Alex C. Telander's Blog, page 48

Guest Post with Anne Leonard, author of “Moth & Spark”

Fantasy Families

Harry Potter. Frodo Baggins. Luke Skywalker. Katniss Everdeen. What do they have in common? Well, besides being heroes, they suffered the childhood loss of one or both of their parents. When my son was younger, it seemed that every book I read him had a protagonist with at least one dead or missing parent.  And it’s not just fantasy. Tom Sawyer lives with his Aunt Polly. Jane Eyre is an orphan. Hamlet’s just lost his father.  King Arthur doesn’t know his father. Many fairytales have wicked stepmothers. It’s hard to think offhand of any hero or heroine who still lives with both parents at the time the adventures begin.

I suspect that a lot of this is because an adventure story is also often an archetypal story about leaving home and entering adulthood. It’s about the hero’s self-actualization. It’s about the heroine learning to use her own agency. Killing off the parents is a symbolic representation of this journey. (Frodo and Bilbo are somewhat unique in being middle-aged when their adventures begin.)

Killing off parents also often serves useful plot purposes – death of a family member destroys a person’s support system, creates a reason for vengeance or a need for help, is the first sign of catastrophic evil, or in some other way becomes the shake that gets the story moving. Handled right, it can bring out rich emotional depth in the characters as they grieve or change their lives.

Wrecking the family before the story starts, however, also cuts off all sorts of interesting possibilities for a more complicated story. Human families are both fraught with conflict and a source of strength and motivation. This was something the Greek tragedians knew. Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, so his wife Clytemnestra kills him, and then her son Orestes kills her. Oedipus famously kills his father and marries his mother, then goes wandering the earth with his daughters. Antigone chooses to bury her brother and is thus condemned to die by her uncle. The climactic point of The Iliad is not a battle scene, but is when Hektor’s father Priam comes to the Greeks and pleads to be allowed a proper burial of his son. I think this family drama is one of the things the gives Game of Thrones such broad appeal.  Tangle families with politics and power, and there’s a recipe for limitless stories.

Family is one of the things I’ve tweaked in MOTH AND SPARK. Both protagonists come from families that get along internally. All four parents are still living. No hero-orphans here.

There are two main reasons that I did this. First, it’s a love story. When a person first falls in love, that’s one of the major points differentiating self from parents. I thought it would be interesting to have characters going through all those thoughts about love and family while family is still around to have an influence on the decisions. The normal tension of bringing home a significant other to meet the parents allows the characters to have all sorts of emotions they wouldn’t otherwise. The tension is even greater if you respect your parents and are worried they will disapprove of your choice.

Second, I did want to tangle family with politics and power.  What’s it like to grow up knowing you’re going to inherit the family business when the family business is running the kingdom (instead of, say, a plumbing company)? What about when something as personal as marriage is reduced to obligation? How about being an adult who still has to take orders from the parents? It’s a situation that is pretty foreign to me as an ordinary middle-class person, and that made it interesting to speculate about. If I’d made the main royal character the king instead of an adult prince, a lot of family dynamics would have evaporated.

MOTH AND SPARK tells a story about each of its two main characters fulfilling a quest with support only from each other and not from their families. Tam and Corin are in fact cut off by distance and events from their families in the last part of the book, so in that sense the novel fits the familiar pattern. Independence from one’s family means family members can’t help. However, once the quest is achieved, family is back in the picture. Independence exists within the context of relationships.

Fantasy as a genre does more than retell fairytales. It allows for the exploration of possibilities that don’t exist in the “real” world. As a reader (and, I admit, as a parent) I’d like to see more stories where family dynamics influence the hero or heroine through the entire book, rather than being a backdrop. As a writer, I want to dig a lot deeper into this area.

People unfamiliar with the genre often dismiss fantasy as not about important or real things. Sometimes that’s the case, and there’s nothing wrong with escapism. But fantasy families can have the same experiences and rich emotional lives that literary realism families do, and I hope that as the genre grows and expands, we’ll see more fantasies where family matters.

