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NEWS AND VIEWS - JANUARY 2020
WRITING NEWS The Demon in the Metal should be out pretty soon, in both print and ebook editions; I'm just waiting on the cover art now. It's been an unproductive month. I started writing Sneak, a new Signalverse novel, but I haven't made much progress yet; I'm still on the first chapter. One of my resolutions for this year was to try to be a little bit more aggressive in selling my books. One idea I had was to study some of the popular self-published authors on Amazon and try to figure out how they're doing it. Well, if the "Dark Fantasy" bestsellers are any indication, they're basically just selling smut. Almost every book in the top twenty has a painting of a half-naked woman on the cover, in stupid spiky fantasy armor with a chainmail bikini or whatever. As of this writing, the #21 ranked bestseller in the entire fantasy genre, in between books from The Witcher and Harry Potter series, is something called Monster Island Girls. This is the description: The beautiful monster girls of the Archipelagos were in need. As of this writing, the book -- the first in a series by a guy called Logan Jacobs -- has 395 five-star reviews. All of this guy's books have hundreds of five-star reviews. I didn't bother to sample his writing at all -- Monster Island Girls could be the next Lord of the Rings for all I know, and Logan Jacobs the next Tolkien -- but it sounds like straight-up pornography to me. I think I'm going to have a hard time breaking into this market. * * * * * * * * FANTASY FANDOM: THE CHOSEN OF THE CHANGELING Greg Keyes's Chosen of the Changeling series (The Waterborn and The Blackgod duology) is one of my favorites; these books are in my top five for fantasies. I first read them around 1996 or 1997, I think, shortly after they were released, and reread them two or three times after that. The series takes place in a world full of nature gods, and follows the adventures of Perkar, a young "cattle-man" from a pastoral culture, who takes it upon himself to try to kill the River, a powerful god, who is slowly killing and "eating" the smaller gods which surround him. Meanwhile Hezhi, a princess from the city of Nhol -- whose people worship the River exclusively -- is trying to unravel the mystery of what happened to her friend D'en, who was taken into the catacombs beneath the palace by the River's priests and never seen again. 
I think what I found most interesting about this series, the first time I read it, was the unique worldbuilding and anthropological realism. Most of the fantasies I'd read up to that point had a pretty basic medieval European flavor to them (borrowing from the Lord of the Rings, of course). The Waterborn and The Blackgod aren't like that; Perkar's culture seems kind of early Indo-European, while the more cosmopolitan Nhol has an almost ancient Egyptian feel to it. The Mang culture -- vaguely Native American, vaguely Mongolian -- is even more distant from medieval Europe. And the overall setting, this world full of gods and spirits, really captured my imagination. More importantly, though, the books are just fun to read, full of action, adventure, deepening friendships, surprising twists, and great characters. Several years after these books were released, Keyes came out with a collection of short stories, called The Hounds of Ash and Other Tales of Fool Wolf, set in the same world as The Chosen of the Changeling. I liked this one as well, but my edition, at least, was full of typos, which kind of detracted from my enjoyment of it. Still, it's worth picking up, for the sake of completeness. The Waterborn was Keyes's debut novel, and I've been following his career ever since. After The Chosen of the Changeling, he wrote a four-book alternate history, The Age of Unreason, which was quite good, and later on he wrote another four-book epic, The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, which is another great series. He spends most of his time writing movie and video game tie-in novelizations now (he's written Star Wars, Babylon 5, Pacific Rim, Planet of the Apes, Godzilla, Avengers, and Elder Scrolls novels, among others), which I confess I don't have much interest in (on the other hand, his Elder Scrolls novels were the two most enjoyable fantasies I read that year). But he still writes his own stuff, from time to time; his most recent series is The High and Faraway, which is generally sound. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M READING I bought a pile of books earlier this month: Brian McClellan's Blood of Empire, Harry Connolly's One Man, and Curtis Craddock's Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery. Haven't started in on any of them yet (still kind of busy) but I intend to soon. As for non-fiction, I'm looking forward to Tom Clavin's Wild Bill (a bio of Wild Bill Hickok), Hampton Sides's In the Kingdom of Ice (about the Jeannette expedition), and Samuel Bawlf's The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake. These ought to keep me busy for a couple months.
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