Reader Advisory

Introducing Chronicle Worlds: Legacy Fleet

May 23, 2019 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

In the twenty-sixth century, mankind has discovered the secret of interstellar 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!

Reader’s Advisory: The Handmaid’s Tale

January 19, 2017 by Rob McClellan Leave a Comment

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is an old favorite of those who would make unpleasant books go away, and was listed 37^th on the American Library Association’s list of 100 Most Banned Books from 1990 to 1999. It was challenged in 2001 in Dripping Springs, Texas by a group of parents who declared it anti-Christian and pornographic. Also quite recently, the Judson School District Board in San Antonio, TX overturned a ban of The Handmaid’s Tale by the superintendent. Ed Lyman had ordered the book taken out of the advanced placement English curriculum when a parent complained it contained sexual and anti-Christian content. A committee comprised of teachers, students, and a parent had recommended the book remain in the class, but Lyman said he felt it did not fit in with the standards of the community.

To be fair: violence, certainly. Sex, absolutely. Anti-Christian, perhaps, if you happen to believe that Jesus was all about wielding obscene levels of wealth and power against the meek. Pornographic, no. There is nothing arousing about the situations found in this book.

The world of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a grim one. Women are second-class citizens in the recently formed Republic of Gilead. Women may not own property or carry money. All dresses and hats come with veils. They may not read, write, or (occasionally) speak unless spoken to. Older women are often pressed into service as domestic Marthas, ruled over by Wives. Because of falling fertility rates in Gilead the younger and hopefully more fertile women are sometimes assigned as Handmaids, expected to produce children for the elite rulers of Gilead. Early in the book, it’s suggested that the suicide rate among Handmaids is quite high.

Meanwhile, older women, barren women, homosexuals and criminals are declared Unwomen and sent to colonies to enjoy hard labor cleaning up environmental disasters, toxic chemical spills, or other similar work. Secret police, known as Eyes, are everywhere.

All this is told to the reader through the eyes and voice of Offred, a Handmaid who’s assigned to an older military officer (the Commander.) Her job is to produce a child for the couple, which is unlikely, as the Wife believes that her husband is actually sterile—a dangerous thought, as Gileadan law says that only women can be sterile. Desperate to manage the situation, the Commander’s Wife arranges for Offred to sleep with Nick, her husband’s driver, in an effort to get her pregnant. Nick and Offred become attached to each other. Eventually, Nick tells her that he can get her out of the country if she’s willing to trust him. The book ends with an assumed contact of Nick’s leading her into an unmarked van, although whether she’s being saved or led to her doom by Eyes is left unsaid.

You don’t read a lot about the men in this society directly, since Offred’s dealings with them are sharply limited by the rules she lives by. Men are either in charge, as the Commander is; or they serve those in charge, as Nick, his driver, does; or they populate the military and police forces that maintain order. The pecking order is rigid and there is no escape. Men conform or die, their bodies to be hung in a public square as a testament to the Gileadan manner of justice. Simple.

The most frequently cited reasons for banning this book are the description of Christianity found in its pages. However, the fundamentalist government depicted in the book merely uses certain images found in Christianity as a tool to maintain militarily enforced rules of society. For an environment supposedly espousing Christian values, Christ himself–who commanded his followers to love the poor, tend the sick, comfort those in prison, and abhor excessive wealth–is nowhere to be found.

That said, the folks who complain about the sheer brutality of the book’s worldview may have a point: violence is the center of the Handmaid’s world. Society at some point in the not too distance past was disrupted when a cabal of fundamentalist-minded military officers executed the civilian government and declared themselves rulers over God’s kingdom. Wars against the infidel are endemic; a news show described by Offred mentions the execution of Quaker and Baptist rebels, and the forcible uprooting of “Children of Ham” (i.e., Blacks) to North Dakota. Jews are given a choice: convert or leave for Zion. There’s some question as to how many of those put on the boats ever arrive at their destination.

The violence that Offred experiences is more psychological than physical, although she says at one point the Wives are allowed to beat Handmaids as long as they use bare hands, since “there’s scriptural precedent.” Handmaids have no names except for those assigned (Offred, Ofglen, Ofwarren, etc.) by the management. Money has been replaced by pictograph tokens they can use to buy food at the local grocery; even the store signs have been replaced by wordless logos. The ostensible reason for this—the reason the Handmaids are told during their training as state-sponsored breeders—is that it’s for their own protection. Women are too valuable, they’re told, to have to deal with such types of stress.

