Tag: books

QUANTUM MORTIS: Steve’s perspective

Confession: I am a control freak. You can ask anyone, especially my wife and co-workers. If a project is to be done right and done on time, I want to do it solo and want it done my way. In the past few years I’ve been learning, albeit slowly, to give up some control when necessary. I took part in a collaborative writing effort with my fellow authors from Marcher Lord Press. We started up a fantasy story that took a couple months to write, with each of us contributing approximately a short to medium length chapter. While I did do the intro and set up the characters, it was freeing to adapt to other writers’ imagination as they took the plot in directions I hadn’t considered.

Also, having five books edited for publication makes one give up control incrementally. It’s either that or you get really pissed off every time the boss-man tells you this is how it’s going to be in your book. Which I sometimes still do. In early February I approached Vox about writing stories for the game he had in development for the world of Selenoth. After exchanging a few emails, Vox phoned me with a different idea: a co-writing project in which we would create a sci-fi murder mystery.

I was intrigued. Never done something like that before, which meant I was excited about the challenge. Vox already had the politics, planets and religions of a story universe sketched out. That appealed to me because it meant less work. It took me a week to brainstorm ideas and whip up a first chapter.

I had no idea how he’d receive the idea. In a phone conversation prior to emailing him that first chapter, I found out that our visions for the overall story had about 75 percent in common, without even consulting each other on details. That’s when the lightbulb lit and I told myself, “I can work with this guy.”

So I hunkered down and wrote long segments, and sent them to Vox on occasion. He would change it as he saw fit, and we often overlapped, with him sending revised sections as I closed in on the finale. I don’t think I argued with any of his changes because when he told me them I went, “Well, that’s way cool!”

My only pet peeve was that Vox preferred phone contact, and I’m an email guy. It’s a minor thing and I got over it, about halfway through the process, because most of our calls ended with clear direction for the story and characters. Took me six months to pound out Quantum Mortis, and Vox another month and a half to write his portions and put on the finishing touches. Not too shabby.

I still shake my head and wonder, “How on Earth did I write a novel and let someone else change it into a finished product that was still part mine, yet not the same thing I came up with?” The trick was not being wholly wedded to the characters and plot from the get go. Told myself,  “Relax. Have fun with the people, the places and especially the action . That way if things get rewritten or cut, it’s no big deal.”

And you know what? It wasn’t. The control freak had loosened his grip. Well, somewhat. Vox wasn’t too scary. I liked that our brains were on the same wavelength when it came to character development and blowing things up. We put together a great story, a hell of a fun thing to write, and hope you enjoy the result of our collaboration.

And yes, the second installment of Chief Graven Tower’s explosive investigations is well underway.
 – Steve Rzasa

QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted will be published on 2 December 2013 and will retail for $22.99 in hardcover and $4.99 in ebook.  You can preorder the hardcover and receive a free copy of the ebook for $14.99 if you do so before December 1st.

UPDATE: If you’re thinking of preordering, here is a little more incentive. The page count turned out to be higher than estimated, at 326 pages, so the retail price of the hardcover will be $22.99, not $19.99. The preorder price is still $14.99 and the ebook price will be $4.99.

Announcing QUANTUM MORTIS

About twelve years ago, not long after writing the short story “Medal for a Marine”, I started writing another short story. This one concerned the murder of a man in exile from his home planet. I didn’t get very far on it before setting it aside, in fact, I didn’t even make it to the actual murder. Nevertheless, I had a very clear picture of the murder, the SF setting, and the detective. Heavily influenced by Fifth Frontier War, the story was set in a futuristic world that was a combination of the Traveller universe and the Space Lords universe. I should probably explain that Space Lords was a 1997 attempt to design a science fiction MMO that was a thousand-year extrapolation from the worlds of Rebel Moon Rising. We never really did much more than discuss it with Microsoft in a desultory manner, but for the next 16 years, the design document sat untouched on a hard drive.

