Tag: books

All war is murder for profit.

Some corporations are just more open about it.

WARDOGS INCORPORATED is one of the largest and most professional mercenary corporations operating in the Kantillon subsector. If you need a bodyguard, an assassination team, or an armored cavalry regiment complete with air support, WARDOGS Inc. can provide it for you… for a very steep price.

Fresh from the nuclear-scarred battlefields of Ulixis, Tommy Falkland and his squad mates are happy to be assigned to a simple corporate bodyguard contract when the interstellar corporation Datacon Verlag inadvertently offends a seriously strange religious cult with an advertising campaign and turns to Wardogs Incorporated for protection. But the contract proves to be considerably more challenging than expected when the executive they are guarding ends up dead, murdered by a military-grade toxin, and they find themselves ordered to track down his killer. But how do you solve a murder when your two primary skills are breaking things and killing people?

HUNTER KILLER is the second in the WARDOGS INC. series of military science fiction novels. From the reviews of the first book, BATTLESUIT BASTARDS:

• Excellent MilSF. Gritty and no nonsense mercs far into Earth’s history. Its the Acendency now, the world of Quantom Mortus. Thoroughly enjoyed this and looking to more in what must be a series. The mercenaries, their tactics, combat moves are all there. You could actually get a low level tactical and some strategic education from novels like this. Obviously written by someone who knows of the craft of war.
• This is what I call military science fiction. I could tell from the first two lines that this book was going to be worth the read! The opening was very strong. There is no time for afternoon tea for these guys, because there is so much action.
• Surprisingly good yarn. Well realised universe. Lots of action. Very much in the mercenary companies idiom. Easy to race through to find out what happens next. Expert writing and pacing.
• Wardogs is a fun romp through the Quantum Mortis universe by a new author. I loved the story and the characters it was non-stop action from beginning to end. I’m hoping to see many more Wardog stories. If you like Drake, Ringo, Carr, or Stirling you should enjoy this book.
• The book compares well to David Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers, the original book on Sci Fi Mercs. This takes place in the world of Quantum Mortis, where you have super advanced technology, in a universe that resembles city states. And with a fight going on with AIs. This is a mercenary company, publicly traded with stock options, in that universe. 

No more songs of Ice and Fire for you, at least not this year:

George R.R. Martin is confirming what Game of Thrones fans have increasingly suspected: The long-awaited sixth book in his A Song of Ice and Fire saga, The Winds of Winter, will not be out in 2018 (here are some of the best fan reactions to this news).

The author revealed the decision in a press release announcing a publication date for Fire and Blood, his upcoming history of the Targaryens which has clocked in at a massive 989 pages long.

“No, winter is not coming… not in 2018, at least,” Martin wrote. “You’re going to have to keep waiting for The Winds of Winter. You will, however, be able to return to Westeros this year. I do want to stress… indeed, I want to shout… that Fire and Blood is not a novel. This is not a traditional narrative and was never intended to be… let’s call this one ‘imaginary history’ instead. The essential point being the ‘history’ part. I love reading popular histories myself, and that’s what I was aiming for here … (Though there are enough stories here for twenty novels. Battles, bloodshed, betrayals, love, lust, horror, religious wars, politics, incest, historical revisionism, all the fun stuff) .… As for me, I’m returning once again to The Winds of Winter.”

I can, however, confirm that the full A Sea of Skulls will be released this year. The hardcover will definitely be available for Christmas.

JRR Tolkien is releasing a new book, The Fall of Gondolin, which sounds right up my alley.

In the latest sad episode of the saga of George R. R. Martin’s next book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, The Winds of Winter, never being published, legendary deceased author J.R.R. Tolkien has reportedly finished another book before Martin could complete Winds of Winter. Not only is the legendary Lord of the Rings author publishing a new book before Martin, but he’s publishing them at a faster rate in general. Tolkein’s new book, The Fall of Gondolin, which will be published in 2018, follows 2017’s Beren and Lúthien, meaning despite being dead since 1973, Tolkien is somehow able to release books at a rate of one per year, while Martin hasn’t released a new ASOIAF book since 2011’s A Dance With Dragons.

