Book promo
If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
FROM RACONTEUR PRESS, WITH STORIES BY M. C. A. HOGARTH AND DAVID BOCK: Moggies Back in Space (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 14)
Cats go where they want. Moggies even more so. When humans go to space, obviously cats will come along to make sure their staff are doing what they’re supposed to.
Join these 10 authors as they explore what cats can do in space.
FROM DUSTIN BALLARD: Dueling Wizards: The Sellsword Saga
In the gritty fantasy world of Galhadria, a down on his luck mercenary limps into a dangerous border town.
Sellsword Cas is broke and battered, but he senses opportunity.
Three rival wizards vie for control of town and are paying good coin for mercenaries. Cas plays one faction against another, meaning to gather enough gold to escape – but as blood is shed and employers betrayed, he finds himself with fewer and fewer options to get out of this town alive.
FROM CAROLINE FURLONG: Debris (The Rise of the Discarded Series Book 1)
Lost in thought, Ayar’s mind was on his invention that would allow premature griffin cubs to survive. He had no inkling he would rescue a creature that he suspected might be rational. Who would put one of their own out to die like that?
Rhys Callahan wanted to avoid a point of known pirate activity. Then he flew directly into one, and his ship was shot out of the sky. He managed a terrifying crash-landing on the nearest planet only to find himself among regressed humans who thought he was a god. When they realized he wasn’t, they became angry. Then they chained him to an upthrust boulder as a sacrifice to their local deity.
Neither Ayar nor Rhys ever expected to meet one another. But now that they have, maybe together they can fight for both their kinds. First, though, they need to learn how to communicate – and hope that neither of them is killed before they can get their enterprise off the ground!
Welcome to the first book in the Rise of the Discarded series!
FROM DANIEL ZEIDLER: Sarbotel Rising
Sarbotel Rising contains the complete Sarbotel Rising Duology (Book 1: The Standard Bearer’s Oath and Book 2: Ilse’s Game) in one volume.
When Ilse was five, the army of a mad alien mage known only as the Tyrant captured the capitol of the kingdom of Sarbotel, trapping all who were within its walls. Fourteen years later, she is the only surviving member of her resistance cell and free of the city, but rather than returning to the safety of her homeland, she has sworn an oath to kill the Tyrant and avenge the deaths of her family and comrades. The Tyrant is more dangerous than Ilse knows, and not all of her new allies can be trusted, but Ilse has teamed up with one of the Guardians…
Heldron, an immortal Guardian, has returned to the world of Seuthes on a mission to disable a powerful magical artifact that has kept the rest of the Guardians away from their homeworld for a millennium. He quickly discovers that, with a lost princess in need of assistance, a kingdom fighting to be free, and an anxious alien war machine considering destroying the planet, his mission is not a straightforward as it seemed…
FROM SABRINA ROSEN: The Sorceress Unbound: Chloe Delis Book 1
Chloe Delis has a new job as the Sorceress
for the city of West Rhodes.
But her spells are behaving unpredictably,
And she has a terrible case of imposter syndrome
The murder of the priestess who might have given her
Some insights into her new abilities plunges her in over her head.
Officer Skylos Whiterock isn’t sure the new Sorceress is all
the city council was hoping for, but he’s willing to keep silent about her quirks
as long as he’s sure she’s not a danger to the people he’s responsible for.
If only she didn’t look so much like his first love.
Then a beastial starts eating its victim’s internal organs
And it’s like nothing Chloe’s been trained for.
Can she find the creature and kill it before it takes another life?
FROM AURORA DAWN: Hallowing Eve: A Billionaire Boss Romance
Billionaire boss Lucas Danvers keeps his assistant, Evelyn Fontana, very close and very busy. He values her efficiency and intelligence and needs it available to him at all times. It certainly isn’t because he’s in love with her and wants to keep her away from other men. It’s simply a question of respecting her abilities.