Anne Leonard lives in Northern California.  She has degrees from St. John’s College, the University of Pittsburgh, Kent State University, and University of California-Hastings College of Law.  Leonard began MOTH AND SPARK while attending the University of California-Hastings College of Law (where she graduated cum laude) eking out a few hours on weekends or a half hour on the bus, or wherever she had the chance. After 3 years, she had a draft, but ultimately decided to practice law first.  At last readers will be introduced to the deadly harsh steppe lands of Sarian, to the white-barked tree-lined streets of Caithenor.

“Influx” by Daniel Suarez (Dutton, 2014)

It seems logical that if movie rights to a book are sold before the book is even published, then the book must be pretty good. Such is the case with Daniel Suarez’s latest book, Influx, rights to which have been acquired by Twentieth Century Fox. Another book that went through similar motions was Justin Cronin’s The Passage, before it was released, which went on to become a huge bestseller and was also a great book. But perhaps the key to Influx is that it is not only a riveting thriller that the likes of Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy might have written, but it is a book that is uniquely Daniel Suarez and sets the stage for his ability as a great writer and talented storyteller. There aren’t many books when one reads the last page, one feels compelled to flip back to the first page and start reading again, but Influx is definitely one of them.

What if our world was in fact way more advanced technologically than we thought possible? What if fusion power, true artificial intelligence, anti-gravity or even immortality had already been invented but had been kept hidden from humanity because of the possible harm it could cause the human race and the planet? This is the premise for Influx, which opens with particle physicist Jon Grady trying out his newly invented technology with his colleagues as they wrap their minds around the reality that is a gravity mirror. The possibilities are endless! And then they find themselves under attack by a terrorist group who tie them up and leave them in the warehouse to be killed by the bomb that has been left for them.

The bomb goes off and then Grady awakens to find himself in the office of the Bureau of Technology Control, a supposed government watchdog group that snatches up advanced technologies that pose too great a risk for the world. Grady is given the option to continue his work for the bureau or be imprisoned. Refusing to give up, Grady options for the latter and thus begins his tough times that will push him to the limits if he wants to fight back against this clandestine nonexistent government group.

Influx has the techno-thrill of a book that the late Michael Crichton might one day have written, as well as the jargon and complexity of the late Tom Clancy, posing the question as to whether Daniel Suarez is the author to step into these bestselling authors shoes? But the book also has a human side to it with its characters, with a moral to be learned and appreciated, as well as a story filled with cutting edge science that leaves one wondering if they’re reading fiction or nonfiction?

Daemon and Freedom™ were Daniel Suarez’s start as an author, as he told a particular story he wanted to tell. Kill Decision was his follow up book that was a story seizing on the hot topic of drones that were about to make headline news worldwide. Influx is the quasi science fiction thriller that Suarez was destined to write, that shows his full ability and scope not just as a great writer, but as a visionary storyteller that sets the stage for his future books that will no doubt match and exceed Influx in scope and potential. Suarez is a writer you should take note of, because he’s got some very important things to talk about, things that in all likelihood may one day come to pass.

Originally written on February 16, 2014 ©Alex C. Telander.

To purchase a copy of Influx from Amazon, and help support BookBanter, click HERE.

Daniel Suarez will be doing a reading and signing at Copperfield’s San Rafael on February 25th at 7pm. CLICK HERE for more information.

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Guest Post with David Edison, author of “The Waking Engine”

What made you decide to write about death?

I accepted my inner Morticia Addams at a fairly young age.

As a boy, I slept beneath the mounted corpse of a 9-foot dusky shark and ate my dinner in the same room as a mummy and a pair of death masks.  My parents are lovely, cheerful people whose love of travel and history made them accidental necromancers, and their only child was a cross between Pugsley and Wednesday Addams to begin with, so… I was steered toward questions about death early on.

My mother isn’t Jewish, and my father isn’t Catholic, and between the two I never quite belonged to either religious world, which set me up nicely for a cross-cultural survey course of the afterlife with no real attachment to any belief system, but baked-in respect for them all.  I survived lions in Kenya and snakes by the banks of the Nile before I hit puberty, not to mention that I explored more tombs, ruins, and caves than most kids have in their nightmares.

