Fiction Friday: 5/11/12

For today’s Fiction Friday, I have a graphic novel adaptation, a novel that mixes gambling with magic, and a cyberpunk short story.

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath & Other Stories

I have mentioned it more than once before, so now it is time for my full review of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath & Other Stories, Jason Bradley Thompson’s adaptation of dream-related stories by H.P. Lovecraft. I was very excited to get my hands on this graphic novel and it certainly lived up to my expectations.

Immediately inside the cover is a wonderful map of H.P. Lovecraft’s dream realms that I am tempted to use as the basis of the next RPG I run (someday, someday). This is followed by the short stories “The White Ship,” “Celephais,”, and “The Strange High House in the Mist,” and the main attraction, “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.”

The illustration is black and white and intricately detailed, with each panel filled to the brim with details both mundane and fantastic. Each story except for “Strange High House” involves the main character entering the dream realms. Once there, the dreamer is represented as a simplistic “mock man,” a simplistic, cartoony character with a large flat face, expressive eyes, and knobbed sticks for hands and feet. This is a neat way to set the dreamer apart from the fantastic world they are adventuring in; at a glance, you always know where the dreamer is in any given panel.

Jason’s architecture is a strong point. His dream realms are filled with incredible, gargantuan cities with building stacked upon building, spires, statues, domes, minarets, and residences both grand and decrepit. Likewise, the inhabitants of the dream realm are well thought-out and -depicted, from ordinary human inhabitants to divine and semi-divine beings to the slimy-faced, turbaned merchants whose wide, crooked-lipped smile succeeds in evoking menace and disgust. There are also monsters galore, with ghouls, gugs, night-gaunts, and plenty of tentacled, slobbering nightmare creatures.  And let’s not forget the cats. I’m a sucker for well-drawn talking cats, and the adventurous kitties in these pages add just the right light touch to some dark proceedings.

I think the best parts of the GN are when Jason is filling in background details that are not part of the original text, for here you can really see his imagination at work and how he did not skimp on any page. There is a two-page spread (pgs 20-21) of Kuranes searching for the dream-city Celephais that includes panels of him searching through industrial-looking wreckage, having tea with a dragon, speaking to birds big and small, fleeing monsters up a spiral staircase, and standing on a flying carpet, to name a few of the scenes, all on a page that evokes a Candyland-ish journey through the dream realms. In the center of the page is the actual human dreamer, at the same time asleep in bed and part of a mountainous landscape. Some of these scenes are suggested in the original text, but most are not. It shows the care with which Jason decided when to narrate straight from the stories, and when he let the art speak for itself.

To sum up: great art and a wonderful adaptation of some classic H.P. Lovecraft stories: what more could you ask for?

Vegas Knights

Matt Forbeck’s Vegas Knights is a book I had to read once I saw its premise of magic users in Las Vegas, because it’s a story that’s been plaguing my mind ever since I first drove away from the city of sin with no money in my pockets. With each visit, I would entertain the same daydream: What if I could have used magic to tilt the odds in my favor? Vegas Knights answers that question.

It is the story of Jackson and Bill, two college students who have learned enough magic to get themselves in trouble with it, and who decide to make some money at the blackjack table by using their magic to make sure they are dealt the cards they need. Whenever I thought of writing this story, I would get stuck at the next logical point: if you can use magic to cheat in Vegas, you can be sure that the casinos use magic, too, and they won’t look kindly on your activities when they catch you. Needless to say, Matt did not let that be a sticking point; rather it is the starting point for Jackson and Bill’s excellent adventure. The story spirals out from there as these two college boys experience the highs and lows of Vegas life and learn what’s underneath the surface and who’s really in charge of Vegas.

Vegas Knights ends up being a fun adventure story with a surprisingly personal through-line for one of the main characters. I tore through it and had a good time. It is available from the usual e-tailers, or you can buy a DRM-free version from the publisher, Angry Robot.

Love in a Time of Bio-mal by Colum Paget

This dystopian, cyberpunk short story is a fractured tale of a tempestuous relationship, set against the backdrop of a world in which neuro-bio-warfare has ravaged the land. The rich live behind hermetically-sealed walls, while the poorest suffer the worst after-effects of the war, such as rogue bio-mal that can make you age prematurely. The narrator has lost his place in the higher ranks of the society, and with it, the woman who was using him to climb the social ladder. The story starts with an emotional punch as we see the lengths the narrator is willing to go in order to win back his former love, and it does not let up from there.

