Jon Frater

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Introducing Chronicle Worlds: Legacy Fleet

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In the twenty-sixth century, mankind has discovered the secret of Chronicle Worlds Legacy Fleetinterstellar travel and colonized scores of worlds hundreds flight years from Earth. But in the 26th century, an alien race–a microbial collective known only as The Swarm–brutally attacked Earth and her colonies. Humanity barely survived and vowed to never let it happen again.

Now, 75 years later…it’s happening again. And Humanity has a lot to learn about the use of the word “never.” As the United Earth fleet loses its best and strongest ships to the Swarm onslaught, only the older Legacy Fleet ships and their experienced, driven commanders are up to the task of defending earth and her colonies.

This is the world of Legacy Fleet, a new anthology based on Nick Webb’s Legacy Fleet trilogy: Constitution, Warrior, and Victory, an amazingly popular  science fiction series. Into this universe comes Samuel Peralta, creator of the well-known Future Chronicles anthology series. Together, they’ve combined their writing talent and publishing experience to create a whole new treat: the Kindle World: Legacy Fleet series.

Links to this great work are here and in the sidebar. And it’s still at the launch price of .99 cents, but that won’t last forever. Enjoy!

AetherCon VI

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A neat bit of news: I’m moderating some guest Q&A panels at AetherCon VI, which is in full swing now.

AetherCon is an all-online convention where participants can roll from one panel room to another, visit events, and partake in moderated gaming sessions with game masters from every time zone.

In my case, I’ll be talking to representatives from some really neat game manufacturers. There will be five separate Q&A sessions:

 

Saturday Sessions

1:00 PM 

Guests: Mortis Logan, Paul Reid

Ral Partha Europe

 

2:00 PM

Guests: Chris Garland

Timeline, LTD.

 

Sunday Sessions

12:00 PM

Guests: Josh Harrison, Andrew Ragland, Mary Harrison

FASA Games

 

1:00 PM

Guests: Rodney Sloan, Bob Storrar

Rising Phoenix Games (South Africa)

 

2:00 PM

Guest: Justin Andrew Mason

Paths to Adventure (Big Book of Maps)

 

 

 

I’d love to see you there!

My First Superhero Story

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Disclosure: I’m a rabid fan of the MCU. I love the acting, the writing, the sets, the costumes, the whole shebang. But other than a brief flirtation with the New Mutants in the late ‘80s, I’ve never really collected Marvel’s comics. I know the characters and I followed the grand story arcs, but I’m not feeling the burn the way I did when I was in college.

So when editor Steve Beaulieu asked me to write a story for his superhero anthology, Collateral Damage, I accepted.

[book_cover not_author_book=”collateral-damage-superheroes-and-vile-villains-3″ align=”right” size-keyword=”medium”]Then, I panicked.

I thought: what am I doing here? I don’t know superheroes! I can barely read the print in a comic book any more. How do you write a story about…?

Wait a minute.

As I thought about it, I realized something: Maybe I can’t write about a superhero. But I can write about the people who deal with them. The normal people. The humans. Even the supers who never made the grade.

And that’s what I did.

My story is titled “Fixing Sniper Girl” and it’s a bit of X-Men meets Gunslinger Girl. A dude with language superpowers retires from active duty, to be called back when his old team—a real super-group—is unable to deal with a high tech assassin. It was terrific fun to write and it’s available from the Amazon store right this minute. Pick up a copy of Collateral Damage if you feel so inclined, and a review would not go amiss. And if you’re really looking for a good time, pick up a copy of HaHaHa! the supervillain companion volume. Above all, enjoy!

Legacy Fleet: Colossus is Live!

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It’s up! it’s live! It’s for sale as part of Nick Webb’s insanely popular Legacy Fleet series on Amazon’s Kindle Worlds!

As I mention in the Author’s Notes section of the book, Legacy Fleet: Colossus was of a universe that I spent a lot of time in many years ago: Palladium Books’ Robotech RPG. While writing those books was a ton of fun, I couldn’t stop thinking about the characters and situations I’d built after we parted ways. I wanted to write more, introduce new characters, cooler ships and gear, and come up with extended stories. Sadly, that door closed. But the ambition never stopped.

So when Nick Webb made his Legacy Fleet series available for new contributions via Kindle Worlds, I knew I could finally bring all those ideas back to the front burner. Colossus is the result.

