Well, it is very nearly time, at last. The second volume in a series that got started almost four years ago.
All Creatures In His Thrall, which picks up the adventures of the newly-married James and Harriet, is coming out in just ONE WEEK! That’s right, we have a Black Friday release! It will start out with the story that appeared in No Game For Knights, but after that, it lauches into a full, novel-length adventure!
Thanks go out to all my fans who have waited so long.
Preorder your copy HERE.
LibertyCon is absolutely my favorite con of all time. And the reason is simple: they know who I am and they care that I’m there.
So, on Thursday, I made the difficult, but all-things-considered wise decision to avoid air travel and drive from Wisconsin to Chattanooga, TN, which is an 11-hour drive. This was because a) I was bringing, and would be returning with, books and swag, and b) I was going, for the first time, to the annual LibertyCon shoot, facilitated by J.F. Holmes. I’d really like to thank him for running an awesome shoot and being so welcoming to newbies like myself. I was also very happy to meet Brian Griffin, who rode to the shoot with me and kindly trained me on the proper use of a .45 ACP.
This shoot was a writer’s/history nerd’s dream come true. I got to shoot more guns than I can remember, including a lever-action .45-70, a 1917 Enfield, a 1942 M-1 carbine, and a Savage Arms 7.62×51 rifle. I discovered that I am actually capable of consistently hitting a man-sized target at 50 yards, which I thought was decent for the first time I ever touched a rifle. I managed half the shots inside the 9-ring at 300 yards with the Savage, and felt pretty good about that, too, though most of the credit must go to the rifle’s owner, a gentleman whose name escapes me at the moment, but who was a trainer on Parris Island for five years, and whose instruction I am deeply grateful for. I did rather less well with the pistols, and I now understand why people who have never touched a gun before can, in fact, miss at insanely short ranges with such weapons.
The rest of the Con… it’s hard to explain. But things happened that I’ve been waiting all my life for. Just a few of them:
People showed up with my books. That they wanted ME to sign. They had read them.
People talked up my books to other people. Because they had loved them.
People came to the table where I was selling my books, and they stood in a line. A LINE! (Two people still counts as a line!)
People told me they had read my Baen Award stories and enjoyed them.
Publishers invited me to play in their universes. And they said good things about me, and so did other authors, authors like Larry Correia and Kacey Ezell.
I really… I actually have fans.
Okay, but to get more specific: On Friday, I had a panel about Heroic Fantasy vs. Sword and Sorcery where I disagreed with everybody. Needless to say, I was right, and there was a lot of confusion about whether it was Heroic Fantasy or Epic Fantasy, but regardless: The Epic of Gilgamesh is sword and sorcery, not epic fantasy, and so is Beowulf. At least that’s what people said.
Saturday was the Big Day. Had a great advance reading of ALL CREATURES IN HIS THRALL, followed by holding a sotto voce conversation with Larry Correia throughout the Baen Roadshow. Fun fact: despite them being VASTLY different universes, Larry and I came up with extremely similar magic systems in the Responsibility and Son of the Black Sword books. And we never had a single conversation on magic. Weird. Finished up discussing Chicks In Tank Tops.
Sunday, D.J. Butler was kind enough to invite me to City Cafe’s very last breakfast service with the Chileses and Sean Patrick Hazlitt. And during autograph signing I learned that I REALLY need to find a way to accept Visa. Sorry, fans I made go running after cash! I learned my lesson.
Hey, readers! Just a quick entry to share my schedule for LibertyCon in case any of you are in Chattanooga for that this week! Also, if you’re planning to attend the reading, this is your last chance to drop me a note for any requests!
So, last week I asked if anyone would read a “Choose Your Own Adventure” format book if I wrote one.
I am pleased to announce that “On The Menu Stains Of Madness,” a Mythos – style short story (which was my original attempt to get into THE CACKLE OF CTHULHU anthology from Baen Books) will appear in STUPEFYING STORIES on March 18th, just ten days from now. I’m honored to appear there, and especially with this aberration of a story, which I never really thought anyone would buy.
