPERO’S DAUGHTER trilogy, by L. Jagi Lamplighter, was one of the best books I read in 2012 (the other being WOOL by Hugh Howey), and so when she offered me the chance to read her new young adult novel, THE UNEXPECTED ENLIGHTENMENT OF RACHEL GRIFFIN, before it was published, I jumped at the chance.
THE UNEXPECTED ENLIGHTENMENT OF RACHEL GRIFFIN is a young adult novel targeted primarily at girls. The protagonist, one Rachel Griffin, is a twelve-year-old girl sent for her first term at a school for young wizards, run under the auspices of the Parliament of the Wise (what the wizards, rather immodestly, call themselves). Rachel has the good fortune of an eidetic memory and a constant thirst for secrets, which is both an advantage and a liability in a society of wizards. Rachel quickly discovers that all is not well in the world of the Wise, and soon finds herself dealing with a secret society of evil wizards called the Velterdammerung along with the normal concerns of a child.
Having never been a twelve-year-old girl myself, I suspect I am not quite the target audience for this book, but I enjoyed it, and I suspect the target audience would do so as well. Rachel spends a lot of time contemplating her feelings, as one would expect a twelve-year-old girl to do, but not enough to slow down the book. The parallels to Harry Potter are clear (children at wizards school, society of evil wizards, etc.), but this book’s setting has a good deal more depth than Harry Potter’s setting, since it is anchored in real-world history. Simon Magus and Aleister Crowley were among the society of evil wizards, for instance. Additionally, there is an intriguing scene when Rachel and her classmates puzzle over the meaning of the word “monotheism”, since they’ve never encountered the word before, which I suspect is a hook for the next few books in the series.
Beyond that, the characters are sharply drawn, and the book manages the trick of having the children be ignorant of their world without be idiots, and having the more gifted children (like Rachel) be intelligent without being unrealistically clever or precocious prigs. Not every writer can manage that.
Also, a big point in the book’s favor: no weird sex. Or any sex, which to be frank is a welcome change in a YA novel. The trend of SF/F brimming with weird sex while the author blathers on about gritty realism has quite overstayed its welcome.
To sum up: in THE UNEXPECTED ENLIGHTENMENT, a plucky band of children join forces to fight evil, despite the best efforts of incompetent adults, at a school for wizards. Recommended
-JM
QUANTUM MORTIS: A MAN DISRUPTED & GRAVITY KILLS by Steve R
Recently, Vox Day and Steve Rzasa were kind enough to send me review copies of their new science fiction novel QUANTUM MORTIS: A MAN DISRUPTED and its attendant novella, QUANTUM MORTIS: GRAVITY KILLS (published through Marcher Lord Press), so I settled down to read them.
Short review:
Murder mystery with rayguns IN SPACE!
Longer review:
Both works are set in the distant future, and center around one Graven Tower, a military policeman in the Armed Forces of Rhysalan, an independent planet ruled by a Duke. The planet is a small power, neutral in the conflict between the imperial Ascendancy and the communistic, borg-like Unity.* Rhysalan’s neutrality is further enhanced by the planet’s status as a sanctuary – the Duke has an open invitation to any overthrown governments-in-exile to settle upon Rhysalan (so long as they can pay the fees). Tower’s job is to help police the various exiled alien governments and make sure they behave themselves, as governments-in-exile tend to get up to mischief on a regular basis. Tower has the assistance of an “augment” called Baby, a super-advanced artificial intelligence that acts as a personal assistant, research assistant, sounding board, philosophical ruminator, and targeting computer. Since Tower is a bit of a shell-shocked veteran and not particularly restrained with his use of his trigger finger, Baby also tends to act as his conscience.
But Tower also has a secret. And someone has figured out his secret, and is ready to use it to enslave him and perhaps start a new war.
Interestingly enough, the space-opera aspect of the plot is almost window dressing – the core of the books is the murder mystery, and a murder mystery set in a society where information technology and networking have permeated every aspect of that society. The book could just as easily have been set fifteen years in the future on Earth, once Amazon figures out its delivery drones. Of course, every good science fiction book has a speculative question at its core, and in QUANTUM MORTIS: A MAN DISRUPTED the question revolves around the dangers of the information technology revolution.
It has been interesting watching SF wrestle with the question of the ongoing IT revolution of the last few decades, especially since society as a whole has not yet figured out how to deal with the Internet. If you read older science fiction, the computers of the future were supposed to be the computer from STAR TREK, Wintermute, and Tron-style virtual reality. No one anticipated the banal reality of YouTube, Hulu, Internet pornography, and people Instagramming pictures of their breakfast toast. All of a sudden, science fiction novels have to wrestle with a future containing smartphones and the Internet, and this book does a good job of grafting the IT revolution onto a space-opera framework.
Of course, the book isn’t all deep thoughts – there are a lot of battles with particle weapons, lasers, missiles, more particle weapons, and flying cars. Graven uses a lot of guns – the book achieves the rare trick of writing gun porn about guns that do not actually exist. It is an interesting look at the IT-augmented warfare of the future (or the present, really), when attacking the enemy’s computer systems is just as effective, if not more so, as attacking his troops and food supplies.
Tower’s relationship with the attractive Detector Hildreth was an interesting note – the adventure kicks off when Tower, hoping to get a date out of Hildreth, agrees to help her with a case. (Naturally, things go quickly awry.) The trick to writing effective romantic relationships (or failed attempts thereof) is to grasp the psychological differences between men and women without holding the differences in contempt or denying that they exist – a trick that too many writers never manage to master.
To sum up, GRAVITY KILLS and QUANTUM MORTIS: A MAN DISRUPTED are good adventure SF novels with a lot of action and a compelling mystery at the core, and I am looking forward to future books in the setting.
-JM
December 3, 2013
Free Fiction Tuesday – MIRRORED KNIGHT
This week’s Free Fiction Tuesday short story is actually a novella – MIRRORED KNIGHT. Links below!
Available at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, and Amazon Canada.
Carradan was once a Knight of the High King’s Realm. But now the Realm lies waste and desolate, and he has pursued the demon that destroyed his home across the worlds and the centuries, coming at last to the city of Chicago.
But the demon has laid a trap for him, for the demon has many willing allies in Chicago…
Christine only wants to pay off her student loans. But when her magic manifests, she becomes an enticing target for the demon’s malevolence.
And unless Carradan and Christine can work together, the demon will consume them both…