I enjoyed the whole story, especially the bits about rogue Artificial Intelligence, which I won’t ruin for you by getting into here. Love in a Time of Bio-mal can be found in Electric Spec, Volume 7, Issue 1. Links to more stories can be found at Colum’s blog, The Singularity Sucks.

Diane Duane E-Book Sale

There is a 60% sale on Diane Duane and Peter Morwood’s e-books at their website. It started on 5/8/12 and is going to run until an unspecified time. Their books are DRM-free and you can’t beat this deal. I highly recommend the So You Want to Be a Wizard books.

Up Next on Lithicbee

Sunday: Part Thirteen of The Only City Left. Will the secrets of Allin’s family history be revealed at last? Was the werewolf ghost who was chasing him really his Uncle? Be here on Sunday for Allin Arcady’s adventures through a planet-sized city called Earth!

Webcomics Wednesday: This time around I’ll be focusing on webcomics that sell digital issues you can read on your tablet.

Kickstarter Fiction: 4/20/12

Okay, so even though I posted a flash fiction story yesterday to meet a deadline, I still want to have a Friday post. It just feels right. Luckily, there is plenty to discuss in the realm of Kickstarter Fiction, aka The Place Where My Money Goes.

The first thing I should mention is that science-fiction author John Scalzi has opened up a forum on his website where people can post pitches for their crowd-funding projects. He reports that he has up to 50,000 daily visitors, so this could be quite a marketing tool to match up projects with those looking to spend their disposable income.

Next, I would like to say “Congrats!” to the Tales of the Emerald Serpent team for their successful project. As I mentioned before, this is a fantasy shared world anthology, which is pretty much all they needed to tell me to get me to pledge.

Speaking of shared worlds, check out Have Blaster, Will Travel: A Bulldogs! Story Anthology. Like Tales of the Emerald Serpent, these stories are based on an RPG, but this one is billed as “sci-fi that kicks ass.” From the project page: “Have Blaster, Will Travel is an anthology of space opera adventure that follows the Bulldogs, people who signed on with the TransGalaxy interstellar shipping company to run away from the law, the criminals they offended, or a past that haunts them. Inspired by Firefly, Star Wars, and lots of other b-movie sci-fi, Bulldogs tells the stories of those who are desperate enough to take a job hauling volatile and hazardous cargo to the most dangerous places in the galaxy.” Sounds like fun, and very tempting…

I hardly need mention this next project since I have seen it talked about all over the place already, but since I overlooked it in the previous Kickstarter Fiction post, let me redress that wrong here. Tim Byrd has a series of young adult pulp adventure novels starring Doc Wilde and family. It has already surpassed its goal, but with over a week to go, you still have time to get in on the pulp goodness. You can find a sample of the first book here. Doc Wilde is over the top, more perfect than perfect, but this is the exactly the sort of adventure I enjoyed reading as a kid, and since I haven’t really grown up, it is another tempting possibility.

And speaking of pulp goodness, Spirit of the Century Presents: The Dinocalypse Trilogy is now even more of an amazing deal. As of this writing, you can get 7 ebooks and 2 RPG PDFs for $10. Remember, there are psychic dinosaurs, kung fu detectives, and an ape on Mars. Words fail me. If you have not pledged, do so now; the project ends on Sunday.

Sigh. I was going to make a disclaimer at the top of this post about how I am not necessarily backing each project just because I mention it, but writing about the projects made me excited and so I added Have Blaster and Doc Wilde to my list of backed projects. (I already had Dinocalypse, of course!) Don’t tell my wife, okay?

E-Books: Frank Herbert

There was a time, after I had devoured all the Dune books, that I read as many of Frank Herbert’s other books as I could find. Lately, I’ve been getting a hankering to re-read some of his non-Dune works, and read some for the first time that I never got to (such as the 2nd-4th books in the Pandora series). Now, as I may or may not have mentioned before, I have moved seven times in the past ten years. On the second-to-last move, I couldn’t take it anymore. I decided I had way too many books, and I donated them to the local library (not without a lump in my throat, let me tell you). Point being, this included all of my Frank Herbert novels.

Now that I want to re-read some of them, it’s time to see what Frank Herbert e-books are available in this new digital age. And for a change, the selection is actually very good (although the prices are all over the place). Here is a list of what is available on Amazon, based on this bibliography from Wikipedia. All prices listed are current as of 4/9/12 and are subject to change. (Tip: As always, the quality of e-books varies wildly. If you buy a book from Amazon and you find the formatting or scanning errors are too much for you to want to read it, you have seven days to return it for your money back. I have had to do this.)