I understand why Alex Shvartsman rejected this one. It’s not quite as funny as the one he bought, but it is much, much, weirder. Bruce Bethke is going to have fun with this one, I bet. And I hope you all will, too.
Adults who were children when I was, or possibly a little younger, will remember the old Choose Your Own Adventure stories. I remember the first time I stumbled upon one of these, and it was absolutely riveting. It was about at town called Deadwood, though whether it was Deadwood city or simply Deadwood, I cannot remember. I thought it was completely brilliant at the time, and eagerly devoured or of the choose your own adventure series as fast as I could check them out from the library.
Now that I am an adult, two questions occur to me: the first 20 being, why have I never seen my own children reading Choose Your Own Adventure books? I don’t know when they stopped being actively published. Indeed, for all I know, they may still be actively published, and I just don’t see them. I do know that near the time I was in middle school, in the late 1980s, some publishers, most notably TSR, had added dice rolls to the narratives, and turned them into what were effectively solo role-playing games. In fact, last year a friend of mine sent me, as a Christmas present an adventure that was, essentially, one of these role-playing books, which I believe was funded through a Kickstarter. It seems likely to me that the advent of cheap video games which were far more engrossing and the rising popularity of formerly nerdy hobbies such as Dungeons & Dragons is likely the reason that these books lost their popularity among school-age children. They simply had other things that were better for scratching that choose your own path itch. I have seen, however, that the “visual novel” style of videogame in which the story is everything and actual tactical, strategic, and reflexive combat is nearly nonexistent seems to herald a rebirth of these old books in a new way.
The other question that I have is a bit more complicated: why have such books never been thought appropriate as actual literature? It seems to me that there is nothing inherently less challenging in the format, and while almost all the books of this type that I have read have been aimed at children, there is really no reason that it would always have to be so. Science fiction, fantasy, and superhero comics have all, at one time or another, been denounced and ridicule as the literature of children and the mentally deficient. And yet, now, in the 21st century, they have become, more than ever, part of the mainstream literature. We even call the comics “graphic novels” now.
So, what say you, readers? Do you think there is a place for serious branching paths literature? Can the reader discover great truths in such a work? Can a writer discuss profound questions of choice, consequence, philosophy, and other matters of substance in such a format? And if not, why not?
Oh, and most importantly of all. IF I WROTE SOMETHING LIKE THIS, WOULD YOU READ IT??
I would very much be interested to hear your responses.
Tomorrow, a novel that I am really extra-excited about releases, which is Todd Fahnestock’s Rhenn the Traveler. Rhenn was, in a sense, along with, Khyven, the major protagonist of first book in the Eldros Legacy, Khyven the Unkillable. Now, Khyven the Unkillable is quite possibly the best sword and sorcery novel that I read last year, and its sequel, Lorelle of the Dark, was in every way a worthy follow-up. So, I know what I am reading for my next novel of the year, and I hope you will too. I will not lie to you and say that this choice has nothing to do with the fact that I, too, am working on and Eldros Legacy novel, but even if that were not so, I would have been glad to read these books. You can buy Rhenn the Traveler here starting tomorrow or preorder today!
So, I’ve wanted to share these for a long time, but life has meant that I have very little time for hobbies I used to enjoy a great deal, like model and miniature painting. I must first of all thank my dear friend and fan Ralph Seibel of Germany — who I have known for far longer than I have been writing — for designing these minis on Hero Forge and sending them to me. It has been years, but I finally managed to break off some time to paint them, and I really wanted to do a good job, so here they are:
Dr. James DeGrande, calming down a fire lizard, his No. 75 dragon scalpel at his side, and Paralyze and Painless at his back.
His assistant, Harriet Templin, witch and all around animal wrangler, fresh from some activity that involved blood and less savory fluids.
When Ralph sent me Harriet, he apologized(!) that he hadn’t been able to give Harriet the hunchback that she is described as having, but he DID send her with a backpack, and a little work with a Dremel and some paint fixed that problem up easily.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this vizualization as much as I did. Unfortunately, my eyes aren’t what they used to be, so these did take awhile. But they were worth every second. Great thanks again, Ralph.