The Fall of Gondolin is billed as the first “real” story of Middle Earth, and tells of the fall of the titular city to dark forces. Edited by Tolkein’s 93-year-old son, Christopher Tolkien, the book was reportedly written while J.R.R. Tolkien was convalescing after the Battle of the Somme. The Guardian, which broke the story, provides a summary of the story:

The book, said publisher HarperCollins, sets the “uttermost evil” of Morgoth against the sea-god Ulmo. Morgoth is trying to discover and destroy the hidden city of Gondolin, while Ulmo is supporting the Noldor, the kindred of the elves who live in the city.

The story follows one of the Noldor, Tuor, who sets out to find Gondolin; during his journey, he experiences what the publisher described as “one of the most arresting moments in the history of Middle-earth”: when Ulmo, the sea-god, rises out of the ocean during a storm.

When Tuor arrives in Gondolin, he becomes a great man and the father of Eärendel, an important character in Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. But Morgoth attacks, with Balrogs, dragons and orcs, and as the city falls, Tuor, his wife Idril and the child Eärendel escape, “looking back from a cleft in the mountains as they flee southward, at the blazing wreckage of their city”.

It might seem shocking that a deceased author could publish two books in his popular fantasy series in just two years, while Martin has taken over 7 years to provide fans with the penultimate chapter of his series and seems unlikely do so before HBO finishes Game of Thrones, the television adaptation that had to chart its own course after lapping Martin. However, it’s worth noting that, being dead, Tolkien needn’t be distracted by things like LiveJournal or WildCards books, so he has a distinct advantage.

Look for The Fall of Gondolin sometime this year. Don’t bother looking for The Winds of Winter. It’s never coming out.

They may well be right. I strongly suspect that George RR Martin simply can’t write at the same level as his previous books in the series anymore, and he knows it. Being a gamma, he’d rather not even try than take the risk of trying, failing, and destroying his literary legacy.

That’s my current theory, anyhow. And it’s totally not based on any concerns about the rest of A Sea of Skulls living up to the first two-thirds….

All war is murder for profit. 

Some organizations are just more open about it.

WARDOGS INCORPORATED is one of the largest and most professional mercenary corporations operating in the Kantillon subsector. If you need a bodyguard, an assassination team, or an armored cavalry regiment complete with air support, WARDOGS Inc. can provide it for you… for a very steep price.

Tommy Falkland is proud to be a Wardog. And he’s delighted when WDI’s executives sign a massive contract to arrange for a little regime change on a no-account low-tech planet that looks like a highly profitable cakewalk. But when the transportation company unexpectedly fails to deliver their armor and artillery dirtside, Tommy and his fellow Wardogs find themselves caught in the middle of the killing zone.

And there they learn that bullets will kill a man dead just as quickly as a plasma bolt.

Some of you have been saying you want more Quantum Mortis. Well, here is more Quantum Mortis. Graven Tower is not the protagonist, but the events taking place in the new series are roughly contiguous with those of A Man Disrupted and are occurring in the same subsector. You can consider Wardogs Inc. to be one of our responses to the stunning success of Nick Cole’s bestselling Galaxy’s Edge series…. but there are others on the way soon. And yes, Wardogs Inc. will be appearing in comic book form, illustrated and colored by the two gentlemen responsible for the action-packed cover.

And “action-packed” barely begins to describe this series. It is, like the Wardogs themselves, off the chain. An excerpt from Chapter 1:

We unceremoniously stuffed the bodies into the small personnel airlock and flushed them out into space.

“Sergeant Thrasher, cargo is clean,” I reported.

“Find anything interesting?”

“Mostly just industrial equipment. Construction stuff,” I said. Four-eyes cut in, “To be precise, mining equipment.”

“Roger,” Squid said. “No problems?”

“Nothing illegal. Some more slug-throwers though, in wood crates,” I said.

“Not our business. Everyone meet up on the bridge in five. We’ve cleared our bodies here, we’ll finish there.”

“Roger,” I replied. Park hammered the tops back on the boxes, then exited cargo. I reset the seals on the door and we headed up to the bridge. It wasn’t a huge ship, so no lifts. Just ladders and stairs like an old atomic model.

We entered the bridge just as Private Ward was dragging out the body of the captain. Park saluted the dead man ironically and Jock laughed.

“Now what?” I said.

“Now we wait for a new crew,” said Squid from the late captain’s chair, a flask in his hand. “Lieutenant says their ship is on the way and they should be here within the hour. At ease for now.”

I looked around the bridge. Everything looked clean and well-maintained, though it was an older ship. Garamond read the name plate on the wall. Registration 1001x235htfg22789.113. Gruppo ENIL-EX, Valatesta.