So I guess I’ve been preparing for The Waking Engine (and the books that will continue the story) for my whole life.  As my studies brought me closer to shamanistic practices and other animistic viewpoints, I started to realize that this business of being interested in (and not upset by) death and the transition we will all make, one day, wasn’t just my own weird idiosyncrasy.  It was a role that men and women have played throughout history, for the benefit of their communities.  We need people who are willing to discuss death, and work with it creatively—it will happen to us all, and yet we spend most of our life pretending that it won’t.  But our ends deserve as much emotional investment as our births, don’t they?

Not only is death a fertile ground for storytelling, it’s also a part of our individual stories.  And as is perhaps fitting with its taboo nature, our concepts of the afterlife are relatively lackluster.  Be bad, suffer; be good, enjoy yourself.  Life is a complicated and fuzzy creature—I never understood how the thing that comes after it could be so one-dimensional.  Harps?  Virgins?  Coming back as a cockroach?  Are you kidding me?

I have always imagined what kind of afterlife could match this beautiful, brutal life we lead.  The answer I found, for myself, was that only life could match life: give us dozens of lives, hundreds of scenarios, and see what becomes of us.  Suddenly, the possibility of reuniting with those who’ve gone before becomes complicated, rather than generic—what has your grandfather learned, in his next life, as a sailor?  That’s so much more fascinating to me than harp music and swan wings and peace.  Peace is the death of the interesting, and that’s the one thing I’m afraid to see die.

That said, I knew I was wading into heavy territory, so I tried to fill the story with as much joy and light and living as I could—which, in my head, is exactly the sort of lesson that Grandpa is learning on his successive lives.  What if death isn’t the end?  What if you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and keep walking down the highway?  That’s a sunset I’ll ride into.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, DAVID EDISON grew up reading and traveling, both to excess.  David was 15 years old when he began his study of creative writing at the college level at Bennington College under Rick Moody and Helen Schulman. He graduated from Brown University with a degree in English Literature in 2000.  In 2006, he co-founded GayGamer.net, the first video game news site and community presence for LGBT gamers—which has been reported upon by everyone from The Advocate to MTV to the Canadian Broadcasting Bureau, and was named one of the video game industry’s top 20 most influential game news sites in 2008 by Official PlayStation Magazine, #20 in a similar ranking by Wikio, and one of 1UP’s top ten favorite game blogs in 2010. He divides his time between New York City and San Francisco. The Waking Engine is his first novel. Visit him online at www.davidedison.com and on Twitter @DavidEdison.

“The Necromancer’s House” by Christopher Buehlman (Ace, 2013)

Welcome to a world where magic, curses and monsters from history and folklore are real. Meet Andrew Ranulf Blankenship, a handsome, debonair magician who is used to getting his way and doing pretty much whatever he wants. He has a pet incarnated wicker man that was once a dog that he makes serve him wine, as well as a foul-smelling demonic mermaid that he likes doing the dirty with.

Only this mermaid just took the life of an important high-up member of the Russian mafia. And Blankenship just happens to have a booby trap infested house along with a number of secret tunnels, all to protect a magic Russian treasury hoard stolen thirty years ago from the Soviet Union. And now he has an ancient creature from Russian folklore coming for this throat, his blood and his soul.

The Necromancer’s House is another strong example of Christopher Buehlman’s talent as a writer with its lyrical prose and gripping plot; the reader soon gets hooked into the story. While some readers may get a little lost with the story’s initial convolutedness, in the end the book delivers.

Originally written on December 26, 2013 ©Alex C. Telander.

To purchase a copy of The Necromancer’s House from Amazon, and help support BookBanter, click HERE.

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Daniel Suarez @ Copperfield’s Books San Rafael February 25th

Be sure to clear your schedule on the evening of Tuesday, February 25th, as you’re in for a real treat at Copperfield’s San Rafael, where we will be welcoming bestselling author Daniel Suarez for a reading and signing. I first learned about Daniel Suarez in early 2009 with the release of his debut thriller, Daemon. I then had the opportunity to interview him and learned that as well as being a great writer, he’s a fascinating guy.