Take a look, and enjoy!

Introducing Chronicle Worlds: Feyland

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Chronicle Worlds Feyland CoverImagine if you will, a world of the future. A world where rich kids are chipped to run automated houses and fly in grav-powered limos while poor kids watch their families dissolve into poor health and struggle to manage the bare necessities. The only thing that brings these groups together is the VirtuMax corporation, an entertainment giant. Its newest hit is an immersive VR high fantasy game that is both addictive and incredibly popular.

But in this world, the veil between fantasy and mundane reality is beginning to shatter and admit the resurgent realm of the Fey. And they are looking to borrow whatever they must from the mortal world to maintain their existence.

Welcome to the world of Chronicle Worlds: Feyland, the latest installment of Samuel Peralta’s insanely popular Future Chronicles anthology series, and the first of his new Chronicle Worlds titles.

Chronicle Worlds: Feyland brings stories from leading authors to the crossroads where individual imagination and gamer sensibility meets author Anthea Sharp’s USA Today best selling Feyland series of YA fantasy books.

Twelve authors contributed to this volume, and every one of them brought exceptional story telling and skills and gamer sensibilities with them into the project. A brief rundown of the work is as follows:

“MeadowRue,” by Joseph Robert Lewis takes the story of an existing Feyland character: a de facto sea hag who must deal with a human girl who has courage and honor on the brain; “The Skeptic” by Lindsay Edmunds, shows how seeking to quantify the impossible but true can bite you on the butt. “The Sword of Atui” by Eric Kent Edstrom felt like a particularly gruesome episode of Sword Art Online, complete with server hacks and apparent game master cameos. “The Huntsman and the Old Fox” by Brigid Collins reminded me of my own experience as a parent gaming with a gaggle of teens and tweens.

“Unicorn Magic,” by Roz Marshal manages to take the story of a girl’s love for her horse and make it both gripping and uplifting.

My own contribution, “The City of Iron and Light,” tells the story of Sabine Jade, a lonely teen who has no idea just how far down the rabbit hole goes…but harbors a burning need to find out.

“The Gossamer Shard” by Dave Adams, shows what the World of Tanks might be like if its players blundered into the Unseelie realm; “The Glitchy Goblin” by K.J. Colt is a dark little tale of broken promises and crushed dreams that will actually make you feel for the goblins (no small task). In comparison, “On Guard” by Deb Logan, is the essence of the short story form: compact, compelling, and utterly without wasted words.

The two final selections, “An Artist’s Instinct,” by Andrea Luhman, and “Brea’s Tale: Passage,” by Anthea Sharp, share a mystical quality of presence. Both tell a story of a young woman struggling to transform herself into something new, but take very different approaches in the hows and whys. Read both back to back and you’ll see what I mean. In fact, you should real this entire book in order, front to back. Leave nothing out. Trust me.

But I think my favorite tale from this volume is “Tech Support” by James T. Wood. Consider: Ranjeet Nagar of Kochi, India is a young man with a strong work ethic and a family to support. He works as a tech support jock for VirtuMax, walking players of Feyland through their technical issues. Ranjeet is a compulsive puzzle solver and some of the wackier calls coming over the phone lately have got his creative juices running wild. But there are problems at work: his job is in danger of vanishing, the crazy calls describe things that cannot exist in the game, and Ranjeet cannot afford a proper VR set so he can’t even log into the game to see the weirdness for himself.

All that becomes irrelevant when Ranjeet finds a woman on the street being attacked by the same demons reported by players. Utterly disregarding his safety and prospects, Ranjeet enlists the help of a co-worker and his ex-fiance, who does have a full-D VR set and is an expert player, to track down the source of the incursions and set things right.

I think in several respects “Tech Support” is the most ambitious story in this set. It takes place entirely in India, flips the dominant theme of player vs game on its head, and manages to maintain a convincing level of engagement and suspense from the first sentence to the last.

That said–and the only thing really left to say here–is that at a launch price of .99 cents, and fifteen solid entries into the world of anthology fiction, Future Chronicles creator Samual Peralta and Feyland owner Anthea Sharp have created something genuinely new and compelling. Fans of gamerpunk, high fantasy, and science fiction will all have something to enjoy here.

