Joshua Palmatier's Blog, page 8

Latest Book Discussion!

I've just posted the latest book discussion at the unofficial DAW Books blog ( dawbooks )! We're looking at Bradley P. Beaulieu's THE TWELVE KINGS IN SHARAKHAI, the first book in his Song of the Shattered Sands</b> series. Swing on by and check it out!

New Releases From DAW!

I've just posted the new releases for October from DAW Books Inc. at the unofficial blog ( dawbooks )! Swing on by and check out new books from Mercedes Lackey, Tanya Huff, and Diana Rowland, plus an omnibus from S. Andrew Swann.

New Book Discussion!

I've just posted the last book discussion for the DAW Books released in August at the unofficial blog ( dawbooks )! Swing on by and check out THE COMPLETE ARROWS TRILOGY from Mercedes Lackey, the series that launched her career!

New Book Discussion!

I've just posted the latest book discussion over at the unofficial DAW Books blog ( dawbooks )! We're looking at an omnibus of two of S. Andrew Swann's Moreau Quartet novels, Forests of the Night and Fearful Symmetries, all in a single volume called The Moreau Quartet, Volume 1. Swing on by and check it out!

New Releases from DAW!

I've just posted the September releases from DAW Books over at the unofficial blog ( dawbooks )! There's new Bradley P. Beaulieu and Seanan McGuire, the latest rerelease of Tanith Lee's books, the paperback of Tad Williams' most recent novel, and an omnibus from C.J. Cherryh! Swing on by and check them out!

Guest Blog: Gail Z. Martin & Larry N. Martin Talk About Their ALIEN ARTIFACTS story!

Today, Gail Z. Martin & Larry N. Martin are guest posting, talking about their new steampunk universe, their story for Alien Artifacts, and the Victorian Era! If you'd like a copy of Alien Artifacts or the other anthology we're Kickstarting right now, Were-, swing on by the Kickstarter and pledge!





Alien Artifacts in the Gilded Age

By Gail Z. Martin and Larry N. Martin

In our steampunk world of New Pittsburgh, the setting for the novel Iron & Blood, the Department of Supernatural Investigation looks into (and covers up) extraterrestrial, supernatural or magical disturbances and takes dangerous paranormal objects into their vaults for safekeeping.

Mitch Storm and Jacob Drangosavich, along with Della Kennedy, are DSI agents who deal with X-Files-worthy situations, with an eye toward keeping the world safe and acquiring the secrets behind promising new technology--human, magical or alien. You’ll be seeing them in our story for Alien Artifacts! But what has really amazed us as we work on the Steampunk novels and novellas/short stories is how perfectly alien artifacts and extraterrestrials would have fit in with all the other Victorian wonderful weirdness.

The Victorians were insatiably curious. They lived for expeditions to far-off places, coveted souvenirs brought back from the ends of the earth, deified adventurers, inventors and explorers and believed that science could overcome all ills. All of which suggests that had alien artifacts shown up during the Age of Victoria, they would have ended up on tour with P.T. Barnum or as the centerpieces of the Worlds’ Fair.

Victorians lived large and dreamed big. They had a huge thirst for knowledge, and their conviction that science could unravel the mysteries of the universe is apparent in their love of inventions and scientific inquiry. Inventions of this era include sewing machines, photography, machine guns, vacuum cleaners, elevators, washing machines, zippers, radar, roller coasters and many other ‘modern’ items. Scientific breakthroughs ranged from the theory of Evolution to germ theory, electromagnetic induction, studies in radioactivity, and the work that led to modern genetics and quantum theory. If they had gotten their hands on a real UFO or alien tech, you can imagine Nicola Tesla, George Westinghouse, and the other major inventors of the day reverse engineering it to figure out how it worked.

Victorians explored the Amazon River and the Australian continent, the Arctic and Antarctic, Africa and the Nile River, Tibet and the Himalayas. Archaeology flourished, and what the Victorians lacked in methodology and cultural sensitivity they made up for in enthusiasm, digging up Roman and Celtic artifacts, exploring Egyptian tombs, and scouring the Middle East for Biblical treasures. They exhibited discoveries and oddities at World’s Fairs, in personal Cabinets of Curiosities and huge museums, in sideshows and circuses, and in traveling extravaganzas like those run by Buffalo Bill Cody and P.T. Barnum, which showed the wonders of the world to standing-room-only audiences across North America and Europe. Alien artifacts would have fit right in. Can’t you picture a Stargate on display in the British Museum, or the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh?

