For Your Viewing Pleasure: The Greyfriar: Vampire Empire Book One (full cover spread)

The Greyfriar (Vampire Empire Book One) © Clay Griffith and Susan Griffith

Trade Paperback November 2010
Cover Illustration © Chris McGrath

Design by Grace M. Conti-Zilsberger

"Great writing, intriguing antagonists and one scrappy heroine make this a worthy addition to the steampunk genre. ... Princess Adele makes a great role model for tween and teen girls – not to mention some adults – and the Greyfriar is everything a steampunk hero should be." RT Book Reviews

In the year 1870, a horrible plague of vampires swept over the northern regions of the world. Millions of humans were killed outright. Millions more died of disease and famine due to the havoc that followed. Within two years, once-great cities were shrouded by the grey empire of the vampire clans. Human refugees fled south to the tropics because vampires could not tolerate the constant heat there. They brought technology and a feverish drive to reestablish their shattered societies of steam and iron amid the mosques of Alexandria, the torrid quietude of Panama, or the green temples of Malaya.

It is now 2020 and a bloody reckoning is coming.

Princess Adele is heir to the Empire Equatoria, a remnant of the old tropical British Empire. She is quick with her wit as well as with a sword or gun. She is eager for an adventure before she settles into a life of duty and political marriage to a man she does not know. But her quest turns black when she becomes the target of a merciless vampire clan. Her only protector is the Greyfriar, a mysterious hero who fights the vampires from deep within their territory. Their dangerous relationship plays out against an approaching war to the death between humankind and the vampire clans.

The Greyfriar (Vampire Empire, Book One) is the first book in a trilogy of high adventure and alternate history. Combining rousing pulp action with steampunk style, the Vampire Empire series brings epic political themes to life within a story of heartbreaking romance, sacrifice, and heroism.

The Wolf Age: what Tolkien might have written had he lived in this postmodern age.

Art by Dominic Harman

John Ottinger III has posted a review of James Enge's The Wolf Age over at Grasping for the Wind. His thoughts below (pay particularly attention to that last bit):

"Ultimately, Enge continues to tread new ground. The Wolf Age is a novel-length sword and sorcery that integrates both ghost-driven airships, a democratic society with a bloody electoral process, and werewolves all into a beautiful yet oddly twisted civilization. The Wolf Age is mythic in its tone and content, yet modern in its theme, and bound up with action-adventure. It’s a masterpiece of storytelling; it’s what Tolkien might have written had he lived in this postmodern age."

For Your Viewing Pleasure: The Wolf Age (full cover spread)

The Wolf Age by James Enge
Trade Paperback October 2010
Cover Illustration © Dominic Harman
Design by Jacqueline Cooke
(click to enlarge)

"James Enge's books are like a strange alloy of Raymond Chandler, Fritz Leiber, Larry Niven and some precious metal that is all Enge's own. They're thrilling, funny, and mysteriously moving. I see ten things on every page I wish I’d written. I could read him forever and never get bored." Lev Grossman, New York Times bestselling author of The Magicians

Wuruyaaria: city of werewolves, whose raiders range over the dying northlands, capturing human beings for slaves or meat. Wuruyaaria: where a lone immortal maker wages a secret war against the Strange Gods of the Coranians. Wuruyaaria: a democracy where some are more equal than others, and a faction of outcast werewolves is determined to change the balance of power in a long, bloody election year.

Their plans are laid; the challenges known; the risks accepted. But all schemes will shatter in the clash between two threats few had foreseen and none had fully understood: a monster from the north on a mission to poison the world, and a stranger from the south named Morlock Ambrosius.

Mark Hodder on Steampunk @ The Mad Hatter's Bookshelf & Book Review

Illustration by Jon Sullivan

Mark Hodder, author of The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, has a great piece on the appeal of Steampunk up today at The Mad Hatter's Bookshelf & Book Review.