That is, until she breaks their tradition of couples’ costumes for the company Halloween party, for which she is solely responsible. When she shows up to the shindig as Eve to his Executive Vice-President Nick Wilbright’s Adam, he has no choice but to disrupt their Edenic date plans dressed as Lucifer. Even if he wants to change the traditional story just a bit.
Nick Wilbright’s been in love with his best friend since college, but Lucas’ procession of supermodels, starlets, and superhot women of all sorts have kept him from making his feelings known. Not to mention that it’s obvious he’s in love with his assistant. Then Evelyn comes to him with a proposition: attend the company Halloween party with her, in matching costumes meant to provoke Lucas to finally pick one of them. Or both.
Will Lucas re-enact the scene in the Garden, or can he tempt both Adam and Eve into sin?
FROM RICHARD MEREDITH: The Crow’s Nest
Winner of 2021 Silver Falchion Award for Best Action-Adventure Novel at the Killer Nashville Mystery, Thriller, and Suspense Writers Conference
Submerged in a crude submarine hundreds of miles from shore and ten tons of cocaine stolen from a ruthless drug lord, Chase Brenner’s only chance to save his family rests with a drug addled smuggler and a desperate gambit to outwit the cartel.
Chase Brewer, a crewman on a commercial tuna seiner, barely escapes death after his boat and its crew are destroyed by el Hermandad—a sinister cartel hell-bent on eliminating all witnesses to its unique smuggling operation. After surviving an arduous voyage in a flimsy boat, he seeks answers and a little retribution. Hot on the trail for clues, Chase rescues Jonny LeBeau, a Louisiana shrimper forced into smuggling by the cartel but now on its hit list after skimming drugs. When the cartel realizes Chase survived and a witness is on the loose, both men are now in its crosshairs.
In a desperate gambit to bargain for their lives, Chase and Jonny hijack a narco-submarine with ten tons of cocaine. The secrecy of the cartel’s billion-dollar enterprise hinges on silencing this dubious pair of extortionists. Jonny, though, proves he’s as cunning as the cartel’s most savage sicario. But the cartel plays its trump card and Jonny faces the moral dilemma of his life—ditch Chase, the man who saved him from death, and escape with riches beyond his wildest dreams or lose it all and, maybe, his life to ransom Chase’s wife and children after they’re kidnapped by the cartel.
FROM KAREN MYERS: Mistress of Animals: A Lost Wizard’s Tale (The Chained Adept Book 2)
AN ERRANT CHILD WITH DISASTROUS POWERS AND NO ONE TO STAND IN HER WAY.
Penrys, the wizard with a chain and an unknown past, is drafted to find out what has happened to an entire clan of the nomadic Zannib. Nothing but their empty tents remain, abandoned on the autumn steppe with their herds.
This wasn’t a detour she’d planned on making, but there’s little choice. Winter is coming, and hundreds are missing.
The locals don’t trust her, but that’s nothing new. The question is, can she trust herself, when she discovers what her life might have been? Assuming, of course, that the price of so many dead was worth paying for it.
FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Wolf and the Well-Tempered Clavier
With the coronation fast approaching, the Cathedral of St. George the Dragonslayer cannot afford trouble. But come it does, while the cathedral choir director is at the Dragon’s Breath Organ, practicing the anthem he wrote at King William’s own request. While explaining some technical terms to his understudy, the choir director decides to show off a little.
In the process, he releases an ancient menace from long before humanity came through the worldgate to this place. An entity that strikes him blind, and threatens further harm to anyone who tries to play the Dragon’s Breath Organ.
However, they dare not disappoint His Majesty, not on the most momentous day of his reign. Someone must cleanse the Dragon’s Breath Organ of this malicious entity, and the choir director cannot. So the task falls to Miss Anne Teesdale, understudy organist.
Now she must delve into the history of the cathedral, and the mysterious ancient magic that fills the organ’s windchest. A secret that may well cost this young woman her life.
Or worse, her sanity.
An Ixilon story.
FROM M. C. A. HOGARTH: Sleigh Bells and Starships: A Peltedverse Holiday Collection.
At last, all the Peltedverse holiday stories in one place… plus a whole new novella!