I took off my helmet and set it on the navigation table next to a personal tablet, still displaying a colorful picture story its owner would never finish. Probably lots of time to read on freighters.

Almost exactly an hour later, a sleek black transport pulled alongside and hailed us. A few moments later, the boarding party joined us. The men wore the same navy blue jumpsuits of the guys we’d just spaced. Gruppo ENIL-EX uniforms, I assumed.

Their leader engaged with Sergeant Thrasher and a severe little man walked up to me. “Do you mind?” he said, then powered up the nav board. He tossed the tablet onto a chair as I gathered up my helmet.

“Good to meet you too,” I said, getting out of his way.

“Hmm,” he said, keying in some numbers.

“So,” I pressed, partly because I was annoyed, “got a hot date, then?”

“Not likely on Ulixis,” he sniffed.

“What? You don’t like furry chicks?” I remember jokes about the women of Ulixis, though I really only had a vague idea where the place was.

“Go away, Wardog, I’m working,” he said, waving his hand dismissively.

I considered shooting him in the back of the head, just on principle, then decided I’d rather not lose my bonus today. Squid didn’t take kindly to freelancing.

What would you ask Jesus? I was thinking about this the other day. Actually, I was thinking about what I would ask Aristotle if I could. What is the single most pressing question to which I would like to know the answer? And then I wondered what other people would do… and I realized that while there weren’t very many people with questions for Aristotle, there were probably an awful lot who would have questions for Jesus. And that made me think about what a singularly fascinating book that might make.

Anyhow, if you’re interested, send me no more than 500 words about the one single question that you would ask Jesus Christ if you had the chance. All I want to know is your age, your sex, and your religion or lack thereof. Please also explicitly grant me permission to include your question in the book in your email.

Attachments should be .rtf, .docx, or .odt. Single-spaced, no tabs, no formatting, and no more than 500 words. If I get at least 100 questions and they prove to be sufficiently varied and interesting, I’ll edit them and put them together. I’ll also contact a few well-known individuals and ask them to contribute a question.

Being assassinated once may be an accident. Being assassinated twice is enemy action.

Aeneas Tell of the House of Tell is one of the youngest Lords of Creation. His family rules the Nine Worlds through its control of the ultra-advanced technology that has permitted the colonization of the entire solar System. More gods than men, the Lords of Creation have cheated Death itself.

But even a quasi-immortal god will take exception to being assassinated. Twice. Especially when the assassin turns out to be a someone he thought was a friend.

SUPERLUMINARY is the latest and most outrageous creation of science fiction grandmaster John C. Wright, the Dragon-award winning author of THE UNWITHERING REALM, THE GOLDEN AGE, MOTH & COBWEB, and AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND. THE LORDS OF CREATION is the first book in the series.

Book Club subscribers, don’t go looking for your missing email. I’m waiting for something else to happen before I send out it out to you, most likely tomorrow. But go ahead and pick up THE LORDS OF CREATION today, you’ll still be eligible for the free book. It’s vintage John C. Wright, one part THE GOLDEN AGE, one part CITY BEYOND TIME, and one part science lecture delivered by a bio-physicist on acid.

Demon is such an ugly word.

Malach prefers “angelically-challenged”. After all, it’s not his fault that he was kicked out of Heaven.

And if you’ll just listen, he can explain everything.

GOD HATES ME: The Diary of an Ex-Angel is a smart, funny, and surprisingly moving tale of a demon who means well and would really like to figure out how to get back to Heaven one day. But how do you make a case for yourself when no one seems to care enough to listen?

The one thing you can’t say about Castalia House is that we’re too predictable. Richard Cain’s new book is… just a little different than you’d probably be expecting. It’s human history told through the perspective of a narcissist who never believes he is to blame for anything.

From the reviews:

• It’s a zippy tale, told in a lively style that gets the reader leaning into the narrative. It’s a quirky faux memoir like something we might read if C.S. Lewis’s Wormwood had corresponded with Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. A few sections made me honestly laugh aloud, something I never expected to happen when cracking a book about a fallen angel. It’s as if Frank Peretti actually had a sense of humor…as if Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins actually knew how to jettison the proselytizing, cut the brake lines, and just let the story run.
• Despite what the cover looks like, this isn’t a supernatural romance novel. No, it’s something much better. This is a story of a fallen angel seeking redemption. Unfortunately for him, every good deed he tries to accomplish ends up going awry.
• In the manner of The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, this book takes the reader inside the head of a fallen angel/demon. The perspective can be a bit troubling, as some of the more pointed passages about casual sins may hit too close to home for the reader. The author demonstrates considerable knowledge of the intricacies of the spiritual world as well as the foibles of the human psyche, upon which the demons prey.
• Overall an entertaining and quick read.