Here's a taste: "The iconic machinery of that age was—and still is—a symbol of strength, hope and ambition. It was powering the Victorians into a bright future. For the educated classes, it promised the spread—and thus an affirmation—of their cultural values (of “civilisation”). For the working classes, it hinted at a possible future release from the backbreaking drudgery of labour—for surely machines would do all the ugly, horrible, uninteresting jobs?—freeing up time for something (anything!) else."

Podcasts and Blog Interviews: Sykes and Enge

Sam Sykes, author of Tome of the Undergates, defends the honor of Canadians, the French, fantasy trilogies, and combat-heavy books on the latest SF Signal Podcast, even if he does take another shot at Brent Weeks. The story Sykes tells about Yours Truly in the shows closing minutes should be viewed only as hearsay. But the rest of the podcast is well worth checking out.

Meanwhile, James Enge (The Wolf Age) is a guest on the latest episode of The Functional Nerds today. I'll be checking it out myself shortly, but they say they discuss "Latin, Morlock, sword & socrcery, Blood of Ambrose, This Crooked Way, Merlin, publishing, Popular Science, Norse mythology, Mickey Zucker Reinhurt, Jack Vance, Frtiz Leiber, Roman & Greek mythology, Thor, Beta Ray Bill, Dwarves, creating languages, Klingon & Pyr books" so you must be as intrigued as I am.

Meanwhile, over on the Black Gate blog, James Enge and Howard Andrew Jones (author of the forthcoming The Desert of Souls) discuss "Writing Serial Characters and the Book Deal." Their back and forth conversation is fascinating and informative.

Diving into the Wreck: An addictive blend of mystery and space adventure

Illustration by Dave Seeley

Over at SF Signal, John DeNardo reviews Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Diving into the Wreck this morning. He calls Diving, "a consistently palatable blend of mystery and space adventure, one that's filled with sense of wonder. What secrets do the ships contain? What dangers do they hold? Rusch's prose, infused with top-notch world building, makes it a pleasure to find out, with a clear and straightforward writing style that's easily absorbed. The characters are well drawn, too, each one exhibiting traits that make them unique." He further says that their is "never a dull moment" and that he is eagerly awaiting the sequel (City of Ruins, out May 2011).


John DeNardo's review is actually the second review at SF Signal. Earlier, JP Frantz called Diving into the Wreck "One of the few books in recent memory that I hated to put down and couldn't wait to pick up again."

Both John and JP will be glad to hear that Rusch has also written several short stories and novellas set in the universe of the books. The stories so far in the "Diving universe" are:

•”Diving into the Wreck,” first published in Asimov’s, December 2005. Reprinted
in Recovering Apollo 8 And Other Stories, Golden Gryphon Press, 2010.
•“The Room of Lost Souls,” first published in Asimov’s, April/May, 2008. 
Electronic edition published by WMG Publishing, 2011.
• “The Spires of Denon,” first published in Asimov’s, April/May, 2009.
Electronic version published by WMG Publishing, 2010. Reprinted in Five Short
Novels from Five Story Publishing 2010.
• “Becoming One With The Ghosts,” first published in Asimov’s, October/November,
2010.
• “Becalmed,” to be published in Asimov’s, 2011.

You can find more information on the Diving website, www.divingintothewreck.com.

Interview and Reviews

James Enge  drops by Suvudu to share five facts about his forthcoming novel, The Wolf Age. See "Take Five with James Enge" for  what powers a magical zeppelin and why the Grateful Dead are cool. Meanwhile, Sam Sykes, author of Tome of the Undergates, answers "8 Shoddy Questions" on SFFNews today, including #8, "Who would win in a fight between a Koala Bear and a Wombat?" Sam was also recently featured on John Scalzi's The Big Idea, in which he explained that "crotch stompin'" was just the icing on the cake in his examination of what it truly means to be an adventurer. And Twelve author Jasper Kent has an excellent interview up at Pat's Fantasy Hotlist.

