I’ve been hinting at it for a long time, now, but the folks at Raconteur Press are ready and Through A Spyglass Darkly, the first book in The Adventures of Jehanne Dark, is ready for release on January 28th, but you can preorder it on January 14th!
In a realm where stone gazes turn men to statues and ancient magics bind the fate of kings, Jehanne Dark, daughter of men and gorgons, hungers for escape form the blood-soaked life of an assassin. When a ruthless usurper’s quest for power drives thrusts Jehanne into a quest for revenge, Jehanne sees her chance: pledge her lethal talents to the besieged King Michael in exchange for sanctuary and pardon.
But as betrayal coils like a serpent, Jehanne must navigate forbidden sorcery, shifting alliances, and her own monstrous heritage. Can she claim victory without losing her humanity… or her heart?
Praise for Through A Spyglass Darkly“THROUGH A SPYGLASS DARKLY is a gripping fantasy adventure in a world of scheming mermaids, vengeful kings, and a half-gorgon assassin who might also be a saint.” — D.J. Butler, Author of Witchy Eye, Baen Books
“Political intrigue done right! Scott gives you well-crafted characters in an immersive fantasy world and a story that takes you on a wild ride!”
–Melissa Olthoff, Author of Rise from Ruin, Baen Books
If you liked Jehanne’s first adventure, in Talons and Talismans, you’re hungry for more.
Are any of my fellow men — and I use that term deliberately — as tired as I am of being told that Men Don’t Read?
What bullshit. Every man I grew up around read. They read awesome books, full of adventure, ideas, and insight, and they taught me to read those same awesome books. In a way, they taught me to write awesome books!
Which is why I’m supporting the Based Books For Male Readers Sale — and putting your money to work for you harder than it normally would. Find A Cold And Mortal Spring for just one dollar. And not just that, but many other great books by great writers. But act fast, because it’s all gone after August 5th.
There’s a story I want to write sometime, and there’s so many possible variants of it that I don’t mind sharing the idea, because it’s cool and because it allows me to go on a rant about the absurdity of “nonlethal force.”
It’s a common lament by those who know nothing about physics, biology, and combat (usually all three) after a fatal shooting that “they should have tried harder not to kill him.” The fact that sometimes this is true only complicates the matter. Usually there’s some degree of wondering why so-called nonlethal measures were not available or deployed.
Of the nonlethal force commonly depicted in movies and bloviated about by know-nothings, all have their difficulties. Gas can be dispersed by wind, rain, is hard to direct, possible to resist, can be neutralized fairly easily and can be fatal against the wrong targets. Tasers can be defeated by thick clothing or strike an area that fails to incapacitate. Drug darts take a long time to work. Allegedly sublethal force such as rubber bullets, blows to the head and blunt weapons can quickly become lethal in the wrong circumstances.
However, the whole argument can be seen for the moot pile of rubbish it is simply by doing a little thought experiment: consider the Star Trek phaser. It’s really the perfect nonlethal weapon: it works instantly, isn’t blocked by armor thinner than a wall, and renders the victim asleep for minutes to hours with no harmful aftereffects.
What’s never seen in Star Trek is the answer to the simple question, what happens if you bounce a six-foot man’s head off a concrete floor with no way for his reflexes to save him. That can crack a skull and kill you. And that assumes the man is standing still. What if he is running at about 10 mph? Riding a bicycle? Driving a car? Standing on a ledge? In a tree? In such circumstances, all of which would be quite common in chasing down a criminal, even a Star Trek phaser would quickly become, regardless of the will of the user, a lethal weapon.
None of this even touches, of course, on how much harm such a weapon could do in the hands of a bad actor. Imagine a world in which kidnappers can insure their victims do not struggle or scream. Murderers would have ample time to take their victims to sites comparatively easy to conceal or destroy. And the thought of it in the hands of a rapist is too awful to contemplate. there are any numbers of stories that could be written about the perversion of the nonlethal, and the more I think most of them would quickly descend into the horror genre.
My new release form Cannon Publishing, A COLD AND MORTAL SPRING, first novel of The Wishkiller Saga, is already available in hardcover and paperback, but releases on Kindle in two days.