So since I got so many hits from the Top Gun script satire, I figured it would drive traffic to do a post that would 1) distract pirates, but more importantly 2) give my fans a laugh. So, here goes the script that I am sure no one would ever predict from Dances With Smurfs 2, Digital Bugaloo. It should go without saying that, like my last review, I have written this one wthout ever having seen, or planned to see, this film.
The Place: The Smurfelf (or Na’vi or Nauvoo, or whatever) Homeworld
Scene 1:
JAKE SULLY (voiceover): Life has been so perfect on this alien world where my family has either overlooked or never known the fact that I’m an alien hiding out in the mindwiped corpse or brain-ectomied clone of one of them.
JAKE’S SON: Hey, Dad, how come you never talk about your childhood. You’re not hiding some deep, dark secret, are you?
NEYTIRI: What a question to ask your father!
JAKE’S SON: Just kidding!
JAKE SULLY: I hope I never have to confess my deep, dark secret to them.
NEYTIRI: Oh, I’m sure that will never be necessary; we showed your people that trying to conquer our planet was hideously unprofitable last time, right?
JAKE SULLY: Yes, you’re right. It would just be pure evil of them to try again. In fact, no matter how rare the substance, it’s overwhelmingly likely that synthesizing it would be far cheaper than launching an interstellar invasion.
Despite the fact that there is no sound possible from outside the atmosphere, an ominous whisper of sound accompanies a distinctive flash of light in the sky.
JAKE SULLY: Well, shit.
Scene 2:
JAKE SULLY: …so that’s the reason, children, that I’ve never talked about my childhood, and by extension, is my deep, dark secret.
JAKE’S DAUGHTER: So, you’re really an alien midget who can’t walk riding my Dad’s body around? I can’t deal with this!
NEYTIRI: No, that’s… how can I explain this?
JAKE’S DAUGHTER: You’re a lot kinkier than I ever imagined?
NEYTIRI: No, I…
JAKE’S DAUGHTER runs off crying.
NEYTIRI: What will we do, Jake?
JAKE SULLY: Well, on Earth we had these people called ‘therapists.’
JAKE’S SON: But why would your people come here and attack us?
JAKE SULLY: Because my people have developed a terrible technology that gives them great power, only at the cost of needing to constantly destroy everything beautiful on their world, and now they will do it to ours as well!
JAKE’S SON: And that’s why they developed this soul-destroying technology?
JAKE SULLY: Yes, they are terrible.
JAKE’S SON: Well, why can’t they just get everything they need just like we do by plugging themselves into your planet’s animals and mind-controlling them?
JAKE SULLY: Well, no. They can’t do that because they’re inferior.
JAKE’S SON: What are we going to do??
NEYTIRI: Don’t worry, your father can just lead us all to triumph again, I’m sure. Can’t you?
JAKE SULLY: This might be a good time to discuss how Earth militaries occasionally learn something called ‘tactics’ and the fact that they probably remember our capabilities from last time.
Scene 3:
Fire and death raining down from the sky. Everyone but the Sully family is exterminated.
JAKE SULLY: Neytiri! Take the children and go!
NEYTIRI: Not without you!
Explosion conveniently knocks Jake out of the sky in a dramatic fall which will provide tension to everyone in the audience with brain damage and who has never seen a movie before.
Scene 4:
JAKE SULLY: What happened?
JAKE’S SON: We lost everything! Everyone is gone!
NEYTIRI: You were knocked out and I saved you. Fortunately, you hit several plot devices on the way down.
JAKE SULLY: Oh, good.
JAKE’S SON: I thought you said these aliens were inferior!
JAKE SULLY: Yes, look at what they did with their soul-destroying technology!
JAKE’S SON: And you grew up with these people and they can travel between stars and wipe us out like that and you knew about it all these years and you never thought to teach us any of it?? It looks like what we Na’vi need is a double-helping of soul-destroying technology!!
