Pluto was never not a planet
Fellow 47North author Jeff Wheeler is running a Fantasy/SciFi giveaway this month, and one of the books in the bunch is a signed copy of SCORPIO, book #1 in the Frontlines: Evolution series.
If you want to put your name in the hat, here’s the link:
https://kingsumo.com/g/mpjkxvm/fantasy-sci-fi-giveaway
Another shot at a signed book, this one totally FREE OF CHARGE…but subject to the favor of the RNG gods. Good luck!
Amazon has put (almost) the entire Frontlines, Frontlines: Evolution, and Palladium Wars series on sale at the Kindle store for the month of August. If you don’t have the whole set on Kindle yet, now’s the time to strike!
The Frontlines series:
Lines of Departure is $4.99 (inexplicably the only book in the sequence not on sale, but strange are the ways of the Big A.)
The Frontlines: Evolution series:
Cygnus will be out on December 8 at the full $4.99 price, but you can preorder it if you haven’t done so already–lots of preorders make my publisher happy and let me write more books!
The Palladium Wars series:
Eclipse is currently in progress and will be available on the Kindle and as paperback via KDP, but I don’t have a pre-order page for you yet. Stay tuned for news on the release in Q4.
Go fill up that Kindle, make the set complete, and bring joy to yourself, me, and my mortgage holder!
Lots of things are going on at Castle Frostbite at the moment, so please forgive my lack of recent updates. I’ll endeavor to make the blog updates more frequent from now on.
First, a quick writing update: ECLIPSE, book #5 in the Palladium Wars series, is 3/4 done at this point but currently on the slow burner because I have a contracted novel due next month that hopped to the front of the queue. (This will be a stand-alone SF novel with 47North, working title COHORT.) Both of those novels will be done by the end of the summer. COHORT will go off to the editor when it’s done for the usual round of developmental end copyedits, and I’ll share a release date as soon as it’s turned in and I have word back on the production schedule but expect it at some point in mid-2027.
ECLIPSE will be out as soon as Robin and I have edited it, but that won’t take forever because I’ve been working on that novel for a while and it has gone through what my friend John Scalzi calls “fractal edits”. Each chapter so far has seen multiple editing passes and revisions, so by the time the last chapter is in the bag, the novel isn’t a draft anymore but a mostly finished product. You should see it available for sale before the end of the year because it’ll be self-published (47North declined to commit to the last book of the series), and I am not tied to anyone else’s schedule for this one.
On a completely different subject: I’ve been asked to run for local office, and after some deliberation and discussions with the family, we decided that helping to improve the local communities and the state as a whole is a worthy cause if I have a chance to move the needle a little. I am running for the New Hampshire State House in November, as the Democratic candidate for the Grafton-18 district, which covers several towns in southern Grafton County: Enfield, Canaan, Grafton, Bridgewater, Alexandria, Bristol, Orange, Dorchester, Groton, and Hebron. It’s not really a paid position–NH’s state representatives get the princely salary of $200 for a two-year term–so it’s a volunteer community service job more than anything else. Because of that, state politics are dominated by people who are either retired or wealthy enough to afford spending several days per week in Concord on their own time and dime. New Hampshire has always had an independent streak and a strong libertarian bent, but in recent years, my home state has taken a political course that leads us in the wrong direction, and I want to help reverse it and maybe break up the one-party trifecta we have going on right now.
Everybody wants to see things change and stuff get done, but few people have the desire or the time to take part in bringing that about. I didn’t have a good excuse to say no, so I figured I should run if I could.
If you want to check out my campaign and maybe toss in a few bucks to support it, you can find it here: Marko Kloos for New Hampshire, State Representative.
(And if you live in the Grafton-18 floterial House district, come out and say hi during campaign season when I am out and about at the various Old Home Days and community events in the county. I’d love to hear your opinion on how our state is run and what could be done to improve things in our towns.)
FIRST DISCLAIMER: No, it’s not going to hurt my writing schedule, and I am not trading the novelist job for a state house seat. As I’ve mentioned, it’s a largely unpaid volunteer position, and I a.) like my day job, and b.) still need to pay the mortgage and fill the fridge, so the novels will keep coming.