- Precious Things
- Season’s Meaning
- Christmas Lullaby
- The Snow Maiden: or the Case with the Holiday Blues
- Case Study: The Tree
- Longest Night
- Silver and Gold
- …and the bonus story TBA!
Indulge your holiday cheer!
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.
If you have questions, feel free to ask.
Your writing prompt this week is: REFLECTIVE
According To Hoyt 
There’s a link missing for FROM DUSTIN BALLARD: Dueling Wizards: The Sellsword Saga
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fixed
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Thanks.
It pointed at the dead tree version but I got the Kindle version.
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“What what happened?” whined the student as he regained consciousness.
His trainer chuckled and replied “You forgot that Shielder’s shields can be reflective. He reflected your energy blast right back at you.”
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Then she took out a sword. “I think this is yours.”
He gave her a sidelong glance.
“Well, there was this chapel,” said Autumn, and recited the story. Which would explain why she carried a sword. Then she scowled. “It’s a sword from a holy chapel. Is it safe for him? With what she did to witch his heart?”
A moment’s reflection had him on his feet and reaching for the sword. “You are not safe if taking this sword would kill me.”
No one else moved. It was harder than he had thought to reach out and take it.
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Heh, good word to work with…
Alparslan swore violently before he urged Elnath to the side. The Carnelian Avalanche moved much faster than its size and armaments would suggest, allowing him to dodge the incoming light beam before returning fire with his cannon. Idiots, every last one of these Arevians! Did they not know reflective armor when they saw it?!
Then again, it didn’t seem like the Alliance forces on the other side were much brighter. One of them aimed a fire beam at Lord Protector Edmund and Alpheratz, only for the Mad Empress’ champion to call up the Diamond Paladin’s own barriers and bounce it back at the poor fool who conjured it. Whoever it was didn’t have Alparslan’s skill and went down in a flash of magical fire before he could react. Still, something about the armor on the Alliance mech, which looked to be a Wenlock model –
“Kill now, think about tech later Alparslan,” Elnath admonished. “We’ve got the advantage!”
“No need to remind me, Boğa!” the engineer snapped, shifting the mech’s grip on the weapon and flicking the switch that deployed its axe-like blade attachment.
Elnath hit the nearby contingent of Baldrazian soldiers like its nickname, cutting down one Jaeger after another. The bullets of the fire support unit bounced off Elnath’s armor like pebbles before Alparslan once again shifted the weapon and fired an explosive round, scattering them. Truly, there wasn’t a worthy opponent among them.
“Or is there?” he thought when he caught sight of a familiar draconic green mech with its ebony wings spread.
“Better to ask the Lord Protector’s forgiveness than his permission when it comes to taking Vincent Austin’s head, eh, Elnath?” Alparslan asked, grinning as he his sights on the Jade Tempest.
“Damn straight!” the taurine mech agreed before they charged their target.
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The reflective strips on modern EMU’s were supposed to help astronauts on the surface see each other in the endless grayness of the lunar surface. However, that assumed there was adequate light, and those strips weren’t covered by moondust from intense activity.
The first was resolved by providing multiple aimable lights on surface vehicles, as well as helmet-mounted lights for EVAs during the long lunar night. The second…
Shelly stretched her hands to loosen them, then slipped them back into the control gloves of the waldos. The electrostatic cleaner was more effective than the old technique of scrubbing, but containment measures were still necessary. The Apollo astronauts hadn’t worried about tracking moondust in, but they were using expendables. Modern lunar rovers were used for hundreds of trips across the surface, so they needed to last.
Not to mention the danger of inhaling the stuff. There was strong evidence that it was at least as dangerous as asbestos.
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Waldos? That’s a term I haven’t heard. Can you explain?
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I knew “oh, that’s a robot arm type thingie!” but I went to look up specific source:
A telefactoring device; also known as the Waldo F. Jones Synchronous Reduplicating Pantograph.