JAKE SULLY: Now, son, all we need to do is discover how this planet will provide us some new animals that will surprise the aliens again that are compatible with our USB brain plugs.
JAKE’S SON: But who will take us in?
Scene 5:
ATTRACTIVE STRANGE GIRL: Hey, new people! We’ll take you in! Come live with us!
JAKE’S SON: Really?
NEYTIRI: Of course, all Na’vi are one.
ASG: Come join our Water Tribe.
NICKELODEON LAWYERS: a-HEM!
ASG: I mean the Sea People! We will be happy to teach you everything, despite the fact that you have no skills that are useful in this area and will probably attract the very people who attacked you.
Scene 6:
EVIL COMMANDER: Are you sure Jake Sully is dead?
LIEUTENANT: Sir, why does that matter? We wiped out his whole tribe.
EVIL COMMANDER: Because only a human could ever defeat us. We tracked him with our bioscantrackerdoohickey.
LIEUTENANT: Can’t we do that again?
EVIL COMMANDER: Only if he’s not underwater.
LIEUTENANT: Geez, what are the odds?
Scene 7:
The training montage that takes place underwater
Scene 8:
LIEUTENANT: No trace of him, sir.
EVIL COMMANDER: Dammit! Well, might as well go mine the biggest deposit of unobtainium on the planet. Where is it?
LIEUTENANT: Underwater, sir. Right here.
EVIL COMMANDER: Geez, what are the odds?
Scene 9:
JAKE SULLY: Son, can you ever forgive me that I wasn’t who you thought I was?
JAKE’S SON: I guess, Dad. I mean, all that matters is who you are inside, which just happens to be a White Savior icon that we poor natives needed to save us, in spite of which you wouldn’t teach us your technology, because our souls aren’t strong enough, I think.
JAKE SULLY: That’s not…
JAKE’S SON: But all we’ve done is prepare to use a bunch of really cool fish in combat! What if the aliens attack anywhere else?
JAKE SULLY: Look, son, they attacked in the air when we had birds; they’ll attack in the sea now that we have fish.
JAKE’S SON: That doesn’t make…
ASG: They’re coming!
JAKE’S SON: Geez, what are the odds?
Scene 10:
Invincible-looking human armada approaches
THX SURROUND SOUND: BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Impressive-looking Na’vi fish school looks Grim And Determined.
THX SURROUND SOUND: BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
LIEUTENANT: Sir, we have his signature: It’s Jake Sully!
EVIL COMMANDER: Today we discover which species is truly superior!
90% OF THE MOVIE BUDGET IN 5 MINUTES: KA-BLAMBOOMSPLASHAIIIIGH – NO! – GABAMFKABLOOEYBAM!
EVIL COMMANDER: You may have defeated us, Sully, but we will return!
JAKE SULLY: You’re going to keep throwing money away on this planet?
EVIL COMMANDER: You will never defeat the corporate drive for profit!
JAKE SULLY: Geez, you guys really are cartoon capitalist villains, aren’t you?
EVIL COMMANDER: Us? I meant Cameron. There’s no way he’s walking away from this cash cow (dies)
END CREDITS
To celebrate the release of CHICKS IN TANK TOPS, an excerpt from my story, “Jeanne d’Architonnere!”
Even inside the armor of the tartaruga that she was preparing for battle, Gia could hear the bellowing of the Florentine leaders. Them, and the crunching thunder of the siege guns.
“This is your army? You are trusting the fate of the Republic to a blind man and a crippled girl?” shouted Soderini.
“It’s better than trusting the mercy of that son-of-a-whore Borgia and His Profanity Julius II!” hissed back Machiavelli.
Gia inspected the turret. Bearings, greased. Springs and gun-track, polished to a shine. She snapped the slats of the viewports up and down on their hinges. She saw the Florentine militia wavering in their ranks, the dust and smoke where mortar stones had fallen, and finally, the sour, square face of Gonfaloniere Soderini, red jowls flapping.
