Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 316

Nook HD, a review

I never had any interest in the Nook line of tablets. While I am very interested in selling ebooks to Nook users, I didn’t want a Nook tablet, since the app selection was too heavily curated, which meant the device’s usability was limited. But then B&N added Google Play to the HD tablets, which was intriguing. Then the price dropped to $150 for the weekend, and I needed something to test Nook books anyway, so I decided to give it a shot.

With the additional of the Google Play store, the Nook HD goes from being an ereader with a few extra functions to a full-fledged Android tablet that happens to have a very heavy Nook skin laid on top. Most Android apps install on the device now (in fact, the first one I installed was the Kindle app), and you get the full suite of Google apps for Android – Gmail and Maps and the like.

Physically, it’s quite impressive – the contoured sides make for easy gripping, and the screen is quite nice and easily the match of the retina iPad models. In fact, the screen is nice enough that it’s almost the equal of reading on an eInk display.

It’s too bad B&N didn’t include Google Play from the beginning – I suspect the company may have shot itself in the foot (or possibly the heart) with that oversight, since Google Play massively improves the Nook HD’s value. It looks like the Nook store will wind up becoming a subsidiary of a larger company, like Kobo and Rakuten, and will discontinue producing tablets in favor of pure media sales. Which is a pity, because the Nook HD is really quite a good piece of hardware. So if you’re in the market for a low-cost tablet, get the Nook HD while it lasts.

-JM

The Last Witchking, by Vox Day

Last year, I read A THRONE OF BONES by Vox Day, and thought it was one of the more interesting new epic fantasy novels I’ve read. The author was kind enough to send me an advance copy of THE LAST WITCHKING, a group of three short stories set in A THRONE OF BONES’S setting of Selenoth. Specifically, THE LAST WITCHKING, THE HOBLETS OF WICCAM FENSBORO, and OPERA VITA AETERNA.

The first story deals with the titular LAST WITCHKING, and provides an origin story for one of the villains in A THRONE OF BONES. In Selenoth, the “Witchkings” were the pejorative name for a race of extremely powerful sorcerers that once ruled and tyrannized much of the world. The elves eventually destroyed the witchkings, but before they did, the last two witchkings conceived a child and hid him among the humans, intending that child to be the instrument of vengeance upon their enemies. The child, named Speer, grows up as an unremarkable human boy until his thirteenth birthday, whereupon he discovers his true heritage, and things rapidly go downhill as Speer tries to fulfill his father’s question for vengeance.

The story was an interesting examination of both revenge and the witchkings’ morality, which (unsurprisingly) was essentially Nietzsche backed up by sorcery. In his quest for revenge, Speer pushes beyond limits even his cruel father would not have crossed…with unpleasant results for many of the characters in A THRONE OF BONES.

I think THE HOBLETS OF WICCAM FENSBORO was the weakest of the three stories. In the story, the goblin commander of a village ruled by orcs finds that the orc king does not particularly care for hobs, a race that has lived alongside the goblins for generations, and has issued an order for their destruction. The goblin commander desperately tries to save the hobs and the goblin village from the wrath of their orcish occupiers.

In a note at the end of the story, the author points out that he intended the story as a homage to the Italians during the German occupation of Italy at the end of World War II, when many Italian civilians and army officers tried to keep the Nazis from getting their hands on the Italian Jews. While this is a noble homage, I don’t think the story quite worked. First, the goblins and orcs are essentially comic figures – the goblins are weak, and the orcs are vicious and brutal – which as characters were unsuited to the tone of a story based on genocide and morality, somewhat like trying to repair an iPad with a claw hammer. Second, the story never quite adequately explains what the hobs are, which made it difficult to care about them. I assumed that “hobs” were sort of Selenoth’s version of hobbits, but that was only assumption on my part. Traditionally, hobs were helpful household spirits, but that didn’t quite match the story. In Jim Butcher’s THE DRESDEN FILES, hobs are vicious psychotic Faerie predators, and I’m definitely sure that didn’t match the story. All in all, I think THE HOBLETS OF WICCAM FENSBORO was an ambitious miss (the author’s note did say he wrote the story ten years before starting the Selenoth novels, so I suspect the setting wasn’t quite formed all the way yet).