Please enjoy the excerpt below:
The keepwood was practically deserted. They met no one on the stairs climbing the height of the trunk. Aethal took a lantern from a wall sconce and pushed the door of Malcoor’s office open.
Shadows faded back to reveal a simple office, nothing more. Jeralta had been right. The room was nearly as big as the one above, if not so lavishly appointed. All was in order, down to the map cases hung from wall pegs and reams of files, neatly arranged in cubby holes. Half the cubbies were emptied. The files in the rest had a distinctly used look to them, as if they had been pushed back hastily. The bookshelves were full, but the writing desk was empty.
“Someone’s been in here, my Lord,” said Falk.
Aethal nodded. “Royal Auditors.” He crossed to a trunk the size of a wardrobe. In a space that could have held at least a dozen massive volumes. One remained, tunneled by bookworms. Aethal opened it to the back page. “This ledger is last dated thirty years ago. They’ll have everything else. Very thorough.” The sergeant shrugged. They headed up to their own room to continue their search.
“Well, they’ve really gone and done it,” Falk said. “Arrested the old bastard. And double-quick, too.”
“Why do you say that? Nothing here seems disarranged.”
Falk rapped a flat, single guffaw. “Malcoor always was a neat one,” he growled. “But they made him travel light.” Falk threw back the doors at the narrower end of the room. Orange and-blue uniforms swayed gently in the walk-in closets, plus a few neat civilian outfits, gathering dust. Shoes and boots gleamed. “This is almost Malcoor’s full kit. They marched him out of here with maybe one or two changes of clothes; one dress uniform if I’m any judge.”
Aethal cast about the room, looking for anything more. “It all fits, certainly. They wouldn’t have moved him off in style if they suspected him of theft.” Aethal gazed at the bookshelves, stopped. There, all together, sat three books with no titles on their spines. Two were thick and squat, but the third was nearly as broad as the ledger in the trunk, despite being not a quarter so thick, and stuffed with loose parchments. Aethal took them down.
The first book was also a ledger, and at first Aethal thought he’d found some sort of evidence that the Auditors had missed, but if so, Malcoor’s theft was both enormous and arcane. It resembled a bill of lading more than a ledger, though for what Aethal could not have said. An expedition, perhaps; the paper was yellow with age. It told him nothing.
The second book was more interesting, though the same age. It was a journal, but the script was so small it would be a challenge to read. He’d been about to put it back when the opening line caught his eye: “Passed the Wrackberg to the salute of Cannon – and may the little Bastard explode his own Self! Clear sailing!” Whom does that refer to? It’s not a documentary of thirty years watching the Pass, then. Aethal pocketed it. He opened the third book to the middle.
Color leaped from every page. Aethal felt himself draw in a breath. In the dim light, blue and white chalks nearly glowed. Aethal flipped back one of the flimsy parchments that protected the page and looked down on a scene drawn by a madman.
It was a coastline, impossibly small, dominated by a green mountain impossibly huge, cast into shadow by the moons, showing low against the horizon. He turned the page. This one was painted: a ship, silhouetted against a burning mountain with red rivulets of fire running down its sides. Above the ship were stars picked out in a sort of quicksilver paint, Aethal guessed. He recognized the constellations.
“Who ever knew the old man was an artist?” asked Aethal, full of wonder. Malcoor had always been the General for him, set in the Pass specifically to drum lessons into young lieutenant heads. Experienced, wise, and even clever in his lessons, he had never been warm and always a little sour. None of this fit Aethal’s picture of him. He turned the page again, and his knees gave way.
It was the first coastline, this time in broad day. The green mountain dominated the coast. And there were low shapes of trees covering the land as far as the artist could have drawn. Not so tall as keepwoods but low and at least as broad. The dark green leaves spread, casting blue chalk-shadows over golden sands. Beneath them there were gleams of silver. Nightmare vision, of Lotus triumphant.
Aethal could hear his own breathing, loud in his ears. Falk’s face was white, his lips moving soundlessly. He knew what he was looking at now. The Empire, lost to the Lotus forever. And who knew that Malcoor had ever been in the Fleet? No, but he had used to tell stories, hadn’t he, on the rare days of rest? Of the days when his father had been in the Fleet. Was this his father’s work, kept out of sentiment? Aethal recognized the handwriting, though. Had seen it often enough in his time here.