Meanwhile, here's what they are saying about our books:

The Dervish House by Ian McDonald:  “McDonald flawlessly weaves the different characters and plotlines together with a masterful touch as he draws upon current events to chart the probable future of Turkey. The protagonists are fully developed against the backdrop of the vividly imagined city of Istanbul while emerging technology holds the potential to change everything. Sci-fi just doesn’t get much better then this.” -Monsters and Critics, September 25, 2010

Blood of Ambrose by James Enge: “Blood of Ambrose is slick, weaving a dark tale of despair and death as our heroes struggle to save their kingdom and, as the book moves forward, the entire continent as a darker and far more dangerous adversary is revealed. Enge’s style is more show than tell and for Blood of Ambrose this works magically as the Two Cities of the Ontilian Empire seem to breathe life throughout the pages…It seemed too soon when I reached the end, so well had Enge penned this barbaric and epic tale. I fully understand now why the book was recently nominated for Best Fantasy Book of the Year.”-Shiny book Review, September 16, 2010

The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie: “Three days of rabid reading later, if there is one word that should unequivocally never, ever be used to describe The Blade Itself, that word would be ordinary. This is the type of book that spoils you, the kind of book that makes nearly everything else on your bookshelf look mediocre, the kind of thing that could forever wreck “ordinary” fantasy for you…Maybe my inner geek is showing, but reading The Blade Itself put me a little in the mind of watching the original Star Wars movie.” ​-The Little Red Reviewer blog, September 21, 2010

The Cardinal’s Blades by Pierre Pevel: “…this is a wildly entertaining read with delightfully broken characters. Were I ten again, I'd be running around the park with sticks, pretending to be the half-dragon Saint-Lucq. Also like Dumas, The Cardinal's Blades isn't "great literature" - there aren't deeper themes or higher ideals at stake: this is a book of swashbuckling excess, and should be celebrated as such.” -Pornokitsch.com, September 17, 2010

I Am So There!

Via Pat's Fantasy Hotlist:

For Your Viewing Pleasure: The Cardinal's Blades (full cover spread)

The Cardinal’s Blades by Pierre Pevel
Translated by Tom Clegg
Cover Illustration © Jon Sullivan 
Design by Jacqueline Cooke

Winner of the 2010 David Gemmell Morningstar Award for Best Fantasy Newcomer

“Bold and completely absorbing, Pevel’s English language debut is exciting stuff.” Total Sci-Fi Online

Welcome to seventeenth century Paris, where intrigue, duels and spies are rife and Cardinal Richelieu’s agents may be prevailed upon to risk life and limb in the name of France at a moment’s notice. And with war on the horizon, the defense of the nation has never been more pressing.

Danger is rising from the south--an insidious plot which could end with a huge dragon- shaped shadow falling over France. A shadow cast by dragons quite unlike the pet dragonets which roam the cities like stray cats, or the tame wyverns men ride like horses, high over the Parisian rooftops. These dragons and their descendants are ancient, terrible and powerful... and their plans contain little room for the lives or freedom of puny humans.

Cardinal Richelieu has nowhere else to turn; Captain La Fargue and his elite group of agents, the Cardinal’s Blades, must turn the tide. They must hold the deadly Black Claw cult at bay, root out traitors to the crown, rescue prisoners, and fulfill their mission for the Cardinal, for their country, but above all for themselves.

It’s death or victory. And the victory has never been less certain.

Fiends from the Past

I don't know how things are in the USA, but in the UK the seeds planted in the mind of many a small child on February 26^th 1977 are now bearing fruit in writers of every sort of alternative fiction. That was the day when the first issue (prog, as it was described) of 2000 AD first hit the streets. I was eight years old. Now I'm in my forties and letting the dark things that lurk somewhere in the recesses of my memory seep out into my work. There's nothing as straightforward as the wonderful cameo by Max Normal in Russell T. Davies' Doctor Who episode Gridlock, but there was one 2000 AD story that has to be acknowledged as an inspiration for my first novel Twelve. The connection may be surprising, since 2000 AD was a science fiction comic, and I don't (currently) write science fiction. But this particular comic strip wasn't SF – it was pure horror.