This story has been largely forgotten (even though it still makes great reading). The notion of a waldo, however, has not. The word itself has come into common usage; the American Heritage Dictionary describes it as follows: “A mechanical agent, such as a gripper arm, controlled by a human limb.” Real-life waldoes were developed for the nuclear industry during WWII; they were named after the invention described by Heinlein.
This technology is known today by the more generic term “telefactoring”; it is used in a variety of industries.
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=23
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When I was young (circa 1967), Dad took us on a vacation to the SW. We stayed for several days at Bandelier NM, and we took in the museum at Las Alamos. They had a display of a hot cell with waldos in them; it’s been too many years to recall for sure, but I don’t believe they let young RCPete work the waldos.
The ones at the lab used (mechanical) cables to connect the operator grips to the actuators. It should have given rudimentary feedback, though it would be pretty mushy. I’d not want to handle eggs with such a setup.
I’ve read of remote manipulators with a more precise feedback setup.
Here’s a link to the Waldo novella, plus another. “Magic, Inc.” is a fun fantasy that sort of fits in with Waldo. Kind of.
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Remotely operated manipulators. The term originally appeared in a story by Robert A. Heinlein, and if it didn’t inspire the inventors of the Primary World technology, enough of its users had read the story that the name stuck.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator
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And the story summary (almost as long as the story!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_(short_story)
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And waldoes (or more general “teleoperation”) are apparently (still) very much in mind for planners of Moon and Mars missions / colonization. Much easier, possibly, to keep the radiation-shielded and life-supported and so on humans clustered in one or a few places (per region), while lots of ‘robots’ rove wider without all those, ah, ‘frills’ (for them).
One big thing is the time lag, though… operating a Moon (whatever) from Earth has to deal with whole seconds of time lag (light travel both ways), for instance. But on Mars, a Starlink-like low-orbit network could connect any two points on the surface in less than (ignoring other coding, routing, etc. delays) a tenth of a second round-trip.
It’s still possible Heinlein was more prescient than he ever knew, here…
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“With a prompt like that, what’s MidnightOilDiary supposed to write about?” said Nigel Slim-Howland, a little frustrated.
After a pause, Jenkins, Nigel’s butler, answered: “Perhaps vampires, sir.”
“What?”
“Or perhaps bicycle safety gear,” Jenkins continued. Nigel glowered at him. Jenkins smiled impishly, being equipped with a humor module, after all.
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Gwendolyn sat peacefully, eyes half-open, an empty teacup next to her. She appeared reflective, Nigel noted, as if she were contemplating the depths of human philosophy. She wasn’t doing much of anything, actually. Her expression was the one she used while sitting in her charging chair, topping off her batteries.
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Nigel held up the science magazine he’d been reading. “So, one bloke says our galaxy is absolutely teeming with life, while another one says we’re absolutely alone. What do you think?”
Jenkins appeared reflective, though he was accessing the Cloud. “Have you considered, sir, that both positions might be true?”
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Max was afraid to speak. Since starting her advanced degree, Cari always seemed reflective, lost in thought. She was similarly silent this evening as they sat in the park. Finally, he worked up his courage. “What are you thinking?”
Cari smiled. “I’m thinking I want a big ice cream cone!”
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The albatross gazes down at the wreck. The urmeer of sea and sky reflects.
The dolphin chirps at the rough waves. The uneven surface reflects.
Hands reach up to the fading light. The sailor reflects.
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Abruptly all the company moved toward the gates. Well, reflected Rosaleen, they were the center of the company. She accepted Liam’s help in mounting, and was glad the distance required a gentle horse as he mounted his own horse, and they were off, with their news.
And their company. She had not realized before that it was just as well that they went south first, where they did not need her to summon her army.
Then she snorted.
“Is something wrong?” said Liam
She told him, and said, “But to reclaim my kingdom by force would mean leaving the army there to hold it still against King Henry’s forces.”
“We would not leave until we held the kingdom against all comers.”
“Soldiers would discourage many of them to keep them from attacking at all.”
Liam frowned. “True enough.”
“Besides,” said Rosaleen, “that would take too long. Your father is old.”