In early 2013, I happened to run across the fragment of the short story. Having almost completely forgotten about it, it read as if someone else had written it. I thought it compared rather well to most of the SF I’d read since then, (China Mieville and Neal Stephenson aside), but realized that with four more 850-page TAODAL novels to write, there was absolutely no way I was going to be able to get around to that SF world for at least another six years. So, I contacted one of the guys who had expressed interest in publishing a Selenoth-related story through First Sword and suggested that we collaborate on turning that story fragment into a SF mystery series.  Steve agreed, we wrote the novel together, and we are very pleased make the following announcement:

QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted will be published by Marcher Lord Hinterlands on December 2, 2013. It is 326 pages and will retail for $4.99 ebook and $22.99 hardcover. Those who preorder the hardcover by December 1st can do so for a discounted price of $14.99 and in addition to the hardcover will also receive a copy of QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted in either epub or mobi format (please specify) via email the day before release.

The independent planet of Rhysalan
provides contractual Sanctuary to 1,462 governments-in-exile. It is the
responsibility of the Military Crimes Investigation Division,
specifically, the Xenocriminology and Alien Relations department, to
keep a firm leash on the hundreds of thousands of xenos residing
on-planet. Assassinations, revolutions, civil wars, and attempted
planetary genocides are all in a day’s work for Chief Warrant Officer
Graven Tower, MCID-XAR.


In addition to a missile-armed aerovar,
his trusty Sphinx CPB-18, and MCID’s extremely liberal policies concerning
collateral damage and civilian casualties, Chief Tower is assisted by
his extreme xenophobia as well as a military-grade augmented machine
intelligence that believes it has found God. So when the
disintegrated remnants of the heir apparent of an alien royal house
are discovered on the streets of Trans Paradis, the question is not
so much whether the killers will eventually be found, but if
it is the criminals or the crime investigators who will contribute
more to the final body count. 

QUANTUM MORTIS is the new
action-packed Mil-SF mystery series from Vox Day, author of the epic
fantasy series The Arts of Dark and Light. Written with Steve
Rzasa, author of The Word Reclaimed, QUANTUM MORTIS A Man
Disrupted is the first novel in the series featuring Graven
Tower, MCID.

However, as it happens, there is more. Steve is an unusually fast writer, especially in comparison with me. So, while he was waiting for me to turn the first draft into a final draft, he decided to make use of the time to write a short story concerning another of Graven Tower’s murder investigations. One thing led to another and by the time we were done with QM:AMD, we had also completed a novella that stood up rather nicely on its own. Since releasing A Magic Broken in company with A Throne of Bones worked rather well, Marcher Lord didn’t see any reason to not adopt a similar approach in the science fiction arena.

So, we are pleased to announce that QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills will also be published on December 2, 2013. It is the equivalent of about 50 pages and will retail for $2.99 in ebook-only. As those familiar with Selenoth probably suspect, Gravity Kills will be enrolled in the Kindle Select program and will be periodically available for free download in 2014 as an introduction to the many worlds of Quantum Mortis.

Speaking of Amazon, I am looking for one more volunteer to read and review QM:GK. If you are interested doing so and expect to be able to read one of the ebooks by December 2nd and post a review on Amazon, please send me an email with QM:GK in the subject and specify if you prefer epub or mobi.

UPDATE: Steve has also announced the book on his blog. If you would like to ask him anything about it, I would encourage you to do so there.

The final translation

My favorite translator, William Weaver, has died at 90:

Deft in handling a variety of writing styles, from Calvino’s delicacy of language to Mr. Eco’s show-offy erudition, Mr. Weaver was prolific. He translated dozens of books, a dozen by Calvino alone, including “Invisible Cities,” which posits descriptive and philosophical conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, and a collection of short stories, “Cosmicomics,” for which Mr. Weaver won a National Book Award for translation in 1969….

Even a partial list of the writers Mr. Weaver translated — which includes Alberto Moravia, Eugenio Montale, Oriana Fallaci, Ugo Moretti, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Italo Svevo — is, as Mr. Botstein wrote, “nothing short of astonishing.”