The supernatural was also fair game to the Victorians. Spiritualism thrived, including the desire to explore the greatest unknown—life after death. Seances were extremely popular and mediums became celebrities, catering to a clientele of the rich, powerful and famous. Inventors like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Guglielmo Marconi also attempted to create machines that would record the voices of the dead or send messages to the Great Beyond. If you can believe that a radio signal might reach the afterlife, it’s not so bizarre to think that you might also be able to contact—and get a reply from—life on another planet.

Victorian literature thrilled to the idea of the alien and exotic. Allan Quartermain explored King Solomon’s Mines, H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds, and Jules Verne took to the bottom of the ocean, to the center of the earth, and to the moon. Victorians even spotted UFOs, with dozens of unexplained ‘mysterious airship’ sightings in the late 1890s. Astronomers in the 1800s expected to find life on Mars, maybe even whole civilizations, and enthusiastically talked about Martian seas and canals. The idea of life on other planets, alien spacecraft and maybe even alien visits to Earth was alive and well during the Golden Age. Proving once again that reality is stranger than fiction, and that you can’t make this stuff up!

Readers of Clockwork Universe: Steampunk vs. Aliens met Mitch and Jacob in “Airship Down,” our story in that anthology, where they had a ‘close encounter’ with extraterrestrial visitors. They’ll be back again for the Alien Artifacts anthology, with even more audacious inventions, bigger explosions, and out-of-this-world exploits!

Gail Z. Martin is the author of the new epic fantasy novel War of Shadows (Orbit Books) which is Book Three in the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga; and Vendetta: A Deadly Curiosities Novel in her urban fantasy series set in Charleston, SC (December 2015, Solaris Books). She is also author of Ice Forged and Reign of Ash in The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga, The Chronicles of The Necromancer series (The Summoner, The Blood King, Dark Haven, Dark Lady’s Chosen) from Solaris Books, The Fallen Kings Cycle (The Sworn, The Dread) from Orbit Books and Deadly Curiosities from Solaris Books. Gail and co-author Larry N. Martin write the Jake Desmet Adventures novels, including the novel Iron & Blood. Gail writes two series of ebook short stories: The Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures and the Deadly Curiosities Adventures and her work has appeared in over 20 US/UK anthologies. Newest anthologies include: The Big Bad 2, Athena’s Daughters, Heroes, With Great Power and Realms of Imagination.

Larry N. Martin is the co-author of the new Steampunk series Iron & Blood: The Jake Desmet Adventures and a series of short stories: The Sound & Fury Adventures set in the Jake Desmet universe. These short stories also appear in the anthologies Clockwork Universe: Steampunk vs. Aliens and Weird Wild West with more to come. Larry and Gail also have a science fiction short story in the Space and Contact Light anthologies.

Please join us on social media:@GailZMartin or @LNMartinAuthor on Twitter, The Winter Kingdoms on Facebook.com/winterkingdoms, blogs at DisquietingVisions.com, podcast at GhostInTheMachinePodcast.com, and at our JakeDesmet.com home page, where you can sign up for our Chronicles newsletter which includes original flash fiction in every issue!

jpsorrow @ 2015-08-27T13:14:00

Today, I will be answering questions all day (and checking back again tomorrow for stragglers) on Reddit's fantasy sub-thread about the Kickstarter, Zombies Need Brains, the past anthologies, and the open call for submissions for these two current anthologies. If you have questions, please swing on by and ask! I'll be there off and on all day. (So if I don't answer your question immediately, I'll be back shortly to answer it.) Here's the direct link to the AMA thread.

In submission news, we are already getting stories for both ALIEN ARTIFACTS and WERE-. We've got more coming in for WERE- at the moment, but hopefully we'll get more for ALIEN ARTIFACTS as time goes by. The deadline isn't until the end of October, so I assume that the stories we're getting right now are those that writers had already written, before they knew about the open call or even the Kickstarter. And it makes sense that those stories would tend more toward WERE-'s theme than ALIEN ARTIFACTS'.

