Peter Nealen's Blog, page 36

Book Review: Somewhither

How does one describe John C Wright’s Somewhither?  That is, indeed the question.

While this book won the Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction novel this year, Science Fiction doesn’t quite cover it.  In some ways, it’s about as Science Fictional as Star Wars.  But since it deals with multiple parallel universes, with technological interfacing between them, I suppose the label “Science Fiction” works.  It could just as well have been called “Philosophical/Metaphysical Action Adventure,” though even that wouldn’t quite cover it.

Now, my introduction to John C Wright was a combination of his blog and Awake in the Night Land, an anthology of stories in William Hope Hodgson’s universe of The Night Land.  I confess I found Wright’s version more readable than Hodgson’s purple prose by a country mile.  That, and Wright’s own description of Somewhither, in an article on his blog, got me interested.

The comment in question?

“And, no, the Ark in my version is not locked in an American warehouse. That would be absurd and unbelievable, whereas this story is utterly realistic.

And by ‘utterly realistic’, I mean is utterly and really just like what would happen if truck full of pro-Catholic apologetic tracts, rammed into a warehouse full of pulp magazines, Batman comics, and old episodes of MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., and a novel was flung from the resulting explosion into low Earth orbit, was exposed to space radiation, mutated, and fell to earth in the Arctic, only to be unearthed by unwary scientists who are murdered one by one.

Or if the poet and magician Virgil saw the movie VAN HELSING, went mad, and decided to write an episode of the Highlander-meets-Buffy TV show. That is what I mean by utterly realistic. It is as realistic as a Dan Brown novel, in other words.”

After that, how could I not read it?

In short, the story starts with the main character and narrator, Ilya Muromets, the son of a Knight Templar living in Tillamook, Oregon (yes, you read that right), discovering that his dad is a Knight Templar, the girl he has a crush on is involved in a multi-universe war, and that her father (or adopted father) is trying to open a door to another universe, a door that would really better remain closed.  Ilya, determined to be a hero, save the girl, and win the affections of said girl, who has steadfastly ignored him for some time, goes charging in where angels fear to tread, and winds up wrapped up in a guerrilla war with The Dark Tower, which is out to enslave all parallel universes.

With me so far?  Good, because it only gets wilder from there.  I don’t want to delve too deeply into the plot, or even all the other stuff that Wright has crammed into this roller-coaster ride of a story.  You should go read it yourself.  I don’t want to spoil too much.

Somewhither is seriously one of the wildest mishmash pulp/sci-fi/fantasy/Christian fiction stories I’ve ever read.  (And in case anyone is worried about the “Christian fiction” part making it too tame, don’t worry.  There’s plenty of violence and bloodshed to satisfy the strictest action junkie.  Some of it’s almost more graphic than the stuff I write.)  Wright has thrown just about everything plus the kitchen sink into this universe (multiverse?).  There are magicians, vampires, werewolves, giant armored zeppelins, interdimensional gates, monsters of all shapes and sizes (many of which come from various medieval sources that are sadly underutilized when people start coming up with monsters for fantasy stories).  There’s adventure and superpowers and lots of combat.

In short, it’s a wild roller-coaster of a multiple universe swashbuckler, with some deeper metaphysical themes woven in between the blood and guts and derring-do.  If you have enjoyed the Jed Horn series, by all means, go read Somewhither.  You will not regret it.

Rock, Meet Hard Place

So, a couple posts back, I spoke of a 22,000 word story that I couldn’t really talk about.  Well, now I can.

A few months back, Mike Kupari hit me up with the idea of doing a short story for Baen.com with him, set in the Dead Six universe, created between him and Larry Correia, between Swords of Exodus and Alliance of Shadows, which comes out next month.  Being a big fan of the Dead Six series, myself, I readily agreed.  The end result is Rock, Meet Hard Place, Part 1 and Part 2.

 

Book Review: Gray Matter Splatter

Jack Murphy definitely has a way with titles.  Gray Matter Splatter is a title that few could pull off, particularly in a day and age of nonsensical buzzword thriller titles like True Faith and Allegiance.

But Jack pulls it off, somehow.  Gray Matter Splatter is a breakneck bloodbath in the Arctic, a bit of a change of pace from the last couple Deckard instalments.

Samruk International, Deckard’s PMC of former Western SOF soldiers and Kazakh mercenaries, has been contracted to secure oil installations in the Russian Arctic against Russian Mafiya elements that are muscling in on the oil companies, not unlike the Mexican cartels have been doing with Pemex in the real world.  What they find themselves up against on the Russian tundra, however, is a paramilitary force far better prepared and advanced than a bunch of Mafiya thugs.  What follows is a deadly chase across the Arctic from Russia to Canada to Greenland.