  

In the interview he said after the duology of Daemon and Freedom™, he wasn’t sure if he’d do any more books. Thankfully, that never came true, as he followed with Kill Decision in 2012, all about those meddlesome drones flying the skies above us, long before they were in the everyday news.

In February 5th, the Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article on Daniel Suarez and where he is headed as a thriller writer and the big shoes he is skillfully filling. The subtitle of the article alone would pique anyone’s interest:

‘Influx’ may propel the sci-fi writer into the void left by Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton.

Suarez’ new book, Influx, will be released on February 20th. I’m already over a hundred pages into it, and in addition to already been the best thing he’s written yet, it’s some great science fiction in the style of Michael Crichton, William Gibson, and Neal Stephenson. It’s a great book that should be the book that launches Suarez to the big author stage known around the world.

So mark this day and time down in your calendar if you live or will be in the Bay Area – Tuesday, February 25th at 7pm – and come meet a great writer who is changing the face of science fiction.

Copperfield’s Books San Rafael is located at 850 Fourth St. in downtown San Rafael. For more information, call 415-524-2800.

Book News: Masters in Self Publishing, Neil Gaiman Gets Company, New Sci-Fi Imprint & More!

Neil Gaiman News 

Neil Gaiman has announced he has a new company, Freemantle Media, developing American Gods into a TV series, as well as an group interested in Anansi Boys.

5 Most Influential Authors of Our Time 

Looking at how they are followed and viewed through social media.

Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Winners by Region 

An interesting and perhaps unsurprising look at where award winners are from.

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“The Heavens Rise” by Christopher Rise (Gallery Books, 2013)

Christopher Rice, son of bestselling horror author Anne Rice, returns with his next novel that is dark and terrifying and mystical in a number of ways, while capturing a feel of New Orleans and that part of the world post-Katrina in a way that only someone deeply familiar with the area could.

This is the story of the strange disappearance of the known and respected Delongpre family; mother, father and daughter lost to the bayou and the world. The daughter, Niquette, is mourned by her boyfriend Anthem and her close friend Ben, while the twisted person Marshall is pretty certain their death was due to his actions. Marshall then throws himself from a high-rise building and ends up in a coma, from which he has gained strange powers.

As years pass and Marshall continues to somehow control others to his whim, it seems perhaps the Delongpres may not be gone for good, as strange things continue to happen, as people fall under a spell, and are not all controlled by Marshall.

Told from various perspectives, Rice has crafted a chilling and thrilling story that abhors as well as entices, leaving the reader turning the pages until the astonishing finale.

Originally written on November 8, 2013 ©Alex C. Telander.

To purchase a copy of The Heavens Rise from Amazon, and help support BookBanter, click HERE.

Innocent Blood” by James Rollins and Rebecca Cantrell (William Morrow, 2013)

In the first book of the Order of the Sanguines, Blood Gospel, it was revealed that terrifying vampires are alive and well. There are good vampires known as Sanguines that were first raised by Lazarus (yes, that Lazarus) and keep themselves alive by drinking the consecrated wine of Christ (yes, that Christ). And then there are bad vampires known as Strigoi that have been alive for centuries, including one Rasputin.

Erin Granger finds herself pulled back into the horrors of the Sanguines after an attack at her ranch and before she knows it she’s pulled back to Rome. Joining Jordan Stone and Father Rhun Korza, this time they seek a young seemingly immortal child who might just be an angel, and hopefully bringing them closer to stopping the Strigoi.

Sadly, this sequel falls into the over the top, back to back action scenes and traveling around the world that has becoming prevalent with Rollins’ recent books, and lacks the compelling history and storytelling of Blood Gospel. Nevertheless, Innocent Blood represents an interesting next chapter in the Order of the Sanguines series that ends on a nail-biting cliffhanger.

Originally written on January 15, 2014 ©Alex C. Telander.

To purchase a copy of Innocent Blood from Amazon, and help support BookBanter, click HERE.

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GUEST POST with Myke Cole, Author of “Shadow OPS: Breach Zone”

Let’s talk about how my military experience does NOT inform my writing.

