I have eyewitness confirmation from a friend that my new novel The Scarab Mission has reached bookstores. Or a bookstore, anyway. I'm assuming the distributor isn't just shipping to one retailer. So to everyone who has been waiting for a copy, go forth and buy! And if your local store doesn't have The Scarab Mission, demand it!
And for a little lagniappe, here's my latest podcast appearance, on Roger and Janet Carden's The Halfling and the Spaceman. You can listen to it here.
Why resurrect a technology which has been sidelined for seventy years? Since the end of World War II flying boats have hung on in a couple of very specialized niches but otherwise they've joined long-range passenger airships in the category of "stuff we don't use any more." The modern world has paved runways everywhere, so airplanes don't need to land on the ocean.
Unless . . . you're the US Navy and Marine Corps, and you're thinking very hard about how you'd fight against a certain large country on the western side of the Pacific. You'd want to use the island chain running from Kamchatka to Australia as a line of unsinkable air bases and combat platforms. You'd want to be able to move forces rapidly around that region, which means you need something faster (and cheaper to replace) than amphibious landing ships.
Speculation: I expect older ballistic missile submarines will not be scrapped as newer boats replace them. Instead they're going to be repurposed as undersea transports, suitable for rapid, secret deployment of small combat units to islands near Asia.
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!
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.
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!
If you want to see an interview with my character Solana Sina, one of the protagonists of The Scarab Mission, check out this Web site: The Protagonist Speaks. Her interview is here. You can find out something about her awful childhood, her colleagues on the mission to Safdaghar, and some of what went wrong. Then you can buy the book and read all about it for yourself!
The second half of my interview with John Michael Godier is now available on his excellent Event Horizon YouTube channel. You can listen to it here. Hear me pontificate about star-mining, slow-motion interstellar colonization, nuclear war, and how planetary scientists have fallen in love with giant impacts.
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