The sheer distances in the Arctic, most of them utterly devoid of much more than occasional animal life, presented a challenge as far as pacing, but Jack managed to balance it deftly.  Some of this is due to the global repercussions of what is going on (which I’ll leave deliberately vague, since Jack reveals the mystery in a slow burn that definitely keeps the reader guessing for a while), which keeps Deckard engaged on several levels.

While the action is the centerpiece (and as well-written as ever), there’s a lot of intrigue and geopolitics going on behind the scenes.  In addition to the harsh realities of Arctic warfare, there is a background of open-source warfare, terrorism, proxy war, and deliberate misdirection of knee-jerk public reaction to further the enemy’s objectives.

There is also a lot of high-tech stuff, some of it presently available, most of it plausible, and a little bit still very much in the realm of science fiction.  In fact, Gray Matter Splatter sits in an interesting middle ground between contemporary military thriller and military science fiction.  This also puts it slightly within the realm of certain James Bond stories and with a hint of GI Joe (though in a good way).

There’s some definite character development stemming from the previous books in the series, both with Deckard, who is starting to have to take a step back and be more of a commander than a front-line door-kicker (though he gets plenty of that in, as well; Deckard is still very much a “lead from the front” sort of commander), but also with Nikita, the rather sullen Kazakh sniper.

Jack does a good job of slow-burning the background plot, though his method could seem a little weird to a first-time reader.  All I can say is, as strange as things might seem, stick with it.  It all becomes clear in the end, as Jack draws the various threads together, and results in a very satisfying mil/milSF thriller.

Book Review: The Perseid Collapse Series: The Complete Scavenger Trilogy

I’m a little late getting to this one, as the omnibus version came out in June, but I finally got to it.  (My TBR pile is pretty tall, and since I’m usually working on reading about six books at a time, not to mention writing, it can sometimes take a bit.)

I haven’t read any of the rest of the Perseid Collapse series, but that doesn’t take away from Ross Elder’s contribution.  There is little extra background needed, and what is needed is provided.

The book opens after the Perseid Event (the nature of which is never clear in the Scavenger Trilogy, though there is some speculation), with society already pretty well in collapse.  We meet the protagonist, Zack Morris, as he’s investigating an abandoned house.

The next couple of chapters cover not only the history of recent disasters in the setting, but also Zack’s personal history.  Ross took a risk here, because it can easily seem like a prologue info-dump.  But when you realize that this is a character who is mostly alone, and who lives predominantly in his own, head, it only makes sense.

What starts as a night scavenging trip proceeds to escalate into the real story, with a confrontation with a local militia, led by a sort of robber baron (in a literal sense of the term; the militia is sustaining its supplies by “confiscating” from the surrounding populace by force).

Altogether, it’s a short read, but Ross tackles some interesting issues along the way, including the unintended consequences of violence, however justified, and the danger of becoming so focused on “survival” that it eclipses anything else.

Along the way, we come to understand that Zack is a profoundly broken human being, and has been since childhood.  This does not stop him from trying to be a hero, and largely succeeding, though at great cost.

Being a survivalist story, there is a fair bit of the usual survivalist tropes in play, though considerably more understated than most such stories I’ve seen (though, granted, it’s not a genre I read a great deal of).  The descriptions of hideouts and supply caches are quite detailed enough for the hardcore prepper nerds, without being particularly gratuitous.  Same with the gun porn.  There’s a little bit, but not especially distracting (and I’m no one to be calling the kettle black when it comes to gun porn).

The combat scenes are well done.  There is a hand-to-hand fight that is quite sufficiently desperate, as the combatants are desperately trying to kill each other while at the same time trying not to get killed themselves.  It’s a down and dirty fight that reads like a real fight.

There is a romance, and if it seems slightly rushed, it’s not entirely out of place.  It’s also pretty tastefully done, never devolving into the pulpishness of, say, William W. Johnstone’s Ashes series.

The only real con I could find with the story is that, honestly, it could have done with one more editing pass.  There are a few jarringly awkward sentences, and a few issues where the wrong word was used, but it can clearly be seen which word was supposed to be there.  I’ve seen far, far worse, though.

Overall, The Complete Scavenger Trilogy is a pretty good read.