Mr. Weaver talked about his work in a 2000 interview in The Paris Review. “Some of the hardest things to translate into English from Italian are not great big words, such as you find in Eco, but perfectly simple things, buon giorno for instance,” he said. “How to translate that? We don’t say ‘good day,’ except in Australia. It has to be translated ‘good morning,’ or ‘good evening,’ or ‘good afternoon’ or ‘hello.’

“You have to know not only the time of day the scene is taking place, but also in which part of Italy it’s taking place,” he continued, “because in some places they start saying buona sera — ‘good evening’ — at 1 p.m. The minute they get up from the luncheon table it’s evening for them. So someone could say buona sera, but you can’t translate it as ‘good evening’ because the scene is taking place at 3 p.m. You need to know the language, but, even more, the life of the country.”

What an epic and productive literary career. I think my next fiction read will have to be one of his translations of Eco or Calvino. That being said, having required several days and multiple consultations of dictionaries and native speakers alike to puzzle out a single Italian word coined by Eco, (celodurismo, in this case), I find it very difficult to accept that the simple words are harder.

Then again, I suppose it’s a lot easier when you can actually ask the great man what he was thinking when he coined it.

Three free ebooks

I had a few Kindle Select days that were about to become unusable, so AMB is free today. Only the text version, however, not the audiobook.  And as I belatedly discovered, The Wardog’s Coin and The Last Witchking are also free today. This may be considered a harbinger of an announcement to come next week.

In case you missed it the other day, you may want to check out the custom Vox Popoli toolbar. I’ve found it to be unexpectedly useful for searching this blog as well as rapidly switching between the recent posts for commenting purposes. I need to create some new icons for the Games, Books, and Daily section, but it will automatically update when I get around to it.

Man up and read chick-lit

It’s always fascinating to watch a gamma male attempt to utilize female shaming tactics on other men. It’s not only that it can’t possibly work, but that it’s done so ineptly:

Last week I suggested it may be time to disband Britain’s Orange Prize, which is restricted to female authors, on the grounds that since only women buy and read books nowadays all literature is by definition “women’s literature” and the need for the prize is therefore obsolete.

I was kidding (sort of), but my larger point — men do not read — is not disputed by anyone. Study after study proves that men account for less than 20 percent of the book market in England, the U.S. and Canada. This fact no longer in dispute, the only question becomes why don’t men read? Why do they choose to forego Twain’s “advantage?”

It turns out that the whole problem is — you guessed it! — women’s fault. At least that’s the answer if you ask the few guys who actually do read books, especially if they happen to be writers themselves, or worked at some point in the publishing industry.

Take Jason Pinter, for example, writing at the Huffington Post. A thriller writer who used to work in publishing, he argues that men actually do read. The notion they don’t is a self-fulfilling prophecy: “[P]ublishers rarely publish for men and don’t market towards men,” he writes.

“Nobody can deny the fact that most editorial meetings tend to be dominated by women,” Pinder writes. “Saying the ratio is 75/25 is not overstating things. So needless to say when a male editor pitches a book aimed at men, there are perilously few men to read it and give their opinions.”

Will Weaver, who writes young adult books, goes further, blaming not only publishing but our entire culture. Also at the Huffington Post, his indictment is much the same as Pinder’s, though. He describes going to Manhattan bookstore, where the Teen Section, all flowery and fem, contained 275 books for girls and a handful of fantasy titles for boys.

“The bias against boy books in publishing has gotten so bad nowadays that my editor now reads manuscripts, he confessed, with an eye toward ‘re-gendering,’” Weaver writes. “That is, ‘I sort of like this novel but what if the main character were a girl instead of a boy?’”

I’ll grant Weaver has a point about the need for more effort to attract boys to reading, and I’ll give Pinder props for writing respectfully of women in publishing. His critique is institutional.

Still, these writers (and others before them, like Stephen King or Chris Goldberg), however sensitive and reasonable they may be, come down ultimately to this: Publishing has been feminized, nothing is marketed to men. In other words, it’s no our fault if we don’t read. It’s the women. Again.