And as of this morning, we are $17 away from hitting $12K! So very close to the first stretch goal, where we get to add Katharine Kerr (author of the Deverry series and the Nola O'Grady urban fantasy series) to the WERE- anthology. Plus, of course, everyone pledged $15 or more will get bookmarks! Let your friends know that we're so close and perhaps they'll push us over that first stretch goal today!

I'd like to introduce everyone to the cover artist for our two anthologies, Justin Adams, who runs Varia Studios. I found Justin through a weird coincidence: I teach spinning classes at the local gym and one day I announced the Kickstarter for Clockwork Universe: Steampunk vs Aliens. One of the members taking the class came up to me afterwards and told me that her son does some artwork and would I be interested in possibly hiring him for my cover? Of course, I already had the cover art chosen for Clockwork, but I told her that I could take a look at his portfolio and see if he'd be a good fit for Zombies Need Brains or not. She gave me his name and the name of his studio, so during a spare moment weeks later I stopped by to take a look. I have to admit that I was expecting to see ... well, something not up to the standards that I'd like to hold Zombies Need Brains up to. I know how much of a book's sales depend on the cover art. I'm happy to say I was blown away. If you click through to the site, you'll see some spectacular art. In fact, Justin's work for Temporally Out of Order is shown on the "Illustrations" page, and there are a few pieces in the "Concepts" section that have inspired a couple of potential future anthology themes.

Needless to say, I contacted Justin when I was starting to develop the Kickstarter for Temporally Out of Order. And of course, he's the artist we're using for both Alien Artifacts and Were-. You've all seen the artwork (now finalized) for Alien Artifacts, and I think it's stunning. We're currently developing a concept for the Were- anthology that I'm fairly excited about. Maybe we'll have a rough sketch of that before the Kickstarter ends. Regardless, based on the work he's done for Zombies Need Brains so far, I know that the cover for Were- will be stunning as well.

Remember that you can get prints of the covers for Temporally Out of Order, Alien Artifacts, and Were- by selecting the appropriate "Art Print Zombie" reward levels OR by adding on a mere $10 each to your current reward level (I'll ask what any additional money is for in the survey at the end of the Kickstarter). If you're in need of some artwork for one of your current projects, you can contact Justin Adams through his website by clicking on the "Contact" section for his email to get rates. He certainly comes highly recommended by me and Zombies Need Brains. We hope to continue working with him for years to come.

Book Review: "Foreigner" by C.J. Cherryh

I've been meaning to get to this series for a while. I've never read anything by C.J. Cherryh, and I know this series is extremely popular (I think there are, like, 15 books out in it so far), so I figured I'd start here.





Premise: Something happens to one of our first deep-space colonization ships and it ends up lost. After barely managing to reach a safe planet that could sustain the colonists, it's discovered that the planet is inhabited. But it's too late. There isn't enough fuel remaining to go anywhere else. So some of the scientists/colonists decide to land regardless ... and so we have first contact with an alien culture that is uniquely different from ours, one where assassination is an accepted form of social climbing and there are no clearly marked borders. There are only associations ... and the fact that we bring with us technology that we must parcel out in order to retain even a toehold on the planet.

The book started off a little rough with some initial set-up with large time jumps before we get to Bren, the main character for the rest of the book. Once we get to Bren, though, the book takes off with an illegal assassination attempt (or so it seems) being made on Bren. No one has filed the paperwork required for the attempt. So what does it mean? Who could have done it? And why did they try to kill Bren? These questions drive the first part of the story, as Bren tries to figure out why his unique role as the representative of humanity amidst the alien atevi has made him a target. And then Tabini--Bren's strongest atevi ally--sends Bren off to the far reaches of the planet, where no human has been allowed, and the plot only deepens. At this point, the book bogs down a bit as Bren tries to figure out what's going on while trapped in a place with no technology he can access. He's stuck with Tabini's relative, Ilisidi, who may be the one trying to kill him. It's here that we're supposed to be delving deeper into the atevi world and culture, to see how different it is from our own, as Bren struggles to understand the atevi and their actions himself.

Overall, an interesting set-up and an interesting culture and a unique take on aliens. I simply felt it was slow in the middle, with a mostly uncertain plot direction, before it appeared to find its footing again and take off at the end. Definitely a good read. I'll be reading the sequels to see where Cherryh takes us with this world and culture ... and with Bren.