Fiends of the Eastern Front, by Gerry Finley-Day and Carlos Ezquerra, débuted in Prog 158. By then I was twelve. I'd never read it since then, but when the idea for a vampire story set during Napoleon's invasion of Russia came to me I immediately remembered what a powerful combination vampires and war make. Fiends was set on the eastern front in World War Two, with a mysterious squad of Romanian soldiers fighting alongside the Germans. It's the obvious location for such a story – the cold and the long nights providing the perfect environment for vampires to hunt. I quite deliberately didn't go back to look at the comic strip when I was writing Twelve, and it was in fact only last week – now that I'm three books into the quintet – that I got round to it. It's a reflection of modern life (and my indolence) that it was easier to order a bound single volume online than venture into the loft and pick out all the relevant editions from my hoarded comic collection.

I'd been fairly sure that I hadn't been ripping it off wholesale, and I was pleased to find no surprises on that front. The only idea that I knowingly took from Fiends, though it's a widespread piece of folklore, was that a vampire could be killed by decapitation. I could even recall the exact wording of the commentary: 'There are many ways to kill a vampire. Decapitation is one of them.' I think that's echoed in Aleksei's words in Twelve when he first kills one of the voordalaki by that means: 'Ever since Iuda had mentioned it, I had been itching to try decapitation as a method for despatching one of these creatures.'

As it happens, and I'd forgotten, the vampires in Fiends conform to just about every bit of folklore that there is: they don't like garlic or crosses; they can transform into bats and wolves; they can't cross fresh water; they can be killed by silver bullets. None of those characteristics applies to the voordalaki of my novels. One notable difference is that my vampires can be killed by fire, where those in Fiends cannot. Again, that was one of the few things I specifically remembered, and remembered almost exactly Captain Constanta's words when he revealed himself to have survived being incinerated by a flamethrower: 'Cringu told you I can grow from the smallest speck – even from ashes, you fool!' I made a definite decision that that was too unphysical for the world I was creating.

So I was well aware of the general connection between Twelve and Fiends of the Eastern Front – vampires fighting in a human war – and I knew a few specific characteristics that I'd chosen to use or ignore. However, there were two connections between the stories which I noticed on rereading Fiends that I had completely forgotten. Whether they come down to coincidence or subconscious recollection is hard to say.

The first is in the specificity of numbers. As the title suggests, Twelve is about twelve vampires, and much of the story involve the hero, Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov, picking them off one by one. In the opening of Fiends its hero, Hans Schmitt, is found dead and entombed and on the walls of the cellar he has drawn the silhouettes of ten vampires. He gets through them rather quicker than Aleksei, managing to kill seven of them in one assault. For me, the number came from the fact that I wanted to name my creatures after the apostles – so I suppose we should blame my childhood reading of the Bible, rather than of 2000AD, for that.

But the most surprising thing was the discovery that, like Twelve, Fiends was written in the first person. I'm often asked why I chose to write in the first person and I can't say anything other than it simply seemed right. The decision has a major impact on plotting, and in subsequent books I've not found it possible to put together an entire story from one viewpoint. You might think it difficult though for a comic strip – a medium in which the fourth wall is so evident – to be written in the first person. Fiends, however, is told mostly through the diary of Hans Schmidt, discovered with his body in the cellar in Berlin in the present day (as 1980 was described at the time). Thus every caption is, unlike most strips, part of a first person narrative. Again it could be coincidence, but I suspect that format may have influenced me.

So what next? Will one of my novels feature a character loosely based on Walter the Wobot, Judge Dredd's irritating sidekick? I doubt it, but it can't be denied that 2000 AD has been an inspiration to me as a writer. And I bet I'm not the only one.

Splundig Vur Thrigg.

www.jasperkent.com