A Bit of News

Those who follow my Facebook page might have seen this already, but I ran into a spot of trouble concerning Hunting in the Shadows‘ Kindle Select status.  Long story short, it seems that Kobo Ebooks failed to take it down after I unpublished the Smashwords version (though all the others are down).  I’ve contacted Smashwords about it; they have contacted Kobo, and hopefully this will be getting sorted soon.  I also contacted Kindle Direct Publishing, explaining the situation, and HitS has a bit of a reprieve; I’ve now got 30 days to make sure Kobo gets their act together.  Considering that Kobo’s website has no contact portal for anything but troubleshooting their ereaders, I’m going to have to rely on Smashwords for it; fortunately, Smashwords got back to me within a couple of hours, so that’s a good sign.

Kill Yuan has now been out for two months, and a few people have asked about the next Praetorian book.  Lex Talionis is coming, and I’ve started to do a little bit of groundwork for it.  I’d hoped to see it out the door by the end of the year; however, depending on how things go over the next couple of months, it might get pushed into early next year.

Here’s why: I just finished a 22k word short story that should be coming out on a major publisher’s website in a couple of months.  I can’t say much more than that, but it’s pretty cool.  It’s my first collaborative fiction project, and my first time playing in somebody else’s sandbox.

I’m also working on a novel for (hopefully) the same publisher.  It’s not sold yet, but the editor has read the pitch and the first chapter (of an early version) and said that she wants to read the finished manuscript.  I’m told, by no less a figure than Larry Correia, that this is a good sign.  Of course, the overall novel has changed a bit since the initial pitch I sent in.  Some of this is because I’ve been working on it off and on since last summer, having put it on the back burner for Kill Yuan, and then again for the short story (which I actually had a hard deadline for).  Every time I’ve come back to it after back-burnering it, I’ve been dissatisfied.  Some of that is because I need to just knuckle down and finish it.  Some of it is because with the initial version, I had two major stories happening in the same novel, and the first one was getting rushed.  So, after talking to Mike Kupari about it, the realization came (with Mike’s prompting) that there were actually two separate books there, and the whole thing needed to be expanded into a trilogy.  After tearing my hair out with the words, “Dammit, Mike!  See what you’ve done!” (to which he laughed and said that spreading discord and making life more difficult for people is just what he does), I outlined the trilogy, threw out a good deal of what I already had written, and got back to work.  Hopefully I’ll have the first draft finished and ready to turn in by mid- to late-September.  Then I can get working on Lex Talionis.

I can say this much about the fifth Praetorians novel; it probably isn’t going to make me many friends on the political front.  A lot of threads, particularly from Alone and Unafraid and The Devil You Don’t Know are going to be coming together and the war is going to come home to the Praetorians in a new way.  Those who study classical history and can take a cue from the company name might get a bit of an inkling of what’s coming.

Now, back to work.

“Do-Something-ism” and Societal Childishness

“Jack,” Trent said, “When I was fourteen I was a man.  Had to be.  Well, it looks like your father dying has made you a man, too.

“I’m giving you this Sharps.  She’s an old gun, but she shoots straight.  I’m not giving this gun to a boy, but to a man, and a man doesn’t ever use a gun unless he has to.  He never wastes lead shooting carelessly.  He shoots only when he has to, and when he can see what it is he’s shootin’ at.

“This gun is a present with no strings attached except that any man who takes up a gun accepts responsibility for what he does with it.  Use it to hunt game, for target practice, or in defense of your home or those you love.

“Keep it loaded always.  A gun’s no good to a man when it’s empty, and if it is settin’ around, people aren’t liable to handle it carelessly.  They’ll say, ‘That’s Jack Moffit’s gun, and it’s always loaded.’  It is the guns people think are unloaded that cause accidents.”

Louis L’Amour, The Mountain Valley War

This isn’t just about guns or the current uproar over the reaction to the Orlando shooting.  This goes deeper than that.  It goes to the very heart of much of what is causing so much political and social turmoil in the US today.

Every time some public death happens (and I mean public; thousands of people die, many of them violently, every day, and never get a single line on the news), there is an outcry about how something must be done to prevent it happening again.  Then there’s even more vociferous outcry about what must be done, and how, with proponents and opponents flinging all sorts of opprobrium at people they’ve never met and will never know over it.

The underlying problem with this vicious cycle of political opportunism and social division isn’t even a matter of politics, money, or philosophical differences over the role of the State in everyday life.  (Don’t get me wrong, those are definitely factors; I’m just saying that there’s a deeper problem involved.)  It is a matter of understanding of the matter of life itself.