As a man who has read all his life, I find this faintly patronizing and more than a little insulting. I have to be marketed to before I can turn off the TV or the video game and read a book? Geez, Mom, is my bottle warm yet? I’m hungry.

These arguments ignore that women not only read all the chicklit — female readers dominate the categories I would consider male-centric, like espionage/thriller (69 percent), mystery/detective (86 percent), science fiction (52 percent). That’s according to a 2000 study — the figures may be worse today.

Given the surprising note of whining in these masculine essays, I’ve come to the conclusion that men don’t read because — well, because they aren’t men. They’re spoiled little crybabies,  and adolescents who refuse to grow up.

How, one wonders, does a disinclination to read what women like to read – which is to say books like The Hunger Games, Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey, and the current NYT bestseller, Dear Life, by Alice Munro, which features stories such as this one: “A young woman ventures to a remote area to assume teaching duties in a
TB sanitarium, soon entering into a dismal relationship with the head
doctor” – somehow translate into being a spoiled little crybaby or an adolescent?

Then again, what Real Man wouldn’t want to read about a young woman having a relationship with the head doctor!  Spicy! As for Just One Evil Act, by Elizabeth George, we are informed that it is a “riveting tale of love, passion, and betrayal” concerning the disappearance of a nine-year-old girl named Hadiyyah. Riveting! Only a child-man could possibly fail to be fascinated by the prospect of such heart-pounding suspense!

Now, I read a lot more than most men or women do. A few of my favorite authors happen to be women. I think rather well of Murasaki Shikibu, Dorothy Sayers, Susan Cooper, Tanith Lee, and Teresa Edgerton. But the thing is, those female authors don’t write conventional romance crap, and if they do happen to exhibit the female tendency to insert some sort of a romantic angle into everything, at least they don’t permit it to dominate the story.

I now have zero – ZERO – interest in the vast majority of what presently passes for science fiction and mystery. Not because I dislike the genres, but because I dislike what the women who undeniably dominate the publishing industry insist on publishing as “science fiction” and “mystery”. And as a writer, I can say from direct personal influence that no matter how good the book is, or how significant its potential, if the book doesn’t “speak to me”, as one editor said, it’s simply not going to be published.

And guess what sort of books don’t speak to the sort of women who work in publishing? The very sort of books that men most prefer to read, which is books that reflect masculine perspectives and honor masculine virtues.

So who is to blame for the fact that most men have quit reading? The answer is obvious: whoever is responsible for refusing to publish the sort of books that men used to read.

Published may not mean printed

It should be fascinating to learn how the forward-thinkers at the SFWA, whose two most recent presidents have staunchly and repeatedly denied that there was any need for authors to be concerned about imminent changes in the publishing industry related to ebooks, deal with the news that the major publishers appear to be moving away from contractually obligating themselves to release print versions of the books they publish:

The idea that any standard deal from a major
publisher guarantees a print format release—which was previously a
foregone conclusion—is something agents no longer take for granted, with
some expressing concern that the big houses are starting to hedge on
print editions in contracts.

While e-book-only
agreements are nothing new—all large publishers have imprints that are
exclusively dedicated to digital titles—a handful of agents, all of whom
spoke to PW on the condition of anonymity, said they’re worried that
contracts from print-first imprints will increasingly come with clauses
indicating that the publisher makes no guarantee on format. The agents
say this is a new twist to the standard way of doing business….

One of the difficulties with reporting on changes
to book publishing contracts is that all new contracts, as Applebaum
rightly noted, are open to negotiation. However, there are standards of
doing business, and the agents speaking out said they feared that if
vague language about format begins to crop up on a regular basis, they
will need to start advocating for a format they were universally
guaranteed in the past.