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Having dropped to one knee before the Duke, Bob rose gracefully. But an arrow passing over his shoulder had him down on that knee again.
“Ah”, said the archer, “a genuine reflect reflex.”
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Behind her were things of metal, polished. They could not serve as mirrors, but they doubled and redoubled her lights as she told a story about a princess captured by a wizard and the knight who saved her. Mostly told to let her cast her colored lights here and there.
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“So each of those jumping dots is an, Earth, warship?” Most of the dots in the field of view were steady stars… but several of them, dim in blue, jumped in unison between three points, each to its tiny circle.
She felt a bit miffed at being unable to keep the quaver out of her voice, but far more happy it was mostly silent. (And the usual flashback was mild and brief, to that last time she’d been helpless in the hands of the World State of ‘United’ Earth.)
“Yes. The motion is the parallax between our three tele-cameras. The blue glow is their anti-matter drives. Brave lads and lasses, ridin’ such flyin’ bombs.”
“Brave?” She kept most of the disdain out of her voice. Brave like the Staters who’d kept her strapped to a chair for so long, electrodes on her body ready to stop her heart cold at the flick of a trigger pulse..?
Tom smiled reassuringly… and it was reassuring, not stupid or clumsy or clueless. “You’re halfway to bein’ one of us now, Sandra, we’ll take care of you if anyone can.” He hadn’t moved a hair, physically; but somehow the emotional distance between them had fallen near to zero. “And yes, I do mean brave, for certain fascistic and communistic values of ‘brave’ that apply to anyone consciously riding a stored-antimatter ship, their whole fuel load ready to blow them and it to kingdom come every instant.”
“You mean, because you — somehow — make your antimatter as you need it, instead of carrying it along from a depot?” She smiled at him, almost as if her Earth Resistance past weighed nothing. “And as a side question, are you trying to distract me?” She tried to smile coyly, playfully, not only insightfully. She couldn’t help being self-reflective; it came with being who she was.
On the screen in front of them, blue dots chased themselves around in tiny self-betraying circles.
“Second question; yes, is it working? And first question; yes, it’s called Kuzmin neutron-antineutron oscillation after the guy who first talked it out on paper, decades before Keeling and Lake built any hardware or the Claybornes cooked up their unified-field stuff to describe how.
“What happens is the neutrons all have a chance at ‘mixing’ briefly into antineutrons, and then annihilating into energy with a touching proton or neutron… but only while the K-L field is up. Turn off the switch, turn off all the effect, enjoy pure, safe matter.
“Meantime the Terries have this immense factory on — underneath — their Moon. Whirls protons around in accelerator circles, smashes them into a series of targets, makes maybe 1% of the input electricity into matter and antimatter. Huge fission reactors to run the whole show, square miles of radiators to dump the immense waste heat, loads of radioactivity and ‘hot’ by-products.
“And when they’re done… that antimatter has to be kept away from matter, unwaveringly perfectly all the time, or BOOM!” His last word almost-echoed in the little room, despite sound-damping panels.
“And Keeling and Lake, that mismatched Martian duo, made it all possible?” The memory grabbing her attention now was very different. One like to send chills up her spine, not nausea knotting up her guts.
Tom Lawrence laughed, in that rich American-Southern way of his. “Wasn’t enough for Claybourne to do the theory, him and his wife, had to get some clever, subversive engineering ideas at work there too. Once you figure to use a material object as a waveguide for… ‘guest physics’ that only hits its true pitch at the end of your fuel/activator rod, it’s all gravy.
“But it took two of the strangest people the Red Planet ever raised up to do it, together.”
And Sandra laughed, actually out loud, all despite the oncoming blue dots. “Could you believe I was actually there, That Night? Saw Miranda Lake, of all unlikely people, grab that old-fashioned ‘mike’ and start in to sing?”
September 11, 2001 would always be ‘That Day’ — and the impromptu sing-in spreading from a bar in Port Lowell would ever be, likewise, ‘That Night.’
When all the ‘factions’ of off-Earth humanity… came together, far more than ever before, as one; the night of the day the Terries ran for home.