“But that would mean breaking Maednac’s Ban; would mean going west of the Prime…” Aethal felt cold. Maednac had long ago decreed on pain of death that none should ever again sail within sight of the lost Empire. The order had never been revoked.
If Malcoor had done that, he would be guilty of deeper treason than Verlaen had ever known. So they discovered it and arrested him? After thirty years? Oh, and then left the evidence here? For a wild moment, Aethal wondered if he might be seeing a confession, of a sort, by the man who had brought the Lotus, but he dismissed the idea instantly. In thirty years, the Lotus would have covered Verlaen mile by mile, five or ten times over. Malcoor cannot be the culprit. I must be the only one who knows of these records besides him.
Impossible: Only Aethal, Jeharok and Farnan knew of his mission to Maednac Serpiin. Yet his father had sent Jeralta to meet him. Perhaps his father had discovered Malcoor’s crime as well, was even now putting Malcoor’s head beneath a greatsword for treason… and thus robbing Verlaen of one of the few living men to ever have seen Lotus.
Aethal forced himself to calm down. It didn’t make sense, but could it really be coincidence? Does my father know? Does the King know already? Why did that frighten him? It would be a great relief; it meant that they would be putting protective measures in place, tightening the Discipline. Or it meant that Lotus might already be rampant in Maednac Serpiin.
If you’d like to read another, longer excerpt chosen by the author, please sign up for my newsletter, HERE, and I will see that you are sent one!
I am very pleased to announce that Cannon Publishing has accepted for publication A Cold And Mortal Spring, a novel I started long ago. You can read the blurb and preorder it HERE. This is my dark, guns-and-sorcery epic. I expect it to run for four or five books. I took a real chance with this one. You see, for thirty years I’ve read David Weber, the author of, among other things, the Honor Harrington series. I fell in love with Honor Harrington. I named my CAT Honor. I don’t know David particularly well, though we have spoken at conventions.
I asked David Weber to read this book, in hopes he would blurb it. I expected he would tell me he was too busy.
A month ago, he wrote me back. He said, “[T]his is the first new book I’ve read in a long time that I really, really didn’t want to stop reading and that kept pulling me along to find out what was going to happen.”
That’s how I felt about all his books, too. I made David Weber say that. About this book.
I really don’t think I can add any more to that. EXCEPT OF COURSE THIS MASSIVE PREORDER BUTTON FROM AMAZON. PRESS IT NOW FOR AWESOME BLACK POWDER/MAGIC ADVENTURE!
Oh, dear God, do I owe myself an apology for watching this. Best I can say is that I watched it while doing household chores, so I didn’t COMPLETELY waste my life.
I can pretty much tell you exactly how this movie came about. Once upon a time there was a studio that found itself having the movie rights to DOOM, the game that, after Wolfenstein 3D, birthed the entire FPS genre of videogames, and a contract with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson for A Movie To Be Named Later. And lo, an executive who neither played videogames nor read fiction did say, “These things I shall combine, that the studio shall make money, and I shall obtain a corner office with bonuses. Hire me a director, and make this shit.”
And so there was a director, who was handed this shit sandwich, and he said to his minions, “These rights and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson have already eaten yea three-fourths of my budget. Find me a writer willing to crap out a script for California’s minimum wage.”
Swiftly a writer was found, who said, “Behold, I have already a script which received a C- in my Screenwriting 352 class at UCLA for being, in the words of my professor, “a shitty retread of World War Z on Mars fueled by methamphetamines dissolved in cheap vodka.”
“Canst thou erase all traces of originality from thy work, so that it may include all this that ye shall find in this 10 year old treatment of the property?” asked the director. And the screenwriter said unto him, “Yea, verily, where is my paycheck?”
In the words of Douglas Adams (paraphrased) they produced a movie that was almost entirely quite unlike DOOM. This movie is the exact opposite of the brilliant imaginations and playful fun that produced such unexpected gems as CLUE and THE LEGO MOVIE. DOOM is sucked dry, not only of any originality, but also of any joy or fun in the original work. It is, on all possible levels, a complete waste of everyone’s time.
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.
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.
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.
G. Scott Huggins 