So here we are. 2017 and Handmaid’s Tale is every bit as creepy as it was when first published in 1985. In a way it’s worse now. The Commander’s Wife, a genteel lady named Serena Joy, was, in her prime, a televangelist who railed against the horrors of modern life and worked tirelessly to bring about the world she now lives in, a world directed by “Christian” values and enforces “traditional” family life. One imagines that she’s resigned to being the head of a household rather than a self-directing individual in a world of business, power, wealth, and religion. One expects that she’d imagined herself being rather more free and/or powerful than she is allowed to be by the leaders she helped bring to power.

As we head into a new presidential administration, it’s worth remembering that this book was meant to be a cautionary tale of a dystopian reality. But…there are those who would use it as a handbook to create a future they very much want to see.

Let’s do better than Gilead did.

Introducing Chronicle Worlds: Feyland

June 29, 2016 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

Imagine 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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Banned Book Week 2015: Fahrenheit 451

September 29, 2015 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

Bad news: 451 degrees F is not, in fact, the temperature at which paper bursts into flame. (It’s actually between 440 and 470 degrees F depending on the type of paper).

Good news: Ray Bradbury’s novel about censorship, mass media, and induced apathy in the modern world is as accessible and spooky as it was the day he finished writing it in 1953.

Fahrenheit 451 is the story of Guy Montag, a fireman in the most literal sense: he sets books on fire. Bradbury said in interviews that he wrote the book to address the popularity of the idea of book burning during the McCarthy years in the U.S. As time wore on, he came to describe the book in more general terms. The book has pulled down a number of awards starting with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Commonwealth Club of California Club Gold Medal in 1954. Francois Truffaut wrote and directed an excellent film adaptation in 1966, and the BBC produced a radio adaptation in 1982.

And of course, it’s been banned, censored, and redacted by schools and libraries since its publication. (The irony of banning a book about burning books is apparently lost in some circles.)

Anyway, Guy Montag burns books. In this world, firemen seek out and seize stashes of books in private homes and ignite them. Books are considered confusing things, filled with all sorts of ideas that make people uncomfortable (“painful, awful, hurting words” as his wife Millie describes them). In that sense, the firemen perform a public service: they keep the masses happy and allow them to focus on the permissible outlets: television (parlor walls), visual mass media, and sports events.

Frankly, Montag is okay with his life until he meets Clarisse, a new neighbor, a high school girl who is far more likely to ask “Why?” than “How?” While she vexes her teachers and fellow students, Montag finds her refreshing and fascinating–until she disappears. Montag’s wife, Millie, thinks the girl died in an auto accident but doesn’t really know or care.

Missing Clarisse is bad enough, but Montag truly questions his life when he takes a call to burn the stash of an elderly woman with a huge hidden library. The house is torched and the woman elects to burn to death with it rather than give up her library. Superficially, Montag understands that the woman sealed her own fate, but his guts tell him a different story.

Montag starts stressing out. Beatty, his fire chief, takes him aside to explain that the books aren’t really illegal per se. A fireman is even allowed to keep one and read it as long as he burns it within 24 hours. It’s the books’ effects on the public that forces the state to employ firemen. After he leaves, Montag reveals to his wife that he does have a stash of books, and he has no intention of burning them.

Montag loses his desire to play by the rules and obsesses about the books. He contacts an old English professor in a desperate attempt to figure out how reading works (and why it’s forbidden), only for him to avoid Guy like the plague. Guy then crashes his wife’s “parlor wall party,” reads the poem Dover Beach, and makes one guest cry. Millie flips out, Guy burns the book to mollify the guest, everyone storms out, and his wife turns Montag over to the authorities.

Millie leaves him on the spot while firemen burn his house. After a grand chase, Montag escapes the city to find a group of exiles who live by the river. Each of them has memorized one book in the hopes that the future will be more receptive to the idea of reading and preserving thoughts through the written word. War breaks out, the city is destroyed, and when the flames die down, Montag and his new friends head in to rebuild.