Bear with me here:

This is the thing. We are currently living through the greatest divide in our nation’s history between military and civilian. A lower percentage of Americans serve in uniform than ever before, and the results are unsurprising. A population that is increasingly cut off from the military experience fetishizes it. This is to be expected. Things we don’t have a lot of interaction with become exotic to us. Stereotypes have one drawback . . . well, they have a ton of drawbacks, but I want to hone in on this one:

They’re monolithic. They take things that are incredibly complex, and distill them down into a single item.

There’s no such thing as a “New Yorker.” We all live in New York. Beyond that, the sheer breadth of our diversity is so vast that calling us New Yorkers is effectively meaningless.

Same thing in the military. Let me give you an example (centered around my latest novel, of course). Much of the action in BREACH ZONE takes place on a Coast Guard Cutter. It’s a 225′ Juniper Class Seagoing Buoy Tender (you can read more about them here). Now I’m *in* in the Coast Guard. But the “black hull” working fleet that Juniper Classes sail in are in the cutter world, the deep-water world, and the ATON (Aids to Navigation) world. Those are all worlds that have nothing to do with my work in the Coast Guard. I’m in the small boat squadrons. We run the 25′ Defender class response boats (more on them here). We stick to law enforcement and search-and-rescue missions. There is so little in common between life on a ’225 and life at my station that we might as well be in two different militaries. And we’re ALL the same Coast Guard.

So, when I began to write about the cutter in BREACH ZONE, I had to confront the fact that I knew nothing about the ship in question. So, I did what all writers do. I went on the Internet and researched it.

The truth is that the military has informed my writing in a million tiny ways that I will never truly have a grip on, but I don’t have a monopoly on the experience. The military influences people who’ve never served, because observing a phenomena is still participating in the experience. I don’t own military stories more than anyone else.

But that’s also the most exciting part about writing in this sub-genre. It gives me an excuse to learn.”

ABOUT SHADOW OPS: Breach Zone

In the wake of a bloody battle at Forward Operating Base Frontier and a scandalous presidential impeachment, Lieutenant Colonel Jan Thorsson, call sign “Harlequin,” becomes a national hero and a pariah to the military that is the only family he’s ever known.

 In the fight for Latent equality, Oscar Britton is positioned to lead a rebellion in exile, but a powerful rival beats him to the punch: Scylla, a walking weapon who will stop at nothing to end the human-sanctioned apartheid against her kind.

 When Scylla’s inhuman forces invade New York City, the Supernatural Operations Corps are the only soldiers equipped to prevent a massacre. In order to redeem himself with the military, Harlequin will be forced to face off with his havoc-wreaking woman from his past who’s been warped by her power into something evil…

 ABOUT MYKE COLE

As a security contractor, government civilian and military officer, MYKE COLE’s career has run the gamut from counterterrorism to cyber warfare to federal law enforcement. He’s done three tours in Iraq and was recalled to serve during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. All that conflict can wear a guy out. Thank goodness for fantasy novels, comic books, late-night games of Dungeons & Dragons, and lots of angst-fueled writing.

“The Pagan Lord” by Bernard Cornwell (HarperCollins, 2014)

Medieval historical fiction extraordinaire, Bernard Cornwell, is back with the next installment of the Saxon Tales. The Pagan Lord is the seventh in the series, with King Alfred gone and the land is on the eve of war between the Saxons ruled by Alfred’s son, Edward and Wessex; while in the north, the Danes led by the Viking Cnut Longsword looks to take more land.

Our hero, Uhtred, has had his ups and downs in the series, but now wishes to bring what men he can together and take back his inheritance in the distant north land of Bebbanburg, but he will have to fight his uncle and progeny to do that. The Christian faith is also growing in this place that will one day be called “Angeland,” and when Uhtred kills an important bishop, he finds those of the faith also warring against him.

The Pagan Lord pushes Uhtred to the very edge and beyond, bringing the reader along with him. It shows Cornwell doing what he does best, moving his characters around and pitting them against each other in magnificent battle scenes. No one Cornwell book is like the other, which is what makes him such a great writer.

Originally written on January 27, 2014 ©Alex C. Telander.

To purchase a copy of The Pagan Lord from Amazon, and help support BookBanter, click HERE.

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