Our wealthy, affluent, Western society has reached a point where a large portion of the population is so sheltered that they see safety as the default setting of life, and any danger is an abberation, something that shouldn’t be.  They seem to believe that their lives would naturally go on forever, if just the right, utopian Things Are Done.  They think that life is supposed to be safe, easy, and comfortable.  These are the same people who accuse the likes of Larry Correia of “wanting people to live in fear” because he advocates for people to be armed and trained to use their weapons to preserve their lives.

Life isn’t safe.  The one constant of life is that it ends.  Everybody dies eventually, and you don’t get a vote in how it happens.  You could live to be a hundred, and die of old age, or you could die tomorrow due to a car crash, a freak medical condition that had gone undiagnosed, a natural disaster, or a violent confrontation.  You can either face that fact, mentally and physically prepare yourself to deal with what you can deal with, while accepting that eventually you’re going to die anyway, or you can live in terror or denial.  One is paralyzing.  The other is delusion.

We have, as a society, become so separated from this basic reality that we have people terrified of tools and loud noises, while other people are so disconnected from the real risks of life and the real world that they do stupid things like wandering off the trail and falling into an acidic hot spring in Yellowstone National Park.

Life isn’t safe.  The real world is fraught with risks.  This isn’t a call to be afraid, it is the opposite.  In the immortal words of Herger the Joyous, “Grow stronger.”  Get out of your bubble of concrete, computers, and safe spaces, realize and accept that sooner or later you are going to die, and learn to embrace the tools to thrive with that danger, instead of embracing wimpiness, rejecting responsibility, and shunning the strength of our forefathers.  Nothing you do is going to make life easier or longer.  Harden up and learn the tools and skills to survive and thrive.

Memorial Day

Presented without further comment, a poem by my Recon Brother, Bryan Moulton.

Dedicated to those who have given all that they can in the defense of our nation, I offer my own humble tribute:

Morning rays, a golden hue, give to your pale visage

Shadows, banished by the day, lurk in angled lines and draws

I lie in peace amidst dew-dropped curves and blades on which you lie

A blanket, born of heavenly breath, warm and safe beneath the sky

An echo, a mourn, not seen but felt, a memory long ago

A flash of light, a flash of sound, age-faded but crisp and bold

Loving assault upon senses, dulled, these memories to the fore

O’ershadow the triumphant trumpets’ call to a friend in need no more

Eyes lift from the green to the playful draught, teasing brilliant stripes with ease

Starry night turns starry day, watched by timeless guardians, freed

A dance in the wind, the fabric plays, with its furl and snap of cloth

Watched over by beams of radiant gold, free of want and grief and wroth

Wondrous gaze falls to alabaster skin, in blessed relief, stark

By warmed touch, your closed eyes have kept me through the dark

A spot of color, here and there, my eye is drawn toward

As light’s embrace engulfs the forms lying there upon the sward

In it forms remembered touch, a soft caress of fabric bold

Nevermore to be prepared, to put hot iron to patch and fold

Hang up your cartridge belt, my friend, stow horn and save your shot

I recite familiar phrase, echoed in time, “I have the watch”

A duty ends, a soul at rest, I stand after the night

And turn my gaze to hallowed rows

Of marble ranks of white

Good and Evil in Stories

I’ve shied away from writing about writing, since I’m still learning myself, but I had a thought recently that I figured could use some fleshing out.  So here goes.

There have long been voices decrying “simplistic” models of good and evil in books and movies (and, I suppose, video games).  Tolkien is often mentioned (though anyone who calls the morality of Tolkien’s tales “simplistic” either hasn’t really read them, or wasn’t paying much attention when they were), particularly in regard to the orcs.  Interestingly, this was a problem that Tolkien himself wrestled with.  His own Catholic epistemology denied that any thinking being could be created as “evil.”  Evil is a defect, not a positive characteristic.  He tried to work out the nature of the orcs until he died, and never quite figured it out (see The Later Silmarillion Part 1: Morgoth’s Ring.)

One sees much more simplistic approaches in later works, that seem to regard “good” and “evil” as faction labels more than anything else.  “This group/band/nation/race are the Good Guys, and that group/band/nation/race are the Bad Guys.”  Some of this has doubtless been helped along by the atrocities of the Second World War, the Gulag, and the Islamists, who commit unapologetically evil actions.  But “Good” and “Evil” are concepts, rather than badges.

Perhaps we have become accustomed to equating “enemy” with “evil.”  Such is not always the case.  Two groups can be enemies without either one being inherently evil.

