Just The Caffeine Talking

I've Got A Little List . . .

The nice people at Shepherd.com asked me to submit a list of five book recommendations. I chose "The Best Novels About Exploring Big Things In Space." It's kind of a funny coincidence that I chose that topic, right when I have a book out about people exploring a ruined space habitat. Their site has loads of other recommended-reading lists on a whole range of topics.

I'd love to hear if anyone has any suggestions for books on that same topic. Maybe you can come up with a better list than I did!

DiFilippo on Scarabs

Paul DiFilippo put up a very kind review of The Scarab Mission in his Locus column. You can read it here, at Locus Online.

The summary: he liked it. The review calls Scarab a "rousing, unstoppable, non-stop adventure," which is good to hear. That's what I wanted to write, but you never know if you hit the mark. I think that is the single most frustrating thing about writing: the lag time. I wrote Scarab in 2020-2021. The last revisions were done last summer. I've mentally moved on to the next book, and only now can I find out if anyone understands or likes what I was trying
to do three years ago. And of course some people won't find this book for months or years yet. 

Copies should now be hitting the mark in bookstores, so pick up yours today. Buy them all up so I can stop promoting and get back to the Worldbuilding series. 

 

FOUND!

Good news for everyone waiting to get a trade paperback copy of The Scarab Mission: the lost copies have been found! According to my publisher, "they should be going where they were supposed to this week." 

I'll send a signed bookplate to whoever comments first that they got their copy. (And to anyone else who requests one, but the first commenter gets bragging rights.)

The Big Idea: Writing For Games vs. Writing Fiction

I wrote a guest post for John Scalzi's Whatever blog, discussing my work writing roleplaying games and how that affected my fiction. You can find it here. For visual interest, check out the cover of Weird War I!

 

Scarab Mission World Exclusive!

If you want a copy of The Scarab Mission, make your way to the Westin Seaport Hotel in Boston and seek out the booth for Larry Smith Booksellers in the dealer area. They've got six signed, hand-delivered copies of The Scarab Mission, making them the only book dealer in the world right now capable of selling you one. Get them while the supply lasts!

Arisia 2023

This weekend Boston's biggest annual science fiction convention returns to the Westin Seaport hotel, January 13-16. I'll be there, promoting my rare and eagerly-sought new book The Scarab Mission. I'm also doing several panels and events.

Saturday, January 14

10:00 A.M.: Connecting With Your Kids Through Media — How liking the same nerdy stuff as your kids can draw you closer together.

4:00 P.M.: Overt and Covert Antagonists: Who's More Evil? — Which is worse, a bad guy you don't know about, or one who isn't afraid to make their villainy obvious?

8:30 P.M.: All Words Are Made Up — How to do alien or fantasy languages, what to avoid, and why it's important.

Sunday, January 15 

11:30 A.M.: Reading — I'll be reading some selections from The Scarab Mission.

2:30 P.M.: Gods Walk Among Us — Gods, both real and made-up, as characters in fantasy fiction.

When I'm not in these program events I'll be hanging around. If I can arrange it, there may be some copies of The Scarab Mission available (no guarantees). If that doesn't work out I can provide signed bookplates to paste into your copy when it finally arrives. And of course, I'll sign any of my older work, including games.

See you all at Arisia!

 

Scarab Mission Update

According to my publisher, The Scarab Mission was printed on time (and I have my comp copies as proof of that), they arrived at the Simon & Schuster warehouse on time, and at the proper moment they were shipped out . . . somewhere. Not to Amazon or bookstores. The good people at Simon & Schuster are trying to track them down and get them to where they need to go, and if the books have truly vanished into the Kuiper Belt then I guess they'll do a second printing. So to everyone who is waiting for a copy, please be patient. You will get your books, but it may be a little while.

This coming weekend, January 13-15, I will be at the Arisia convention in Boston, and I plan to bring some copies for booksellers in the dealer room. If you can get to the Westin Waterfront, you can get a copy before anyone else, and I'll be on hand to sign them.

