Erm Kaslo, hardboiled wizard's assistant

Last year, I introduced a new character in the Archonate universe. Erm Kaslo is a “licensed confidential operative” (combination private detective, bounty hunter, bodyguard), who lives on Novo Bantry, one of the long-settled worlds of The Spray. He’s a hardboiled version of Henghis Hapthorn who faces the same dilemma as Old Earth’s foremost freelance discriminator: he discovers that the fundamental operating principle of the universe is about to switch from rational cause and effect to sympathetic association, or to use the vulgar term, “magic.”

I took Hapthorn up to the point where the change was just about to happen, and left him to decide whether he wanted to live in a universe ruled by wizards. I’m going to take Kaslo right through the transition and into the collapse of technological civilization and the beginnings of the age that Jack Vance described in his seminal work, The Dying Earth.

I’m writing Kaslo’s story as an episodic novel. I’ve now written four episodes. The first, “And Then Some,” appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction last year. The other three – “Sleeper,” “His Elbow, Unkissed,” and “Phalloon the Illimitable” – have now been bought by John Joseph Adams for the on-line magazine Lightspeed. He’s also bought the reprint rights to “And Then Some,” which will kick off the serial (because that’s what it is) in September.

Eventually, when the story’s been told and all the episodes have run in Lightspeed, I’ll put them all together and self-publish them as an ebook and a POD paperback.

I’m looking forward to this. I like writing hardboiled crime fiction, and taking a guy like Kaslo through an apocalypse ought to offer plenty of scope.
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Published on June 21, 2013 00:56 Tags: archonate, erm-kaslo, henghis-hapthorn, lightspeed, matthew-hughes
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