Despite their dismay,
agents and other insiders who spoke to PW said they were not necessarily
surprised by the move, given the current marketplace. There is growing
pressure on publishers to release books quickly, and to do so in the
formats that will bring in the most revenue. Because so many book deals
are made well in advance of the titles’ release dates, publishers have
always had to gauge the future relevancy of topics and authors. Now
publishers also have to attempt to anticipate the future
bricks-and-mortar landscape when signing contracts. As some insiders
explained, it’s a very different situation when the question goes from,
“How many copies will Barnes & Noble take?” to “Will Barnes &
Noble be around?”

Considering how McRapey had a complete meltdown when Random House established its digital-only imprints, it should be deeply amusing to see his reaction when this starts happening, to say nothing of the rampant panic amidst the less successful SF/F authors, as they will not only be limited to trivial advances, they won’t even be able to point to their print books to differentiate themselves from the self-published ebook authors anymore.

The fact is that print books don’t really make much economic sense anymore. There is too much risk attached to them given the rules of the distribution system. I think this will most affect paperbacks, particularly trade paperbacks. There will always be a small percentage of book lovers who demand hardbacks, but if I’m a publisher who faces the possibility of eating some 5,000 paperback returns, why take that risk?

Take ATOB, for example. I’ve sold 15x more ebooks than hardcovers, and that is to a group of unusually book-friendly readers who are disproportionately inclined to buy my books. I’ll continue making the hardcovers available, (because, let’s face it, the monsters do look well on the shelf), but they are a sideshow, they are not the primary product.

Perhaps more importantly, as the authors of the article noted, once Barnes & Noble goes down, there won’t be a large enough retail market to make it worth their while producing print books for it. It may be another year or two before the publishers make the leap, but don’t be surprised if they do so sooner than that, given the growing financial, competitive, and distribution-related pressures on them.

A Magic Broken in audiobook

I am very, very pleased to announce that A MAGIC BROKEN is finally available in audiobook. Narrated by Nick Afka Thomas, it is one hour and 45 minutes long and Amazon is selling it for $6.08. If you would like to hear a sample of it, you can do so at Amazon or download a sample.

Nick is already hard at work recording THE WARDOG’S COIN, and if there proves to be sufficient interest in the audiobooks, afterwards he will begin the yeoman’s task of narrating A THRONE OF BONES.

I’m quite happy with Nick’s work and I was surprised to find that I even prefer his voice to Roy Dotrice’s, the highly regarded narrator of George R.R. Martin’s work. It’s a very different approach, and a more subtle one that I find both less jarring and easier to understand.

If you’re an Audible member, I think you may even be able to download it for free.

Mailvox: The Hydrogen Sonata

TT notices what I’ve been reading recently and has a question or two:

A couple of years ago I tripped across Iain Banks’ Culture series and fell in love with it.  I used Player of Games as the gateway to get my friends hooked. I was greatly saddened by Banks’ far too premature death.

Have you read the others in the series?  Are you enjoying the Hydrogen Sonata?

But for the consciousness uploading, I think we’re getting close to the technology that could create the Culture.  Or, at least, put an end to want.  That idea really excites me. What are your thoughts on the subject?

I have read most of the others in the series. While I quite like the concept of the sonata and I found it initially intriguing, the book itself has thus far proved to be remarkably tedious. Part of the problem is that the central plot device, which is the Subliming of the non-Culture race, is almost totally uninteresting to the reader; with precisely one exception that I will not mention for spoiler reasons, there is literally no reason why he should care about it one way or another. That being said, I’m only halfway-through it, so I cannot honestly say that I have an opinion on it until I finish the book.

The problem with the Culture series is the same problem that Star Trek has faced for decades. First, imagine that all the Earth’s problems are solved! Okay… so now what?

The answer, apparently, is to go outside the area in which the problems are solved and then recreate those old problems using new and different cultures to take the place of the divisions inside the amalgamated culture. What this represents is a failure of the imagination; neither Banks nor Roddenberry were ever able to actually present a credible future of the sort they were nominally envisioning.

It’s remarkable how much war and violence there is in these officially peaceful cultures, is there not? Why, it’s almost as if the alternative it literally too boring to imagine!