Bradbury’s work is generally allegorical, but Fahrenheit 451 is a thematic wonderland. Besides the obvious comparisons to real-life book burning which are perpetrated in the name of racial, political, or cultural purity, Bradbury equipped many of his characters with “Seashell ear-thimbles,” tiny earpieces through which individuals received streams of personalized media entertainment. On the surface, it’s just a radio, but just beneath that is the desire to surround oneself with a cocoon of sound to keep the world at bay. In that respect, one can’t exactly look at a world where tens of millions of personalized iPhones, Androids, iPads, tablets of every size and price range, float around keeping their users’ attention focused on their glowing screens at the expense of their neighbors and not be a little concerned.

Beyond that the book itself has been the victim of corporate meddling in the name of education standards. Starting in 1967 the book was subject to the expurgation of all words “hell,” “damn,” and the word “abortion” by its publisher, Ballantine Books, to create a high-school friendly version. Worse, by 1973 the cleaned up edition was the only version on the market. When Bradbury learned of this in 1979 he insisted that the original text be reinstated, and in 1980 it was.

One bit that appears frequently in the text that I sped over in this review is the mechanical “hound” that follows Montag, literally sniffing out trouble. It’s basically a robot that’s designed to assist the firemen in their daily lives, including sniffing out book stashes. Besides emerging as a stand-in for continual state surveillance, it’s one of these drones that chases Montag all over the city as a last ditch attempt by the government to silence him. For all that, the hound fails. It’s his wife, Millie, that rats him out the the government, showing that people are still the more dangerous enemy.

Another bit that recurs in the text: there are very few scenes where the subject of war isn’t in evidence. Bombers constantly fly overhead on their ways to foreign targets, Millie’s friend’s husband has been called up (she figures he’ll be back in a week because it’ll be over quickly), and Montag’s home town gets annihilated at the end of the book. The fact that war even exist in this world gives the lie to the danger that books and reading supposedly represent. If everyone must be kept happy and quiescent, why even have wars? Bradbury’s characters are not even sophisticated enough to ask that type of question. Even Beatty is, at heart, a just a functionary. And while Montag and the exiles have the best intentions, we have no clue if they have the skills to rebuild anything, even as they’re willing to try.

As always, many thanks to Shiela DeChantal and her Book Journey blog for giving awareness boosts to Banned Book Week.

When UFOs Were Real

September 25, 2015 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

One of the niftier bits about growing up in the 1970s was that UFOs were real. Real enough for the U.S. Air Force to carry on with a project known as Project Blue Book. It was, we were told, a concerted effort by the military to quantify reported sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects in an attempt to understand what they were and why they were showing up.

The project was a thing from 1952 to 1970 but even after the military cancelled it, UFOs held the public’s attention in a vise-like grip. Books on the subject were in every major store. There was even a TV show based on it.

In the end, we gave up. Hoaxes were exposed, sightings were attributed to natural phenomena, and repeated screenings of Close Encounters of the Third Kind was as close as any human got to seeing the inside of an alien spaceship.

Until now.

Eric Tozzi has the dirt on the aliens, and let me tell you, it’s not pretty. They are here to kidnap our people for nefarious purposes, break our planet, and trash our stuff. Phoenix Lights, his grand addition to the Apocalypse Weird ‘verse is on sale for another couple of days, meaning you can grab this great bit of UFO-type mayhem for about a buck. You can read a review of the book here to get started. You won’t be sorry!

[book slug=”apocalypse-weird-phoenix-lights”]

Reader’s Advisory: Star Wars: Aftermath

September 22, 2015 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

I don’t generally read Star Wars novels.

I read and loved Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and Brian Daley’s Han Solo at Star’s End decades ago because they were on the book store shelves and the shiny newness of the Star Wars films sparkled and glittered like the pyramids of Giza must have when they were completed. Plus, Foster had Vader, Luke, and Leia, and Daley had Han and Chewie, and both books added so much content to what at that time was a relatively narrow storyscape with enormous potential but little realization or growth.

Nearly forty years later, we stand at the other end of the spectrum. There is a shipping container full of stories dealing with the old school characters, the new school characters, their ancestors, their descendants, and so on. But I’m not really drawn to the novels as much as I was to those first releases. The stories are wonderful, but the shiny newness has long since worn off. I need a particular hook to pull a Star Wars (or Star Trek) novel off the shelf and devote my time to it.

There have been two recently. The first was Death Star by James Luceno, a book I have literally been waiting for decades to read. The second was Aftermath by Chuck Wendig.