Dune Novels:

1. Dune: $15 and rife with scanning errors according to reviews on Amazon.
2. Dune Messiah: $8.
3. Children of Dune: $8.
4. God Emperor of Dune: $8.
5. Heretics of Dune: $8.
6. Chapterhouse: Dune: $8.

WorShip aka Pandora Novels: The first two books in the series have been released as e-books by Kevin Anderson’s WordFire Press. Note: Books 2-4 are co-authored with Bill Ransom.

1. Destination: Void: $5.
2. The Jesus Incident: $5.
3. The Lazarus Effect: not yet available as an e-book, but as of 4/6/12, Kevin Anderson reports that the e-books are in the works and should be available in a few weeks.
4. The Ascension Factor: same as The Lazarus Effect.

ConSentient Novels

1. Whipping Star: $10.
2. The Dosadi Experiment: $8.

Other novels:

The Dragon in the Sea: $10.
The Green Brain: $7.
The Eyes of Heisenberg: $7.
The Heaven Makers: $5.
The Santaroga Barrier: Not available.
Soul Catcher: Not available.
The Godmakers: Not available.
Hellstrom’s Hive: $10.
Direct Descent: $5.
The White Plague: $10.
Man of Two Worlds (with Bill Herbert): $5.

WordFire Press also recently released a previously unpublished Frank Herbert novel called High-Opp which sounds interesting and timely, in that it is about class warfare between the lucky few rich and the majority oppressed. It is $5 at Amazon. (Note: All of the WordFire Press re-releases are $5. Thank you to Kevin J. Anderson and crew for selling these books at a reasonable price.)

Kickstarter Fiction: 3/30/12

It hasn’t worked out that way recently, but I’m trying to keep Friday as a sort of grab bag post between Webcomics Wednesdays and installments of The Only City Left on Sunday. So here is where you might read about webzines, e-books, philosophical ramblings, or whatever I happen to be researching at the moment. These are the posts that most feel like I am writing into the void, but every once in a while someone’s Google search brings them here, and hopefully one or two people enjoy what they find.

Today I want to share three Kickstarter fiction projects that I am backing. Why am I backing independent publishers instead of (or in addition to) buying the latest thriller from Amazon? As a writer, I am fascinated by the possibility of independent publishing. I see in it the possibility for a lot of new authors to make their name, and dare I hope, make a living, outside of the big publishing houses. Time will tell. In the meantime, it is fun to be a part of these ventures.

Spirit of the Century Presents: The Dinocalypse Trilogy: This Kickstarter is for a series of novels based on an RPG setting I am not familiar with, but it sounds like a blast. 1930s-era pulp adventure with psychic dinosaurs, talking apes, jetpacks, and heroes with names like Sally Slick and Jet Black? Yes, please. I am going in for the e-books, which at this point is up to four books with the possibility of more if the funding total rises high enough.

Tales of the Emerald Serpent: Shared World Mosaic Anthology: Thieves’ World is one of my favorite series, and I followed a lot of the authors from that anthology back to their own books and also to other anthologies like C.J. Cherryh’s Merovingen Nights. I am definitely a fan of a well-done shared-world anthology. Since this project references Thieves’ World and other anthologies I have dabbled in, like the Man-Kzin Wars, I have high hopes that it can be as fun to read as those anthologies of yore. The only writer on the book that I have read before is Julie Czerneda, whose books I have enjoyed, so this seems like a great way to find new authors.

As of the time I am writing this post (Tuesday! Look at me, building up that buffer again), the project is 43% funded with 22 days to go.

Singularity & Co. – Save the SciFi!: This project is a little different than the previous two as it is not for new works of fiction, but rather a way to save older works of science-fiction from obscurity and copyright limbo. Here’s their plan: “Each month we’ll choose one great classic, obscure or otherwise fascinating sci-fi book that’s no longer in print and not available online, track down the copyright holder and/or author (if they’re still around), acquire or otherwise clear the copyright, and publish the title both online and as an e-book, for little or no cost.”

I have run into so many books that I cannot find as e-books, so I really appreciate the premise of this Kickstarter. While there is no guarantee the books I have looked for will show up here, I still think it is a great idea and a worthy project.

Are there any Kickstarter fiction/comics/video game projects you think I should check out? Let me know.