Lifesite profiles Moira Greyland’s autobiographical memoir:

The daughter of famed science fiction author Marion Zimmer Bradley has written an autobiographical account revealing the horrors of growing up in a home raised by LGBT parents who repeatedly sexually abused her and her brothers.

“I have heard all the customary protestations. ‘Your parents were evil because they were evil, not because they were gay,’ but I disagree,” writes Moira Greyland in her new book, The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon.

“The underlying problem is a philosophical one that is based on beliefs that are not only common to gay culture but to popular culture. And this is the central belief: All Sex is Always Right No Matter What,” she wrote.

“I had both biological parents in the home, but both refused to act like traditional parents,” writes Greyland. “I needed my father to protect me and to see me as a girl instead of refusing to protect me and seeing me as an amorphous nothing who competed with him for boys. I needed my mother to love me and hold me and comfort me instead of being a terrifying, angry dictator. Worse than that, I was expected to not want them to love me and protect me, or to act like normal parents. I was supposed to be happy that they were doing their own thing, no matter what they did to us.”

The Last Closet has been an Amazon bestseller for weeks as a Kindle e-book, and is scheduled to be published as a print book this month. Over one hundred readers have reviewed it, and virtually all have given it five stars.

The book recounts Greyland’s life with her mother, who was the author of The Mists of Avalon and many other famous works of science fiction and fantasy, and her father, Walter Breen, who was a world-renowned authority on numismatics. Both identified as “gay,” both abused drugs and were involved in occult practices, and both were pedophiles, Greyland says, a claim that has been confirmed by her only surviving brother.

Man people desperately want to believe homosexuals Are Just Like Everybody Else. But they are not. Just ask a policeman. Or ask a child of gay parents. Once an individual decides that he no longer has to abide by traditional morality because he has certain urges, it becomes considerably easier to violate even the most outrageous moral norms when he feels the need or even just the desire.

That doesn’t mean that gays can’t abide by traditional moral standards, or that all straights do, only that the probabilities observably differ. A gay man is 14 times more likely to abuse a child than a straight man. Even worse, gay priests are 198 times more likely to abuse children than straight men. One of the ugliest aspects of The Last Closet is the way in which Moira’s parents intellectually rationalized even their most abhorrent behavior. They were not unique in their ability to do that.

You can shriek “bigot” and “homophobe” if you like. But reality doesn’t care. No amount of denial will eliminate the logic, the probabilities, the statistics, or the pain of the abused children.

The Original Cyberpunk is giving it away today on Free Release Friday:

To celebrate the release of STUPEFYING STORIES #20, we’re giving away the Kindle edition FREE for the cost of a click—but only for the next 24 hours, beginning at Midnight tonight, West Coast time.

Tell your friends! Tell your family! Tell people you know who aren’t such good friends but still like to get free ebooks! Share the news!

But share it soon, because at midnight tomorrow night, this book goes back to normal price.

» DOWNLOAD ISSUE #20 RIGHT NOW

STUPEFYING STORIES #20 features the gut-grabbing cover story, “Zombie Like Me,” by Clancy Weeks, along with a terrific mix of fantasy, light horror, demons, abominations, vampires, old family secrets, very nasty little fairies, and Bo Balder’s remarkably strange but charming story, “Alien Whispering.” If nothing else, read “Endeavor to Dream on Broken Wings,” so you can someday tell people that you were reading AJ Finley before anyone else had heard of her.

CONTENTS:

• THEIR NOSTALGIA WILL BE VERY MUCH LIKE OUR NOSTALGIA • by Eric Cline
• HOW TO BUILD A TRAIN • by Brandon Kempner
• ENDEAVOR TO DREAM ON BROKEN WINGS • by AJ Finley
• PILES OF DUST AND BERRIES • by Sadie Bruce
• ALIEN WHISPERING • by Bo Balder
• LUCKY FIND • by Lance Young
• SECRET SEED • by Shannon Norland
• ZOMBIE LIKE ME • by Clancy Weeks