Disclosure: I’m a Wendig fan. I have been since I discovered Wendig’s Terrible Minds website. I own a bunch of his books on how to improve writing. I devoured Backbirds and Mockingbird in a few hours when they were still new. Under the Empyrean Sky is waiting for me on my Kindle account for a long enough break in my schedule for me to read the silly thing. So when I heard that he was doing the official (i.e., Disney-approved) book that told what happened after Return of the Jedi ended, I was on board.

I’ve read the book. I liked it. I don’t love it the way I loved Mind’s Eye and Star’s End. But I can’t quite figure out where the Wendig hate is coming from.

I’m not going to write a whole thing on the problems that established Star Wars fans have with Wendig. Author friend Will Swardstrom has already written one of those, and it’s excellent.

Still with me? Okay, here we go.

The Galactic Empire’s new and improved Death Star is gone, the Imperial Fleet is scattered across the galaxy, and Darth Vader and his master, Emperor Palpatine, are dead as well. The celebrations across Coruscant are in full force, and as one determined crowd of citizens manages to topple the statue of the emperor outside the senate, others pick up pieces of debris and start chucking them at nearby police. The incident escalates into a riot, police give way to stormtroopers, and the real shooting begins.

The empire is dead. Long live the empire.

Wedge Antilles jumps his starhopper into the Akiva system, followed and captured by Admiral Rae Sloane. Sloane has other ships with her Star Destroyer task force, including the Ravager, the last Super Star Destroyer in operating condition. Sloane’s plan is to gather other high-ranking imperials–politicians, bankers, merchants, and officers–to her, and band together to form the backbone of the new and improved Galactic Empire.

But a lot is happening on Akiva. Bounty Hunter Jas Emari is looking to fulfill contracts on the same banker that Sloane is working on. Ex-Imperial Loyalty Officer Sinjir Rath Velus is looking to keep his head down–he’s painfully aware that his side lost–but neither of them can avoid Akiva’s worst loan shark, Surat Nuat. Rebel fighter pilot Norra Wexley is finally home after three years of battle–including the over Endor–to gather her son, Temmin, and escape to calmer placed. But Temmin has plans of his own which do not include leaving the planet he calls home. And Surat Nuat has plans of his own for Temmin and they don’t include Norra or her new friends.

Wedge is missed and Admiral “It’s a Trap!” Ackbar knows where he was last seen. While Akiva’s surface lends itself to politics, gang wars, treachery, wild high-speed escapes, and acts bravery, the space above it becomes the point of contention between Sloane’s and Ackbar’s space fleets.

Meanwhile, hell breaks loose throughout the galaxy as survivors of the decades-long civil war realize that the conflict hasn’t ended for them as much as it has entered a new phase. A longer and more dangerous phase. The imperials struggle to maintain a semblance of control as the politicians on Coruscant tries to re-establish the senate and turn the New Republic into an official galactic government.

Aftermath is a rare book in that it openly and immediately acknowledges that the Empire and the New Republic are really two sides of the same coin. Empire and republic are two words that refer to roughly the same thing: power and organization. The connotations are abstract: rule by force, versus rule by self-determination. Control itself is beyond question. But the films, old and new, gloss over the infrastructure, the nuts and bolts that keep the galaxy revolving on its axis except when our heroes blunder into them. It’s easy to assume that the Star Wars universe begins and ends with awesome space battles. It’s a lot more work to imagine the millions of pilots, engineers, miners, industrialists, bankers, soldiers, laborers, etc., whose time, energy and investment made those space battles possible or influenced their outcome. And we all knew the rebels would win because that was the story the George Lucas wanted to tell. Wendig’s narrative is far more ambiguous.

The frame that’s used here is almost apocalyptic: the people in charge are are dead, but the machine cranks on. All the trappings of the official economy are still in order. The factories build parts for ships and weapons that still come off assembly lines, letters of credit still clear banks, construction firms still lobby for contracts, and the legerdemain of politics continues unabated. Below that is the shadow economy, composed of bounty hunters, mercenaries, information brokers, pirates, informants, and outright criminals. The thing that Wendig remembers is that both sides needed all these elements to keep their part of the conflict alive. In that respect, little has changed except the stakes and the players.

Beyond that, Aftermath is very much the first work of an extended story. Wendig is setting up future conflict and continuity, showing us the shape of his story arc, and this arc is wide indeed. It has many moving parts, all of which carry considerable history with them as they appear on stage.

I’m looking forward to seeing what he does with it.