“The rare trick”

Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer, reviews both Quantum Mortis books:

Short review: Murder mystery with rayguns IN SPACE!

Longer review: Both works are set in the distant future, and center around one Graven Tower…. It has been interesting watching SF wrestle with the question of the ongoing IT revolution of the last few decades, especially since society as a whole has not yet figured out how to deal with the Internet. If you read older science fiction, the computers of the future were supposed to be the computer from STAR TREK, Wintermute, and Tron-style virtual reality. No one anticipated the banal reality of YouTube, Hulu, Internet pornography, and people Instagramming pictures of their breakfast toast. All of a sudden, science fiction novels have to wrestle with a future containing smartphones and the Internet, and this book does a good job of grafting the IT revolution onto a space-opera framework.

Of course, the book isn’t all deep thoughts – there are a lot of battles with particle weapons, lasers, missiles, more particle weapons, and flying cars. Graven uses a lot of guns – the book achieves the rare trick of writing gun porn about guns that do not actually exist. It is an interesting look at the IT-augmented warfare of the future (or the present, really), when attacking the enemy’s computer systems is just as effective, if not more so, as attacking his troops and food supplies.

Read the whole review there. Jonathan always has an intelligent take on things and usually somehow manages to observe an aspect of the novel that even the writer doesn’t realize is there until it is pointed out to him.

Also, for those who are interested, I’ve started a Quantum Mortis wiki to help Steve and I keep track of who is who and what is what. If you feel like pitching in and contributing to it, please feel free to do so. I’m also throwing together a Traveller-style sector map that I expect to post there sometime next week.

On the translation front, there are now Finnish (2), French (2), Bahasa Indonesia, and Latin works in progress. So, if you’re a native speaker of some other non-English language and you’re interested in receiving a bigger revenue share than Simon & Schuster used to provide to Dan Brown and me at the turn of the century, shoot me an email. I’m particularly interested finding translators for Deutsch, Schwyzerdütsch, and Italiano.