“Oh, my, no, I’d no idea. So you saw her start to sing ‘Et Dona Ferentes’ in her Little Black Dress?” (Not so strange, someone would set the Kipling poem to music sooner or later; but as a lounge-singer’s earthy solo, from the ultra-introverted, shy-ish, almost-ascetic likes of Miranda Lake??)
And Sandra Seligmann smiled like the rising sun. “Oh, yes. It took us a while to notice the first guy — he was a Dualist, too, what they call a ‘corehead’ when they’re being impolite, but it was a night of victory and the mood was warm and bright and mellow, and he’d picked the most perfect of all perfect songs, Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ — everyone else simply picked it up, and sang along, and… well, the rest is history.
“And the next guy, an atomjack from a glassworks under Utopia Planitia, he kept on with Maclean’s ‘American Pie’ — perfect for our time and Stater occupied North America, of course — and we sang the whole long version with him without hardly missing a word, and by the end someone’d stuck a live stick ‘mike’ in his hand too.
“Then that was over; and there was Miranda Lake holding out her hand. And she belted it out like the most extraverted lounge singer ever, such a virtuoso songbird for half a recluse. And her end chorus was… magic.”
Sandra was not surprised to find the beginnings of water in her eyes. A bit so at what she did next.
“Cock the gun that is not loaded,
“Cook the frozen dynamite,
“But oh, beware my Country,
“When my Country grows… polite!”
Sandra Seligmann, nee Kuo in old San Francisco’s Chinatown, slowly caught her breath after having almost matched Lake, here in this tiny sort-of kind-of conference room. “Sorry, got carried away.” She didn’t sound any too very sorry, though, even to herself.
“Oh-my-God, you were there, singin’ along with her, weren’t ya?” It shone like a light in his eyes, like the UV-rich cerulean of a gas core reactor. “And don’t, ever, apologize for doin’ anythin’ like that ’round me. If you ever hear me sing ‘The Night They Burned Ol’ Dixie Down’ you’ll hear much the same as you gave out, and maybe not as nice.”
(Melting down that Robert E. Lee statue, ‘devil take him and the horse he rode in on’ and all, might’ve been meant as an act of revisionism. But it had done something far different, lit a fire that would never burn out. Or as the hard-pressed Ukrainians had begun saying, ’round about that same twilight-dark Crazy Years time, ‘Never forgive, never forget.’ Ooops.)
“And on that sort of note,” Tom went on in a very level and staid tone of voice, “this is what we’ll do about those nasty blue dots. You, and I, are going to Be Somewhere Else when they get here. Remember what I said, how no material is perfectly non-reflective?”
“Yes.” She was back in the present, obscurely… reassured.
“We’ll be sheathed in no material. We call it a Boltzmann field, perfectly non-reflective, perfectly absorbing; like a bog-standard superconductor is perfectly non-resistive. The old ‘cloaking device’ from SF? A lot like it, except perfectly absorbing means perfectly emitting, so it has to be kept cold. We’ll still cast shadows against the stars, but that’s rare and there are mitigations for it too.
“And our drive will be something called a slingstring. You know it?”
Sandra could feel her eyes grow wide. “Like a perfect tether, too smaller-than-atoms thin to disturb anything material, but… unreasonably strong.”
“Maximally strong; tension equals mass, perfect.” He smiled wolfish. “They say the perfect is the enemy of the good — here, it should beat anything ‘good’ the Whirled State has. And, if that’s not enough… I think the Dualists might just like you enough to take a hand, themselves.”
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“Sarbotel”
With apologies, I first read that as Sabotel, which I took as sabot + tel, either Agent 86’s shoe phone, or a plot to disrupt Ma Bell. In my defense, I did wake up too early today…
God bless you all as we approach Reformation Day!
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The black ship crept into the Solar System, totally undetected. No emissions came from it. Its drive system was non-Newtonian, ejecting no tell-tale mass, it moved through space by treating it as an abstract concept, as if it wasn’t even there. Its albedo matched the most empty parts of space.
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