Pluto was never not a planet
I plugged the number of comments into a random number picker, which has determined that Bryan Porter is the winner of the Knaves Over Queens hardcover. Congratulations, Bryan! Please email me at frontlines@markokloos.com to let me know where to send it, and whether you want it now or (with more signatures) after Worldcon.
Thanks for playing, everyone. I may do more of these on a regular basis.
I am currently sweating in my office in 90-degree weather, which apparently will last all through next week, and working on a new Frontlines novella while I wait for my edit notes for the PALLADIUM WARS novel.
I recently received the contributor copies for the UK/AU versions of LOW CHICAGO and KNAVES OVER QUEENS. One copy goes on my personal brag shelf, but I got two of each, so I thought it might be cool to give one away to a Wild Cards fan. KNAVES OVER QUEENS isn’t going to be out in the US until next year, so other than ordering a copy via Amazon.co.uk, you won’t be able to get your hands on this hardcover in the US just yet.
So here’s your chance. The rules are as follows:
Leave one (1) comment at the bottom of this blog post stating you want a shot at an early hardcover of KNAVES OVER QUEENS. Comments left on Facebook or Twitter will not count, only comments on this blog post.
I will leave the comments open through the end of the weekend. At 0800 Eastern Standard Time on Monday morning, I will close the comments and use a random number generator to pick a winner from the comments.
The winner will receive a signed hardcover copy of KNAVES OVER QUEENS. If the winner so chooses, I will hang on to the book until Worldcon in San Jose and see if I can get Melinda Snodgrass, George R.R. Martin, Kevin Andrew Murphy, and Caroline Spector to sign it as well. (We’re doing a Wild Cards signing at Worldcon 76, so chances are probably pretty good.) Or I can sign it by myself and send it on its way on Tuesday morning–your call if you win.
Contest is open to anyone, anywhere in the world. I’ll cover the postage.
Today is release day for LOW CHICAGO, the twenty-fifth Wild Cards volume, which means today is my second book release day of 2018 because I have a novella in that book. The novella is called “Stripes” and features my joker-ace Khan (the half-tiger dude on the cover). He’s shunted back in time to 1920s Chicago where he gets to rewrite a bit of Roaring Twenties history in the only way a 300-pound mob bruiser can: with claws and fists and Tommy guns.
LOW CHICAGO is a stand-alone novel in the Wild Cards universe. While it features characters that have appeared in other volumes, it’s a mosaic novel with a self-contained narrative. You can jump in and read it without any prior knowledge of the Wild Cards universe, and I’d be super happy if you did because that means I’ll get to write more Wild Cards stuff in the future.
The other contributors to LOW CHICAGO are Melinda Snodgrass, Kevin Andrew Murphy, Saladin Ahmed, Christopher Rowe, John Jos. Miller, Paul Cornell, and Mary Anne Mohanraj. All of them are amazing writers, so chances are good you’ll get your money’s worth out of the book. If you decide to pick it up, let me know what you think in the comments!
Today, Tor.com is featuring a long excerpt from LOW CHICAGO, the Wild Cards novel out in June. The stripey fellow on the featured image is my Wild Cards joker-ace Khan, and he appears in the excerpt (which is the interstitial for the novel, written by John Joseph Miller.)
It’s time-travel story, so you can probably guess from Khan’s attire in which period of Chicago history he finds himself after the events in the excerpt. I hope you give the novel a shot when it’s out because I really liked writing that particular novella, and I think it turned out pretty well.
(LOW CHICAGO will be released on June 12.)
I haven’t posted anything lately because I am still at work finishing the current novel. It still has a provisional title, but the series it kicks off has a name now: THE PALLADIUM WARS.
(It’s military SF, but the scope is a little wider than Frontlines because it’s written from multiple points of view, so if that kind of narrative is your cup of tea, you’ll probably like it. At least I hope so, because the sales of the first book will determine the future of the series, and I really like the world I cooked up for THE PALLADIUM WARS.) More on that later when I’ve turned in the book and we have concrete plans for the publication date.
Oh, and if you’re interested in getting into the Wild Cards universe and don’t know where to start: Macmillan has a special on the three books of the Fort Freak triad, which is a good jumping-in point. All three books together are $21 and change, and they’re available from all the major ebook retailers.
The latest (current) triad is called the American Triad: Mississippi Roll (published in December 2017), Low Chicago (out in June this year, and featuring my novella STRIPES), and Texas Hold’Em (out in October.) Gritty and fun superhero stuff, fun characters written by a group of super-talented writers, and now in development for TV…so get on board and become a fan before everyone jumps on that bandwagon once it becomes the next GoT. (And I hope it will do just that, because I want to see Khan tear off some faces in a live-action TV show.)
So there’s this new Wild Cards novel called KNAVES OVER QUEENS, and it has a cover and a release date for the UK edition:
It’ll be out on June 28 from Harper Collins Voyager UK, and it’s the first time a Wild Cards novel sees publication in the UK before the US. There’ll be a US edition too, of course, but UK booksellers will gladly ship to the US as well if you don’t want to wait another year or so for the Tor version to appear on shelves here.
For KNAVES OVER QUEENS, I came up with a new ace called Archimedes, and then sent him right off to war on his very first assignment. If you’ve been reading my blog, you can probably guess which war that is, considering it’s a British-themed book with British aces.