“You call him profane!” he cried. “But you’re the one dealing with a sorcerer!”
“Well, if he can conjure up a spine for your militia, then he is no wizard, but a worker of miracles and therefore a saint!” growled General Machiavelli. His smooth face was a saturnine mask. Gia was not fooled. The man’s rage was hotter than the copper of the architonnerre. And that shone with heat, steam venting from its valve.
“They’re your militia!” roared Soderini. “You trained them! You led them! You led us all: to this!”
“And you refused to let me train them more,” Machiavelli went on, implacably, “You and the rest, so worried that I might declare myself a prince that they are now – as I warned you! – unable to save us from the devils beating at Prato’s gates!”
Gia snorted. At least she and her fellow tartaruga crews had drilled. They’d had to learn the machines inside-out.
“Have faith,” said a voice with an odd accent. French? A short man in blue uniform under a breastplate stepped into view. “Gaston de Foix comes from victory over Spain at Ravenna, and though wounded, he rides to your aid. But he cannot retake Prato if it has already fallen, and Prato is the key to Firenze. Better to fight now than beg Christ’s mercy from the black hearts of Pope Julius II or Borgia.”
At that name, rage mounted in Gia’s belly, spreading even to the legs she could not otherwise feel. She looked at the Florentines with disgust: they’d wanted to wait like princesses for some dashing French officer to ride to their rescue without having to fight. She’d never had any such illusions. She looked down into the belly of the tartaruga.
“Carlo, are we loaded?”
“Si, donna.” The squat man gestured to the long trough of cast-iron balls.
“Gun-breech?”
He grinned. “Smooth as a whore’s passage.”
“Don’t talk dirty about my baby, Carlo. Gun-barrel?”
“Hotter than Borgia’s soul in Hell.”
Gia listened to the Florentines’ cursing and said, “I think it’s time for a valve test, don’t you?”
Carlo’s smile turned wolfish. “Si, Donna.”
Gia looked out, making sure that the gleaming muzzle was turned well away from the arguing lords. The general’s hand was drifting slowly toward the hilt of a large dirk at his belt.
“Lock breech.”
“Locked and empty.”
Gia reached over and slammed the valve shut. The steam hissing through the turret vent cut off. Boiling water rushed through its siphon tube and hit the barrel of the gun, heated by its cage of coals. It flashed instantly into steam. The copper barrel loosed a jet of vapor with a roar that silenced the shouting Florentines.
Today, I get to announce the release of my story, “Jeanne d’Architonnere,” in the anthology Chicks In Tank Tops from Baen books. This is an especially fun story to announce. If you are a regular follower of mine, it will come as no surprise to you that my day job is being a history teacher at a local high school. Despite this (or perhaps because of this) I rarely delve into the arcana of writing alternate history. However, when I was invited to participate in this anthology by my editor, Jason Cordova, I very much wanted to bring one of my favorite daydreams to life.
Most people know that Leonardo da Vinci drew up blueprints during his lifetime (okay, sketches really) for a war cart ringed with cannon that would later become popularized as history’s first idea for the modern tank. Of course, da Vinci’s version had no engine beyond the feet of the soldiers who would presumably man it, and it was conceived of as a purely anti-personnel unit.
What fewer people know, is that da Vinci also conceived of a breech-loading, steam-powered cannon. This weapon, which he called the architonnere, worked by superheating the barrel and breech of the gun. After each round was introduced into the breech, and the breech sealed, a bell would allow water to enter just behind the breech, where it would instantly flash into steam and thus fire the round.
I will hasten to add that as a historian I do not consider it terribly realistic to speculate that the real Leonardo da Vinci would, in any conceivable set of circumstances, actually be able to marry all of these ideas together along with a flywheel drive to create the tank, or (since that word was the result of a code name given by the real armored fighting vehicles’ British inventors) the tortoise, as it is described in the story, but that’s where fiction comes in. I hope you will all enjoy the story of Jeanne d’Architonnere and those of my fellow authors.
G. Scott Huggins 