New Book Discussion!

I've just posted the next book discussion for the August releases from DAW Books at the unofficial blog ( dawbooks )! We're looking at Frozen in Amber, the first book of a new urban fantasy series from Phyllis Ames. Swing on by and check it out!

Guest Blog: Jean Marie Ward Talks About Her WERE- Story!

Today, we have a little guest blog post from one of the anchor authors of the ALIEN ARTIFACTS/WERE- anthology Kickstarter (check it out now). She's talking about her story for the WERE- anthology, which features were-creatures OTHER than werewolves. So welcome Jean Marie Ward!


My Kind of Crazy Town
By
Jean Marie Ward


“I need to steal something.”

My husband didn’t look up from his computer. “What kind of thing?”

“It’s not so much a what as a where. I’m working on a story for Joshua Palmatier’s Zombies Need Brains, a kind of continuation of my story in The Modern Fae’s Guide to Surviving Humanity. Well, it features two of the characters and . . .”





Greg gave me the spousal stink eye and quoted The Thin Man. “Has it got anything to do with the gun?”

Which is his code for: I don’t need to hear what you did when you were a little child. Cut to the chase.

“I need something worth stealing at Catholic University or the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. For the plot.”

He thought about it all of a second. “Would a papal tiara work?”

A papal tiara, for those of you who didn’t suffer through Catholic school, is Roman Catholicism’s version of the triple crown. Literally. It started life as three gold crowns stacked on a sterling silver base, and is why all those Renaissance paintings of popes look like they’re wearing giant sparkly bullets on their heads. In theory, they’re used at papal coronations, but since they’re every bit as heavy as you’d expect, and modern popes don’t flagellate themselves any more than they have to, they’re mostly display pieces.

“There’s one in the Shrine,” he continued “and the security is”--he waggled his hand to indicate that on a Washington, DC, scale of ten, the precautions in question probably qualified as a minus-three.

“Perfect!”

Doubly perfect since the Shrine’s papal tiara, while plainer than most thanks to its mid-20th century modern design, weighs a full ten pounds. Ten pounds of silver, gold, dozens of diamonds and precious gems. Oh, the stumbling and bumbling and chaos I can wreak with a ten-pound silver football in the middle of one of the biggest churches in the world, across floors and down stairs polished to a silky mirror gleam!

I love This Town (yes, Joshua, it needs to capitalized. That’s what we call it: This Town), my birthplace, my heart’s home. Washington, DC, boasts a street plan that could serve as a demon-summoning circle--and that’s only the stuff on the surface. The city sits atop an underground network of forgotten streams, buried streetcar tracks and disused tunnels that make its above-ground map look positively benign.

Washington also hosts embassies from nearly every country on the planet, plus a glorious melting pot of communities, cultures, cuisines, legends, demons and gods. The world’s single greatest producer of greenhouse gasses (aka the U.S. Congress) sits across the street from one of the world’s greatest repositories of arcane tomes, scripts and texts (the Library of Congress). They both share a hill with a court called Supreme and a train station called Union.

We have more named ghosts than anyplace except London--not to worry, we’re catching up--and we think the perfect location for a possessed statue is in the inner courtyard of the Federal Courts’ Court of Appeals Building. (Word! She’s called Black Aggie, and you can read all about her here. She’s one of the sights I routinely show my victims--I mean, friends visiting the city.) Considering the lawyers in This Town, it’s probably appropriate--especially since she was modeled on a statue by Augustus Saint Gaudens popularly called Grief. But I’ll digress more about that later.

Better yet, DC is a criminally under-used location for urban fantasy, which is why I set most of my contemporary fantasy here. Most of my fiction, period. In addition to all things spy, it’s a primo location for anything noir, as those of you who snagged the Alien Artifacts/Were--? Incentive booklet Dangerous Dames will immediately discover. What happens in our bars . . .

(Since I’m a nice person--when I’m not leading innocent civilians into the presence of demon-possessed statues, that is--you can find out exactly what happens in my kind of DC bar by following this link to "District Coincidental". It’s only one very short story, and Patricia Bray can only kill me once, right? Right?)

The main problem I face writing fiction about DC is it’s really, really hard to top the stuff that passes for normal around here. The cash drop site I describe in “District Coincidental” was famously used by spies and would-be influence peddlers in the days before the CIA moved out to the George Bush Center for Intelligence in northern Virginia.