Here’s the promo text from the publisher:
“The return of the famous shared-world superhero books created and edited by George R. R. Martin, author of A Song of Ice and Fire
For decades, George R.R. Martin – bestselling author of A Song of Ice and Fire – has collaborated with an ever-shifting ensemble of science fiction and fantasy icons to create the amazing Wild Cards universe.
In the aftermath of World War II, the Earth’s population was devastated by a terrifying alien virus. Those who survived were changed for ever. Some, known as Jokers, were cursed with bizarre mental and physical deformities; others, granted superhuman abilities, are known as Aces. Now the virus has reached Britain…
Queen Margaret rules over a country in which such legendary figures as Herne the Hunter, Spring-heeled Jack and Babh, the goddess of war, roam at will. Her Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill – gifted with extraordinary longevity – together with the Enigma ace – Alan Turing – set up a special organization named the Order of the Silver Helix. They will need all the wild cards they can find if they are to deal with the terrifying mutations thrown up by the virus.
KNAVES OVER QUEENS – the first ever Wild Cards novel set in the UK, and a perfect jumping-in point for readers new to this shared world – features a stunning collection of original stories from such luminaries of the world of science fiction and fantasy as Paul Cornell, Marko Kloos, Mark Lawrence, Kevin Andrew Murphy, Emma Newman, Peter Newman, Peadar O Guilin, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Caroline Spector and Charles Stross.”
June also marks the release of another Wild Cards novel in the US. That one is LOW CHICAGO, and I have a novella in that one as well, so June marks the first month in which I have two stories out. (Coincidentally, both are novellas, and almost the same word count in length.) I’ve never had a novella published–the Frontlines story MEASURES OF ABSOLUTION is technically a novelette at around 12,000 words–so this just doubles the awesome.
I know most of you are here for the military SF, but I have to tell you that I love working on Wild Cards stories, and I feel that the stuff I’m writing in that world is some of the best material I’ve ever written. I’ve done short stories, but I am primarily a novelist, and the constraints of the novelette/novella length of my Wild Cards contributions have made me much better at pacing and structure for the longer works as well. I hope you give the Wild Cards books a shot.
POINTS OF IMPACT is out and doing well. As always, some oopsies made it through the entire editorial process past a dozen sets of eyeballs. And as always, I started getting Tweets and emails about continuity bloopers not 24 hours after the book hit the virtual shelves. Thanks to all to took the time to write and point them out. I shall now address them so they’re all in one spot for easy future reference.
MINOR SPOILERS FOR “POINTS OF IMPACT” FOLLOW:
It’s January 9th today, which means that POINTS OF IMPACT is now out on Kindle, in paperback, and in Audible audiobook format (read once again by the amazing Luke Daniels). If you pre-ordered the book, it should show up on your Kindle or in your Audible library AT THIS VERY MOMENT AS IF BY MAGIC, or in your physical mailbox whenever your delivery guy comes around.
I hope you enjoy the sixth installment of Andrew Grayson’s story. POINTS OF IMPACT picks up two years after the events of FIELDS OF FIRE, and Andrew is still fighting the long fight, trying to pry the Lankies loose from what’s left of Mars, where troops and equipment get ground down at an alarming rate because neither people nor machines were designed for years of constant combat deployments under harsh conditions. (If that sounds familiar somehow, it’s probably a total coincidence.)
Enjoy your preorder, or pick up a fresh copy, and don’t mind me while I sit in a corner over here today and engage in the traditional ritual of anxiously refreshing the Amazon page every thirty seconds…
So I have something pretty wicked to show you today.
Remember how I mentioned that my first Wild Cards novella in the U.S. will be out in June as part of a novel called LOW CHICAGO?
Well, the final cover of LOW CHICAGO is in, and it’s freaking glorious. Not just because it’s cool by itself, which it definitely is…but because the cover character is mine. He’s called Khan, and he’s the protagonist of the novella “Stripes”, which is part of that book. This is the first Wild Cards character I got to create, and he’s probably the most fun to write of all the fictional people who sit around in the fiction casting office in my brain. He’s a joker-ace, which means that his Wild Cards mutation makes him look inhuman but also gives him great powers. What kind of mutation, you ask? Well, let me show you the cover:
That is a pretty beastly cover, I think. (Pun intended.) The artwork was done by Michael Komarck.
LOW CHICAGO will be out on July 16th, and the other stories in the volume were written by John Jos. Miller, Saladin Ahmed, Paul Cornell, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Kevin Andrew Murphy, Christopher Rowe, and Melinda M. Snodgrass. It’s part of what we call the American Triad, but it’s a stand-alone volume, so you don’t have to have read the entire series to know what’s going on in this one.
POINTS OF IMPACT was picked by the Amazon Books editors to be a featured “Best Books of the Month” selection for January. It will be released officially on January 9, which is in…uh, six days already. Yikes.
But that’s not all, friends and neighbors. Over at Crazy Jeff’s Electronic Book Emporium (a.k.a. the Kindle store), the other five books of the Frontlines series are on sale for $1.99 each for the entire month of January. That’s five books for ten bucks total, which means that if someone wanted to buy the whole series on Kindle, they’d be out only $14.94 this month.
Tell your friends and family, tell your car mechanic, tell that weird guy on the street corner who yells at passing bikes. THEY’RE GOOD BOOKS, BRENT.