Update: More Kickstarter fiction projects and/or updates here.

Diane Duane E-Books

I still get visits from Google searches for some variant of “C.J. Cherryh e-books,” which reminds me that one of the reasons I started this blog was to collect links to authors’ e-books. So for my second post in the series I am going to discuss science-fiction and fantasy novelist Diane Duane.

I first discovered Diane Duane through the Thieves’ World series (much the same as how I found Ms. Cherryh!). The first two books of the Thieves’ World series are collected into one e-book, Thieves’ World: First Blood, but Ms. Duane did not contribute to the series until the sixth book and I will probably do a whole post on Thieves’ World at some point, so… moving on!

At some point I got a Science Fiction Book Club omnibus edition of the first three books in Ms. Duane’s Young Wizards series: So You Want to Be a Wizard, Deep Wizardry, and High Wizardry. The first book is about a young girl named Nita who lives on Long Island, is frequently bullied, and who ends up becoming a wizard along with new friend Kit. As a young boy who lived on Long Island, was frequently bullied, and who wouldn’t have minded becoming a wizard, So You Want to Be a Wizard quickly became one of my favorite books. I have owned it in that original SFBC version, a 5-in-1 SFBC version, a paperback, and now an e-book version.

I re-read So You Want to Be a Wizard this week and although I am not that child anymore who discovered the book for the first time, I still enjoyed reading the book. These books are about magic and wizards, but it is a very science-fiction-based magic system, and the wizards are more like computer programmers who have access to the code that the universe runs on (known as the Speech in the books). Change the code, change the universe. Their job as wizards is to keep the universe running and slow down its eventual heat-death. It is a neat concept and a little different from what you would expect in a book about wizards.

The Young Wizards series is available from Diane Duane’s website, where you can buy it direct from the site or from links to the major e-book sellers out there. What’s interesting is that there are separate links for buyers from the U.S.A., from Canada, and for international (non-North American) buyers. I actually purchased the international versions even though I reside in the U.S.A. because you can purchase those directly from Ms. Duane’s site and because they are DRM-free. So when I opened So You Want to Be a Wizard and saw that it didn’t have chapter breaks (the lack of which is a pet peeve of mine), I was able to open it up in Calibre, convert it to an epub, add the chapter breaks in Sigil, and convert it back to a mobi for my Kindle. I know not everyone wants or needs this freedom, but for me it is nice.

Ms. Duane’s website also has links to her Middle Kingdoms series (The Door into Fire, The Door into Shadow, The Door into Sunset), Feline Wizards series (The Book of Night with Moon, To Visit the Queen), the stand-alone novel Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses, and the short story collection Uptown Local and Other Interventions. There is also one book, A Wind from the South, that is advertised in a sidebar only and so might be-overlooked; according to Ms. Duane’s Wikipedia entry, this book is previously unpublished and was released as an e-book only.

Amazon has more of Ms. Duane’s books available than she lists on her web site, mostly in the Star Trek universe and in a series of Young Adult books called Tom Clancy’s Net Force of which I am wholly unfamiliar. The full list of her available books on Amazon is here; just select Kindle Edition to see e-books only.

Looking over all the e-books that are available, I can only think, “Why haven’t I read so many of these books?” I think I fell out of touch with Ms. Duane’s books somewhere along the way. Maybe once I left young-adulthood, I was less inclined to read these tales. I recently purchased all nine Young Wizards books from her site and I am looking forward to re-reading the first five or six (I can’t remember if I read the sixth book yet) and reading the rest for the first time. I have a feeling that after that I will be returning to Ms. Duane’s site to check out her other books. It’s never too late to be a kid (or young adult) again.

(Note: In researching authors’ e-book availability, I focus on what books, if any, the author has available for download on their own site or their site of choice, and what Amazon has available. Since I don’t own a Nook or a Sony Reader, I don’t check the availability on those sites anymore, although it is usually a mirror of what is available on Amazon.)

C.J. Cherryh E-Books (Updated with Good News)

This post is an update to my 8/30/11 post about which C.J. Cherryh e-books are available.

Since that time, books 1 and 10 of the Foreigner series have been added to the Kindle Store on Amazon.com, while books 2-6 are still MIA. Also, Alternate Realities is also available for the Kindle now, and is a great deal at only $7.99 for the three-book collection. (Most of the books available are priced at $7.99, which is nice.)

Despite the books that are on Amazon or on the author’s own Closed Circle website, there remains a gaping hole in Cherryh’s bibliography for those of us hoping to port our physical book collection into the digital world.