Finally, OPERA VITA AETERNA was a superb story, and my favorite of the three. The story is essentially one decades-long conversation between an abbot of the church of the Immaculate (Selenoth’s equivalent to Christianity), and a mighty elven sorcerer who has grown intrigued by the church’s teaching. Selenoth’s elves seem to have a tendency towards cat-like sociopathy, so the conversations between the sorcerer and the abbot were interesting. Additionally, it’s very rare to find a story that handles a religious conversion experience well, but OPERA does it, and ties in nicely with the larger history of Selenoth.

So, as I said with THE WARDOG’S COIN, people who have already read A THRONE OF BONES will find these stories an interesting addition to the world of Selenoth. If you haven’t read A THRONE OF BONES, these stories are a good introduction, and will help you decide if the longer book would be to your liking or not.

On a semi-related note, the Selenoth books are a welcome breath of fresh air. SF/F publishing has become too ossified and moribund (science fiction and fantasy are supposed to be the literature of the speculative, yet every writer these days seems to have the exact same standard-issue SWPL worldview) so books from a writer who is capable of regarding organized religion as something other than a peculiar superstition practiced by the peasantry are most welcome.

-JM

Reader Question Day #63 – all about DEMONSOULED, GHOST IN THE ASHES, and computer games

Gordon asks:

Couple of questions about a few characters who you have dropped or killed off and I missed it. What happened to Wesson, Gerald’s squire and Sir Nathan?

I can not wait for the final book. You have me hook line and sinker. Well done and a great read.

Thanks for the kind words about the books! I’m glad you liked them.

Concerning Sir Nathan, he did indeed sort of drop off the map. Officially, he died in his sleep between SOUL OF DRAGONS and SOUL OF SORCERY. Originally, in the outline for SOUL OF SORCERY, I had Adalar Greatheart come back as a point-of-view character to come home and bury his father, then get caught up in the Tervingi invasion and the Great Rising, and fall in love with Molly Cravenlock. However, that didn’t work for several reasons, mostly because upon consideration neither Molly nor Adalar would like each other very much, and it added another POV character to what was already a very complex book. So I decided to consolidate a bit. Originally, the Guardian of the Tervingi was a old man, and his apprentice was a young woman. So I flipped the roles, and made the Guardian into an old woman (Aegidia) and her apprentice into a young man (Riothamus), which then let Riothamus be Molly’s love interest. Unfortunately, in the process I never got around to addressing Sir Nathan.

As for Wesson, he became a knight in Lord Malden’s service, and won some lands in Mastaria for himself. He and Adalar are still friends, and Wesson appears briefly in SOUL OF SWORDS.

I think at some point I might do a short story where Adalar and Wesson come back to the Grim Marches to bury Sir Nathan and put his affairs in order. Of course, there will be complications. It’s fiction, so there are always complications, much like real life.

Several people write to ask:

When is SOUL OF SWORDS coming out?

June. I won’t say when in June, but unless I die or get gravely ill or something equally calamitous happens, the book is coming out in June.

Mark asks:

Were parts of Demonsouled inspired by Baldur’s Gate?

Oh, totally. Though the DEMONSOULED books went in quite a different direction than the BALDUR’S GATE computer game series. Writers occasionally talk about their influences, books they read as a child and so forth, but most of my influences came from the computer games of the 1980s and the early 1990s. The QUEST FOR GLORY series was a huge influence, as was ARTHUR: THE QUEST FOR EXCALIBUR (the very first computer RPG I ever played, using my uncle’s old Mac Classic), and two of the early LEGEND OF ZELDA games, specifically A LINK TO THE PAST and LINK’S AWAKENING, both of which, in my opinion, were classics. MASTER OF MAGIC, a combination of Civilization and Magic: The Gathering was another, and I loved that game – I still play it occasionally, 19 years later.

In fact, it was a computer game that got me into reading fiction. I hated reading fiction as a kid, mostly because the teachers invariably assigned books about plucky children and their heroic canine sidekicks, and I hated dogs, a side effect of having a paper route. I preferred books about astronomy, paleontology, geology, and archaeology, but only about ancient Egypt. Then I played BETRAYAL AT KRONDOR, and found the world so fascinating that I started reading the Midkemia novels, and have been reading fiction regularly ever since.

Stefanie asks:

I finished Ghost in the Forge quite a bit ago, and I was wondering what the next book would be.