Because he was considerably more talented and imaginative than Roddenberry and his heirs at the helm of the Star Trek franchise, Banks’s Culture feels much more rationally credible than Roddenberry’s UN Stormtroopers in Space nonsense, but it is still, at the end of the day, an artistic and imaginative failure. In fact, it is a testament to the man’s skill as a science fiction writer that he managed to make such a comprehensive failure so interesting.

As for the potential end of want, I have been thinking about that a lot lately and will reserve my thoughts on the matter for a future post. Post-scarcity economics is a fascinating topic, but I would not consider the Culture to be a serious take on it for reasons that should be discernible in light of what I have written above.

Congratulations are in order

Jill is rather pleased with her new cover for her book Anna and the Dragon. She writes: “Check out the book cover [JartStar] made for me. I think it’s beautiful.”

It is, indeed, an unusually pretty cover. I particularly like the rich colors and the ur-Celtic pattern underneath the dragon. And, let’s face it, who doesn’t like slender redheads?

So congratulations to her, and congratulations to JartStar as well. It’s always good to see readers collaborating in such a productive and mutually beneficial manner. There is a lot of talent here, so whether you’re looking for a writer, an artist, a programmer, a physicist, a lawyer, or any number of other specialties, it might surprise you what can be found here.

I am, of course, always available for consultations concerning gratuitous cruelty, should my own artistic services ever be required. “Look to Wowbagger” will probably be the title of my autobiography.

Top 10 novels list

It’s hard to distinguish between great novels and great novelists. There are those who are great due to their ability to consistently deliver very good novels, but never write a truly great novel. And then there are those who wrote one great novel and never again approached such heights.  Regardless, in this list, I’m again applying the one book per author rule.

There are almost certainly books that belong on this list that are not there, but because this is my personal list, only novels that I have read are included.

  1. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
  2. Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco
  3. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  4. The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu
  5. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
  6. The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse
  7. If On a Winter’s Night A Traveler, Italo Calvino
  8. Watership Down, Richard Adams
  9. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
  10. The Code of the Woosters, P.G. Wodehouse

I understand it is customary to put James Joyce first and I have read three of his books. Ulysses, in particular, is a grand achievement, but it fails in the primary purpose of the novel, which is to entertain. In my opinion, it is a work of great technical virtuosity rather than great literature; to give it pride of place here would be akin to declaring that an extended guitar solo was the greatest rock song.  In contrast, the literary pyrotechnics of Calvino do not substitute for the entertainment aspect, they have the effect of enhancing the reader’s pleasure.

The Tale of Genji is massively underrated in the West, both as entertainment and as a historic literary achievement. It is quite possibly the first true novel and it is the most alien fiction you can possibly read, given the temporal and cultural distance between the reader and the author, an imperial lady-in-waiting of the Heian court circa 995.

Umberto Eco is fantastic in English, and he’s even more spectacular in Italian. In fact, one of the reasons I learned Italian was so that I could read him in the original. (Always intended to read Hesse in German as well, but I never got to quite that level.) Perhaps my subscription to the conspiracy theory of history is one reason I rate Foucault’s Pendulum so highly, but I stand firmly by my high regard for Eco. Everything he writes is excellent, even the nostalgic, self-indulgent The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.

If there is a theme concerning what I consider greatness in literature, it is the novel’s depth of commentary on the human condition. I value substantive thoughts on this matter much more highly than mere technical prose mastery. Others may disagree, and some will no doubt find my preferences indicative of my own limitations, but of the books on the list, only Calvino, and to a lesser extent, Wodehouse, can be reasonably described as a true masters of style.

The inclusion of The Code of the Woosters is perhaps the most dubious proposition on the list. I’m including it because Wodehouse delved much more deeply into human psychology than a superficial glance at his light-hearted, endlessly amusing work would indicate, because it is one of the few Wodehouse novels that has some political bite to it, and because humor is far and away the most difficult kind of fiction to pull off. I admit, however, that one could reasonably cite Wodehouse as an example of the great novelist sans a truly great novel. But in my opinion, his only serious rival as the greatest humorous writer in history is Douglas Adams.