Available Now

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The Expocalypse Arrives!

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Taste Makers_Cover4_titles“The Taste Makers serves up an apocalypse easily worthy of The Joker’s most diabolical of schemes.  Frater executes The Gotham/NYC food scene with a savvy panache and a spicy menace that, pardon the pun, cuts like a knife.  This is one weird serving of an Apocalypse that’s singular, and frightening, in vision.  Try a slice and stay for dessert… It’s deadly fun.”

— Nick Cole, author of The Red King

 

Buy it on Amazon!

Review it on Goodreads!

Grim Predictions

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So author/director/screenwriter/all around wackadoo Forbes West made a thing. He has a podcast called Live at the Benbow Inn, which he is slowly but surely turning into a regular feature on his blog. I got a chance to sit in on an episode recently where I and other awesome people got to pontificate on our views and concerns–and some truly far-out theorizing was involved there–about what the future of Planet Earth holds and why. Give it a listen!

Christmas Eve and All’s Hell

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It’s December 24, 2015. Christmas Eve. The rain has just stopped, it’s 68 degrees in in New York City and the weather is, to put it bluntly, all kinds of wrong. Where we should be seeing snow and ice encrusting windows and burying cars this winter, we’re seeing something very different and not a little creepy. The world is changing whether we like it or not.

On another Christmas Eve many years ago while on my first trip to visit Israel, I had a particularly eye-opening experience. It was during a tour of the Golan Heights, on the country’s northern border. Syria was just a few miles away, along with batteries of artillery, miles of barbed wire, and anti-tank obstacles strewn through valleys and hills.

One fact of life in Israel is the sound of explosions: the sonic booms made of fighter planes patrolling Israeli airspace. Three, four or more times a day. The crack of thunder flies above you despite cloudless skies. Windows shake in their frames. You get used to it pretty quickly, the same way you get used to small earthquakes in Japan or even California.

As we passed through a supposedly secure part of the Heights that day in 1986, we were allowed off the bus and walked around through country that had seen awful fighting in 1967. Suddenly, booms crashed overhead. We ignored them. It had become background noise to us. But they kept coming, one after the other, precisely spaced, echoing between the hills. Radios squawked and our tour guides hustled us back onto the bus and we tore out of the area.

Later on we learned that the area we’d been walking through had been part of an artillery exchange between Israeli and Syrian forces. When you live in a war zone, you get used to things like that, too.

And yet, JerusalePolitics of Apocalypse, The - Jon Fraterm is the site of three major religions’ holiest places. Control over the city has been traded between tribes, nations, and empires for nearly three thousand years. Yet we can’t seem to stop fighting over it.

Still. The world is changing whether we like it  or not.

Politics of the Apocalypse is a short story that throws religious zealotry at self-sacrificial idealism. It’s Christmas Eve and the Hordes of Hades are about to launch their final attack on the Old City of Jerusalem. Dedicated defenders of three faiths are ready to cut and run over dogma. What do they do? What would you do?

The story is live for Kindle on Amazon’s website, for 99 cents.

Enjoy!

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What I’m Writing: AW: The Taste Makers

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A while back I wrote what I consider my first story about the end of the world. I’m a comic fan, and while talking to other comic fans, the subject of Christian mythology came up. I wanted to write a sort of buddy cop story set in the old city of Jerusalem, which I’ve always felt a special connection to, although I haven’t visited there recently. The result was a short work titled The Politics of the Apocalypse and it was published in HDWP Books’ Theme-Thology: Real World Unreal. It was a ton of work, and a ton of fun to write.

Then I was pointed toward a much bigger, far more ambitious project: a shared world where each contributor could wreck the world in his own fashion. I was hooked.

I’m a New Yorker. I was born here, I live here, and I’m probably going to die here. I take that reality very seriously. I complain—all New Yorkers do—loudly and frequently about the air, the heat, the cars, cabs, trains and subways, OMG the mayor, because that’s what we do.

But what got me thinking about the end of everything was the food.

Think about it. Americans are obsessed with food. Eat more? Eat less? Organic or non-organic? Vegetarian or vegan? GMO or non-GMO? Real sugar? Sugar substitutes? Canola oil or coconut oil? Only in New York City can a diner enter a restaurant and demand to know if the salmon on the menu is Atlantic or Pacific, without a hint of irony. Only in a foodie’s paradise like Manhattan can one find a dish to tweak any conceivable taste.