I’m going to start writing GHOST IN THE ASHES in June, as soon as SOUL OF SWORDS is done. Here are some details on what Caina will do in GHOST IN THE ASHES:

http://www.jonathanmoeller.com/writer/?p=3696

-JM

SOUL OF SWORDS, another excerpt

It’s Friday! Let’s finish off the week with another snippet from SOUL OF SWORDS:

The creature tottered forward, cackling. “And you, serpent, are now my slave! Bow before me!”

“A ridiculous request,” said Skalatan. “I will not kneel to you.”

The revenant’s withered lips peeled back from its yellowing teeth. “You will kneel to me!”

“As I do not possess knees,” Skalatan said, “I fail to see how I shall accomplish this.”

The revenant titled its head and stared at him.

“The San-keth do not have limbs,” said Skalatan. “Surely a wizard of your wisdom knows this.”

Skalatan did not possess much of a sense of humor, but he nonetheless enjoyed the twitch of irritation that went through the revenant’s frame.

-JM

Spinneret, by Timothy Zahn

A while back I mentioned I was reading some vintage science fiction published in 1985, and that book was SPINNERET, by Timothy Zahn.

In SPINNERET, some Canadian scientists invented hyperdrive around 2012, and so humanity has sent its first hyperspace-capable ships to explore the nearby star systems in hopes of finding planets to colonize. However, the explorers quickly discover that all the nearby habitable planets are already colonized by space-faring races. After some negotiation, the United Nations is offered the lease to a habitable planet called Astra, a planet all the other space-faring races rejected because of the utter lack of metals in the planet’s crust – even crops will not grow there without massive piles of fertilizer. But with no other choice, an American military colony under the command of one Colonel Meredith is established on Astra.

However, the colonists soon accidentally discover why there is no metal on Astra – there’s an alien machine buried beneath one of the mountains, a machine that absorbs any available metal on the planet’s surface and converts it to a strange metal that is superconducting, incredibly strong, very flexible, and practically impervious to all forms of physical and radiation damage. The colonists nickname the device the Spinneret, and quickly realize that a lot of people, both back on Earth and among alien races, want to get their hands on the machine.

Mayhem ensues.

It was a fascinating book for two reasons. First, I enjoyed the exploration of human colonization on another planet – complete with labor unrest, since it turns out many of the Hispanic agricultural workers brought to Astra were deceived into coming to the planet. (History, repeat, again.) Additionally, the tension of finding a powerful alien device energized the novel. It was like throwing a pizza into a room full of hungry college students, and watching them eye each other and wonder who was going to take a grab at the pizza first.

Second, this book is what I call “vintage” SF, by which I mean SF written long enough ago that we are now living in the time period the book portrayed. So it’s interesting to see what a writer in 1985 thought the future around 2013 would look like. In SPINNERET, the Soviet Union is still around and kicking, which makes since, since no one thought the Soviet Union was going to collapse right up until Boris Yeltsin got up on that tank. There are a large number of illegal Hispanic immigrants in the US, not because of decades of steady migration, but because in 2011 the Mexican government collapsed in civil war and created a refugee crisis in the US. In 2013, humanity has figured out interstellar flight…but not, apparently, the Internet or email, and a major subplot involves someone smuggling paper letters (actual, physical letters, written on paper) back to Earth. People have cell phones, but they’re strapped to the wrists like watches. (Maybe this anticipated the smartwatch.) No one has tablet computers or laptop computers, and the only computers are apparently big mainframes.

I like vintage SF, since it’s a bit like reading a parallel universe. But it’s more authentic than reading a book where someone explicitly tried to create an alternate history to our own, since this is what a writer suspected the future would actually be like.

Anyway, SPINNERET was an enjoyable book, both in its own right and as a parallel-universe look at what 2013 might have been like.

-JM

SOUL OF SWORDS, another excerpt

Editing and revisions for SOUL OF SWORDS are underway. Meanwhile, let’s have another excerpt.

Note that it is has MILD SPOILERS for SOUL OF SKULLS:

Gerald nodded. “That is why we came to the Grim Marches, Mazael.” He looked at his wife and sons. “Rachel and Aldane and Belifane will be safe here, as will the rest of our families. The Grim Marches have known nothing but war since the Malrags came, and I hate to ask it of you. But…”

“You shall have my help,” said Mazael. “The Lord of the Grim Marches will ride to the aid of the Lord of Knightcastle.”