Watch this space for news as I learn more.

Book Launch Party: Everyone On Earth is Invited!

This Saturday Baen Books is hosting a virtual Book Launch party for The Scarab Mission. At 8:00 p.m. Eastern US Time I'll be on a livestream — answering questions, talking about the book and future projects, and generally doing my best to be a funny dancing monkey.

You can see it on the Baen YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/y8rIEevkgIY

Or via Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/events/709418230573342

Or go to the Baen Books Twitter feed to find the link:  https://twitter.com/baenbooks 

Since this is a virtual party there's no limit to how many people can attend. Bring your friends, bring your children, bring random strangers. Let's see if we can get every living human watching!

I Don't Know What's Going On With Amazon

A number of eager fans have reported that they can't order the print edition of The Scarab Mission from Amazon. I don't know why this is happening. I've notified Baen Books about it, and I'm sure they've been rattling Amazon's cage.

I am sure that the books really exist. I got my complimentary copies weeks ago. It's possible that there were delays in shipping the copies to Amazon  — though that sounds unlikely to me, as it was printed in the USA, and transport within the country seems to be humming along pretty well. They may have under-ordered, though again that seems odd given Amazon's reputation for inventory management. They're selling the Kindle version, so it's not as if they've decided to "deplatform" me for some reason. 

In short, I don't know, I'm doing my best to find out, and as soon as I learn anything I'll pass it along. 

Notes on Scarabs

My newest novel, The Scarab Mission, hits the stores today. If you pre-ordered from Amazon it should be on your doorstep.

So . . . what's it all about, anyway? Where did this book come from and why did I write it?

The Scarab Mission is the second novel in my expanding "Billion Worlds" series of books and short stories. It's kind of a non-prequel to the first book in the series, The Godel Operation. I say non-prequel because there's only one character in common between the two books, and no direct plot links. The story takes place in the year 9965, about thirty-three years before Godel Operation begins.

The central idea of Scarab Mission — a rag-tag group of salvagers explore a space habitat full of perils — goes back to before I actually thought of the Billion Worlds setting. (If you really want to dig deep, I suppose it goes back to 1978, when I got my first Dungeons & Dragons set.) Some time in the early 2000s I had the notion of a group of "junkrats" exploring a vast alien derelict, possibly building whole communities inside the wreck.

Part of that notion — the vast alien artifact with humans living in and on it — became my short story "Object Three," which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 2011.

But the story of people exploring a vast wreck hung around, and when I began devising the Billion Worlds setting I realized it would fit perfectly. I got the idea of adding a "ticking clock" time limit to the story to create more tension. Initially I thought it would be a decaying orbit, with a space hab spiraling down to break up in the atmosphere of one of the outer giant worlds.

But the more I thought about that, the less plausible it seemed. For one thing, a decaying orbit is a bit fuzzy. It's more like a range of probabilities about when something will fall out of the sky, rather than a looming deadline. Not as dramatic.

And for another, who would throw away a whole space habitat, even if it is deserted? That's a lot of valuable material, and in a fully-colonized Solar System, metals and heavy elements would be in high demand. That realization gave me the idea of kicking the derelict hab into a "gravity slingshot" encounter with Jupiter to sent it off into the far outer reaches of the Solar System, where the comet-dwellers would be especially desperate for those resources.

That, in turn, gave me a different time limit: the crew have to get off the hab in time to use Jupiter's atmosphere for braking, or risk going off on a decades-long orbit into deep space. It also gave me a reason for them to be there at all! If you're the crew sending the wreck into its new orbit, then it's perfectly natural to spend a little time poking around to look for some useful stuff to take off for extra profit.

Once I had the basic physical realities of the story, the rest was simply an exercise in brainstorming Bad Things to happen to my scavenger crew. Hazards and death-traps aboard the station. Various villains who want to kill, enslave, or maroon them. A couple of dark secrets to motivate people. And a fabulous treasure for them to seek.

Enjoy!