I e-mailed Ms. Cherryh to ask about these “missing” books and her thoughts on e-books in general. She kindly replied and here is what I learned.

There are indeed plans to release more of her books, both on Amazon (and other such websites), and the Closed Circle site. Per Ms. Cherryh: “I had some rights to part of Foreigner; DAW and I conferred, traded, and now you’ll be seeing more DAW e-books on Amazon et al., and some of my earlier non-series works on Closed Circle.” She describes the process of converting her physical books into e-books as “practically a comma by comma revision process into CSS” and not just a matter of scanning pages. This gives me some comfort because there is nothing worse than buying an e-book and realizing it is a scan-and-sell job (although when this has happened to me, Amazon has been excellent about giving me a refund).

Finally, I asked Ms. Cherryh about her feelings toward e-books in general and whether she sees the conversion of her books as a positive thing. She replied, “Change is [positive]. It was bound to happen. Piracy is a problem–but it’s a funny thing: people who understand the point of my books and like what I write are not thieves and do not have the mindset of thieves, and when they’ve gotten a pirated copy not knowing there was a problem, they’ve kindly come to Closed Circle and dropped a donation in the bucket.”

So, more C.J. Cherryh books are on the way, and Book 13 in the Foreigner series is set to be released on 3/6/12 (which should give me time to re-read the last few books to get back into the atevi-human mindset). Good news for fans of Ms. Cherryh’s works!

4/1/12 update: Per Ms. Cherryh’s website, she is close to adding Chernevog and Yvgenie to the Closed Circle site, with major changes made to Yvgenie.

C.J. Cherryh E-Books

If you are a C.J. Cherryh fan and want to read her books on your Kindle, nook, iPad or other e-reader, the pickings are slim. On Amazon, there is little rhyme or reason as to what is available. On the science-fiction side, books 7,8,9, 11, and 12 of her Foreigner series are up, with book 13 available for pre-order, but 1-6 and 10 are not there, so hold on to your hard copies. (It looks like book 10, Conspirator, should be available, but it is not showing up for me.) The two books of the Hanan Rebellion, Brothers of Earth and Hunter of Worlds, are available in one volume, At the Edge of Space. Hammerfall and Forge of Heaven, the two books of the Gene Wars, are also available.

On the fantasy side, all five books of her Fortress series are available.

It is nice that these books are available on Amazon, but it does leave a gaping hole in Cherryh’s bibliography as far as e-books go.

A few more e-books are available on the Closed Circle, which is the online presence for authors Lynn Abbey, C.J. Cherryh, and Jane Fancher. It appears to be intermittently updated but it is still alive, with the most current post being from 8/15/11, just about two weeks ago.

On Closed Circle, you can find: Heavy Time and Hellburner @ $5.00 each, Faery Moon and Rusalka @$9.95 each, and three volumes of The Writing Life: A Writer’s Journal, which is “an edited-for-legibility version of the online journal [she] kept for several years.” The first volume is free, so give it a try. Volumes two and three are $5.00 each.

You can find the stand-alone fantasy novel The Paladin on webscription.net, along with the shared world fantasy omnibus The Sword of Knowledge, although per Wikipedia, Cherryh did not actually write any of the included books.

If you have a nook or Sony Reader, you can also purchase Alternate Realities, which includes Port Eternity, Wave Without a Shore, and Voyager in Night, at Sony’s ReaderStore, or Barnes and Noble, but Kindle users are out of luck on this one.

Those are all the books I could find that are available (legitimately) as e-books. Hopefully one day we will also get the first six Foreigner books, the Chanur series, the rest of the Alliance-Union books, or even, dare I dream, the Merovingen Nights shared universe series. If you find anything else, please let me know and I will update the list.

Note: There is newer C.J. Cherryh ebook news here.

A repository for science-fiction/fantasy writing links.

I have been searching on and off for a) science-fiction and fantasy e-books other than those that can be found on Amazon, and b) science-fiction and fantasy writing markets. I have collected many links for both searches; there is no dearth of sites out there. What I have not been able to find is one site that collects all the links in one area. Or if I have, it is usually outdated.

I will use this site to add links and then check on them periodically to make sure that they are still live. If you have suggestions for either area, please share them.

Also, don’t get me wrong about looking for e-books other than Amazon. I love Amazon, it is a great resource, but some of the authors I enjoy reading do not have their books for sale there.