Bottom line: some eat to live, others live to eat.

But what if the food were the trap? What if we were so obsessed with the process of eating–who prepares it, how it’s prepared, where do the ingredients come from–that it literally killed us?

AW: The Taste Makers is what I’m writing to find out.

The book isn’t finished–it’s close, but not just yet–and it’s gone through several major revisions so far. I can’t even tell you if “The Taste Makers” will be the final title. But I can show you the pitch I wrote that got the publisher’s attention:

Wall Street crashes for the last time as a Food Network entrepreneur and his crew struggle to survive the unraveling horror of his latest venture.

A rash of murder-suicides ravage daily life as food preparation becomes a devastating weapon that knows no borders or boundaries, under the influence of forces beyond science.

As cursed novelty knives turn foodies into homicidal maniacs and a unknown blight destroys crops, the emerging elite horde supplies as cities become death traps and the countryside starves.

The Wolf of Wall Street meets Friday the 13th as financial sharks deal with demonic slashers, backstabbing greedheads, and a sea of their past victims in a bloody conflict where only the ruthless can survive.

The action swaps between the financial district and the upper east side, from the upper reaches of the Freedom Tower to Central Park and Chinatown while a NYPD detective comes to terms with what he’s seen done to his beloved city in the name of profit, and whether he can help stop it.

A ton of work to finish, and a ton of fun to write.

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Last Chance for WEIRD Things

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Remember last week when I told you about the Apocalypse Weird fund raiser?

Of course you do. You came here and read about it. Maybe you even clicked on the campaign link and donated. And you did these things because you care about brave new ideas in the world of fiction and about my willingness to be part of it.

So here we are, with 13 hours to go before Indiegogo closes the campaign, tallies up the numbers and your change to be part of something new and awesome disappears.

But . . .

If the campaign makes its goal, then Indiegogo will keep the clock running. That’s added time to donate in exchange for outstanding perks, a heartfelt “Thank you!”, and maybe some mention of the project and books to friends who like to read books about the world ending in wacky and outlandish ways.

So this is it, The Big Push. As I write this the campaign is 66% funded. Another $3,421 puts us over the edge and allows the process to continue, giving you access to perks long after the clock stops as well as many more months of outstanding books.

But for now, the clock is ticking . . .

 

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Donation Clock of Doom Awaits!

 

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The Apocalypse Arrives and It’s Weird

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Today sees the launch of an ambitious new series from Nick Cole  and Michael Bunker, titled Apocalypse Weird. The concept is simple: the end of the world is very f-ing nigh and you have front row seats. Five novels drop today and join The Red King, Cole’s previously released work in this ‘verse: The Dark Knight by Nick Cole; Reversal, by Jennifer Ellis; The Serenity Strain by Chris Pourteau; Immunity, by E. E. Giorgi; and Texocalypse Now by Nick Cole and Michael Bunker.

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While shared universe series aren’t new (remember Bill Fawcett’s The Fleet? How about David Drake’s Crisis of Empire?), what makes the AW ‘verse unique is the fact that Cole and Bunker have  partnered with Rob McClellan’s ThirdScribe outfit to open the field to any and all contributors. So-called “Tier 3” authors are considered purveyors of AW fanfic. The stories are non-canonical, but they are also open to anyone who wants to publish them using the ThirdScribe platform. Readers vote on their favorite stories and well-received contributions get both the attention they deserve and perhaps a bit more.

The rules of the series are straightforward: in the not-too-distant-future (or past) a demonic mafia known as “The 88” have decided that they can’t sit around waiting for mankind to doom itself forever. Their solution: give homo sapiens a big push into the abyss. Their foot soldiers in this work are human servants known as “The Black Hand.” As civilization crashes and burns, individual actors, perpetrators, and survivors share talents, stories, actions, and supplies to manage their own little corners of the devastation. It’s up to each author to mix and match the mayhem according to his or her tastes and writing style. The results are brilliant, fresh, and exciting.

I’ve read Reversal and The Dark Night, and I’ll be posting reviews of those later today. But all five books are now up for grabs (and linked above). If what I’ve seen so far is any indication, this is the best apocalypse to come along in years.

Get the Books!

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