(Yes, I know the name is a contradiction in terms. All us locals know. We didn’t name it; blame that on your elected officials. At least the in-house spy museum is good, much better than the four-room Spy Museum on Seventh Street you pay $20 to visit.)

The cash drop is still at the bar, unchanged from the 1940s. What you want to bet it’s still being used? (The other truth about This Town is politicians never learn from the past; they always repeat it.)

Even the city’s early history is outlandish. If unlike your elected representatives, you paid attention in history class, you may have learned that the British burned the White House, the partially constructed Capitol and several other government buildings to blackened shells on August 24, 1814. What you probably did not realize was they were not chased away by the Mid-Atlantic states’ pitiful excuse for an army. Andrew Jackson had nothing to do with it, either. He was off fighting the redcoats in the west, and didn’t send those Brits running back home to Mother England until the Battle of New Orleans--a full month after the war officially ended in January 2015.

No, what sent the British fleeing our Capital City in white-knuckled terror was the two--count ‘em, two!--hurricanes This Town rained down on them within a single twelve-hour period. Talk about hot air--and Congress wasn’t even in session. They’d fled the town days before with the President, the army, and anybody else with delusions of grandeur.

(I wrote about that, too. The novella, “Cooking up a Storm”, appears in Tales from the Vatican Vaults, an anthology published in the United Kingdom on the 201st anniversary of the invasion. I’d shoo you off to your local retailer to buy it, but currently Tales from the Vatican Vaults is only available from British merchants like Wordery.com. How’s that for fine Washington irony?)





Then there are Washington lawyers. Over the years I’ve met many, some of whom I’m delighted to call my friends. But they are definitely a breed apart. We haven’t seen their like since Rome ruled the world, and unlike conquering Roman generals, they aren’t plagued pesky, skull-toting slaves direly intoning: “Remember man, thou art but mortal.”

I’m pretty sure Washington lawyers are mortal, but I’m not entirely convinced they’re human. What they are is another matter. They’re too articulate for Cthulhu’s progeny, and despite what you may have heard, they are not hell spawn. The Devil has long since given up trying to control them. Every time he goes head to head with one, he loses. From what I’ve seen, Stephen Vincent Benet based “The Devil and Daniel Webster” on an actual case. After all, despite his Yankee roots, Daniel Webster spent most of his adult life arguing laws in Washington.

I don’t think our lawyers are space aliens, either. The breed has occupied the District for a long time without using the rest of us as a food source. The rumors they are vampires are just that. The real bloodsuckers in This Town are the lobbyists. Unlike lawyers, they never have to show up for daytime court dates.

But whatever they are, the ones actually practicing within the city limits have a really hard time behaving like people.

You’ve heard that line from William Congreve, “Music has charms to soothe the savage breast.” Well, let me tell you, not around here. In evidence I present this article from The Washington Post, the newspaper that once upon a time gave you Watergate.

The short form is DC is a great town for street musicians. Spread Love, a New Orleans-style outdoor band, routinely plays for tips next to the Farragut North Metro station, on a corner overlooked by the Treasury Department and a major Washington law firm, to the delight of locals and tourists alike. The lawyers in both buildings, however, greeted their joyful noise the same enthusiasm as Linda Blair greeted her parish priest in The Exorcist, culminating in an attempt to sic the Secret Service on them--apparently forgetting under duress that the Secret Service no longer answers to the Treasury Department. (They’ve belonged to Homeland Security since 2001.)

When coercion by proxy didn’t work (because the agents were too busy taking selfies and grooving to the music), the lawyers tried bribery. They offered the band $200 a week to move. The band laughed. But the band can make up to $200 an hour on that corner--a sum that puts their earnings almost on par with a junior assistant Washington lawyer.

Obviously, to the lawyers overheated legal brains, this means war. They are buying equipment to measure the band’s sound levels in the hope they exceed legal limits. (Hard to do that in the heart of DC’s business district, just sayin’.) They have vowed to take their complaints to the mayor and the DC Council. And if that fails, they’re already putting the money aside to hire a string quartet to steal Spread Love’s space on the corner.

I can’t top that. I just can’t.

Well, maybe with a were-opossum . . .


Jean Marie Ward
JeanMarieWard.com