Gerald flinched. “But I’m not…”

“You are,” said Mazael. “Like it or not, Gerald. Your brothers are dead, and your father has turned to madness. Lord Malden is no longer fit to rule. That means you are the rightful Lord of Knightcastle and liege lord of Knightreach. If your people are to be saved from Lucan and the runedead, you shall have to save them.”

-JM

SOUL OF SWORDS – beginning edits

Cover design by Clarissa Yeo.

After finishing the rough draft of SOUL OF SWORDS, I took a few days off to relax. I wound up writing a short story. I’m not very good at relaxing.

I did, however, play some SKYRIM. During my SKYRIM sessions, I was killed by bears, mountain cats, walruses, and, in one memorable occasion, bitten in half by a dragon. I also accidentally killed myself when attempting to fling a fireball spell at an advancing group of bandits on a mountain path – I dropped the spell at my feet and blasted myself off the side of the mountain.

It was really quite a spectacular fall.

I am not very good at SKYRIM.

So instead, tomorrow, I will begin editing SOUL OF SWORDS.

-JM

PSA: Companies to avoid

I know a lot of you are writers. If you are, David Gaughran has a good post of various vanity publishing companies to avoid. A lot of big name traditional publishers are getting into the vanity publishing business these days, and in my opinion most if not all of these companies are little more than scams.

It is darkly amusing that so many traditional publishers, who for so long defended themselves as the gatekeepers of literary quality from the unpublished hordes, are now so quick to transform themselves into vanity publishers to bolster their profit margin.

Seriously, there is nothing these companies offer that you either cannot learn to do yourself with moderate (and basic HTML, which is needed for ebook layout, is useful in many other fields of endeavor), or that you cannot contract out to someone for a reasonable, one-time fee.

-JM

Reader Question Day #62 – all about GHOST IN THE ASHES

Cora writes:

hi i love the ghosts books and am wondering when ghost in the ashes will come out? also, can you give a hint on what the book will be about?

Probably August or September, with September being more likely. I’ll start writing it as soon as I’m done with SOUL OF SWORDS.

As to what it’s about, I’ll give you two answers – one that doesn’t spoil the previous GHOSTS books, and one that does. Read on at your peril!

NON-SPOILER ANSWER:

In GHOST IN THE ASHES, Caina meets an escaped, pregnant slave girl desperately fleeing from bounty hunters. Since pregnant slave girls are a gold coin a dozen outside of the Empire, this catches Caina’s attention…and she quickly realizes that something very dangerous is underway.

SPOILER ANSWER (only read this if you’ve read the rest of THE GHOSTS books):

The Empire’s war against New Kyre hasn’t been going well…but it has won some sharp victories against Istarinmul. The Istarish have decided they’ve had enough, and have sent an ambassador to Malarae to negotiate peace with the Emperor.

The ambassador is the emir Tanzir Shahan, the younger brother of Rezir Shahan…who, you might recall, Caina killed in GHOST IN THE STORM. Of course, Istarinmul’s neighbor to the south, Anshan, wants Istarinmul and the Empire to continue fighting, and Caina’s job is to make sure the Anshani don’t assassinate Tanzir and blame it on the Empire.

And in the middle of this tense situation, Caina finds the pregnant slave girl pursued by bounty hunters.

Angela asks:

Hello! I was wonder what Halfdan’s background was and how he became a Ghost. It would be cool if you wrote a short story on it,or have you?

I haven’t written a short story about Halfdan. But that’s a good idea – I usually give away a free short story every time I release a new THE GHOSTS novel (this is why you should sign up for my newsletter - you’ll get free stuff), so that might be the topic of the free short story with GHOST IN THE ASHES.

Of course, knowing Halfdan, he would completely lie about his origins in order to advance some mission for the Ghosts. Given how he and Caina enjoy playing mind games with each other, it’s likely he would do the sort of thing the Joker did in THE DARK KNIGHT, and tell a different origin story every time Caina asks, and let Caina pick apart the flaws as a mental exercise.

-JM

SOUL OF SWORDS rough draft finished

I am pleased to report that the SOUL OF SWORDS rough draft is now finished. It weighed in at about 151,500 words, and I suspect after editing and revision it will be the longest of the DEMONSOULED books, and it will be the single longest book I’ve written.

This seems like an excellent opportunity to reveal the cover image for SOUL OF SWORDS:

Cover design by Clarissa Yeo.

I am going to take a few days off, and then start editing SOUL OF SWORDS towards the end of next week. If all goes well, the book should be available by the end of June.

-JM