Many of those who decried the earlier moral simplicity of struggles between Good and Evil have endeavored to subvert the tropes.  In fact, “subverting genre tropes” is presently all the rage in publishing.  Sometimes this can be done well, where there is a sympathetic character on both sides.  All too often lately, however, it seems to have devolved into making everyone involved an irredeemable bastard, effectively denying the existence of Good altogether.

It’s something I’ve tried to explore a little with Kill Yuan.  Shang Wei Feng Kung is a ruthless individual, in service to a totalitarian regime that is the heir of the horrific slaughter of the Cultural Revolution, but I daresay most would be hard-pressed to describe him as evil.  He’s doing what he sees as his duty.  That doesn’t mean he’ll hesitate to kill Dan Tackett if he sees it necessary, nor will Dan hesitate to put a bullet in his head.

It may be a touch pretentious for a hack action writer to talk about “literature,” but I think as a whole stories would be better served, and would speak better to the human condition, if we learned to put a divider between “enemy” and “evil” again.  They can be separate concepts, and provide a lot of fodder for interesting storytelling that can’t be found if every character is on one side of the fence or another.

“Kill Yuan” Is Now Available

Today’s the day.  Kill Yuan is out.  Amazon’s being a little slower getting the paperback up than they have previously, but it is on the way.

The Kindle link is here.

As previously announced, the ebook is presently Kindle exclusive.  I’m giving Kindle Select a try, which also means that if you are subscribed to Kindle Unlimited, you can borrow the book on your Kindle.

Signed paperbacks are now available for pre-order on americanpraetorians.com, to go out June 10.

China Keeps Pushing

China has been a player in a couple of my novels, now.  The Devil You Don’t Know dealt in part with the PRC’s dealings with Mexican cartels.  Kill Yuan is set on the periphery of the perennial flashpoint of the South China Sea.  Neither are new, though the South China Sea is becoming more and more of a focus, as China continues to push the US Navy as well as all of their maritime neighbors to the south, including Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia.

The Spratlys have been a flashpoint with China’s neighbors for decades.  The Chinese claim actually, according to Beijing and Taipei (which claims the islands under the auspices of the Nationalist Chinese government that preceded Mao’s Red China), dates back to the Han Dynasty, in 2 BC.  Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam, and the Philippines also claim the islands.  In recent years, the PRC has begun building up reefs in the South China Sea into artificial islands, claiming that these are for scientific research such as fish population studies, though, in spite of the conspicuous operation of civilian airliners on the artificial island on Fiery Reef, there appears to be plenty of military equipment on the islands.  They have had the effect of strengthening China’s claim on the South China Sea, effectively in a “possession is 9/10 of the law” sort of way.

Now, they are preparing to run an expansive series of military drills in the South China Sea, the Xinhua News Agency has reported.  They’ve been announcing these fairly regularly, ostensibly to demonstrate that they’re being transparent with their military movements in the region, though the announcements can also be read as declarations of their own strength in the area.  There have already been tensions between China and the US, as the US Navy has been conducting “freedom of navigation” exercises with destroyers passing through the South China Sea, effectively serving notice that the USN is watching to make sure that the sea lanes passing through the region aren’t cut.

So far, most of the tensions have been rather more diplomatic than military, as China expresses its dislike of USN ships by denying berth in Hong Kong.  See this article.

There’s an interesting contrast here between what is being said publicly, trying to downplay the hostility between the two powers, and what is going on out on the water.  First, the public statement:

“But the very fact that we’re on this pier, that our two navies, our two countries, don’t let that minor hurdle get in the way of our relationships. Our, the relationship between our two countries is much too important for a port visit to get in the way of that,” Aucoin told reporters.

Then, only a couple paragraphs later:

“We are seeing Chinese fishing trawlers provoking the United States Navy, carrying out sovereign acts, but just over the horizon is the PLA,” said Rear Adm. Paul Zukunft, referring to the People’s Liberation Army.

“So our biggest concern is about a miscalculation. But their coast guard has not been transparent in terms of what their intent is,” he said at a discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations.

How much of this is simply an attempt to assert Chinese dominance in the region, and how much of it is active provocation, is hard to say.  There has been a fair bit of what little information that comes out of China that indicates that the PLA, which is sorely lacking in combat experience, has been chafing at the bit to go after the US for decades.  There is plenty of evidence to point to that they have been attacking US interests indirectly.

Where this ultimately goes is anyone’s guess at this point.  China is pushing, and as Zukunft said above, one miscalculation could have some pretty severe consequences.