SECOND DISCLAIMER: You may not agree with my politics or the party for which I am running. And that’s your right in a democracy like ours! I just don’t want to read cranky comments about how you’re no longer going to read my books because of my political affiliation or opinions. If that’s the case, just go ahead and boycott me privately. No need to exit in a huff.
That’s it for me today, and now it’s back to work on COHORT, which has a looming deadline and much work to be done on it yet. I hope you’re all enjoying your summer!
(My team made this up as a way to memorize all the towns in Grafton-18. It’s not an official campaign graphic, but I figured I’d share it here just for fun.)
Over at Transfer Orbit, Andrew Liptak is saying some nice things about Frontlines in general and ECHOES OF SILENCE, which is in his list of 14 books to check out in July.
I buy more books from Andrew’s excellent curated lists than any other source of reviews or recommendations. If you are looking for a good source of SF/F genre news and book reviews, Transfer Orbit is well worth a subscription.
The not-so-little novella is chugging right along in the Kindle store as more Frontlines fans are discovering its existence. Of course, I already got a one-star review from someone who didn’t know what was going on because they failed to read the author’s note in the product description. I mean, I just put it in there in prominent bold font instead of making it a singing, dancing, unkillable pop-up warning, so that’s probably on me.
If you enjoyed Love Death + Robots on Netflix and you would like to own the anthology of all the short stories that were the basis for the first season, I have good news: it’s on sale this week at Amazon for the low, low price of $2.99 for the Kindle version. Here are the links for the respective regional Amazon pages:
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0923HJQ5G
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0923HJQ5G
Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0923HJQ5G
Australia/NZ: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0923HJQ5G
India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B0923HJQ5G
The anthology includes both “Lucky 13″, which was the basis for Episode 13, aptly called “Lucky Thirteen”), and “On The Use Of Shape-Shifters In Warfare”, my Army-Werewolves-in-Afghanistan story that was the basis for Episode 10, “Shape-Shifters.”
Today is the day! After almost two years, there’s a new Frontlines novel out. ORDERS OF BATTLE is the seventh volume in the series and picks up a few years after the last book. Things have calmed down a bit for humanity after POINTS OF IMPACT, but the Lankies are still out there, and someone higher up in the chain of command has decided that now’s the time to go looking for them.
ORDERS OF BATTLE is available on the Kindle and in paperback form today. (The Audible audiobook will be delayed until February–see my previous post on that for details.) I hope you pick it up in whichever format you prefer, then read it and maybe leave a review or recommend it to friends. And most importantly, I hope you enjoy returning to the Frontlines universe with Andrew Grayson and his podhead comrades.
The Sci-Fi Shenanigans podcast interview I mentioned in my previous post can be found here:
http://www.sfshenanigans.com/2020/08/25/sfs-episode-167-marko-kloos-dragon-award-finalist/
Check it out if you want to hear me talk for close to an hour and give no fewer than three involuntary sales pitches for various aspects of Uncle Jeff’s Book and Trinket Emporium.
I was on the shortlist for the Dragon Award in the military SF category, but alas–I didn’t win. That honor went to Savage Wars by Jason Anspach and Nick Cole, so congratulations to them. (Congratulations also to my friend John Scalzi, who won the Dragon Award for Best SF Novel with The Last Emperox.)
I’m still at work on CITADEL while trying to stay on top of the rest of my commitments and keeping my head above water. 2020 sure turned out to be a peach of a year.(I want to apologize to 2016 for having called it the WORST YEAR EVER. Sorry, 2016…I was young and naive.)
We are safely isolating here at Castle Frostbite and doing what we do most of the time anyway, which is to cook food and eat snacks and play games. The kids have been in an online charter school for a year now, so not much has changed around here other than the fact that I still can’t find toilet paper at our usual grocery store.
Life and work continue as we wait out this current craziness. I am busy with CITADEL, third novel in the Palladium Wars series. Number 2, called BALLISTIC, is going to be released next month, and I hope you give it a read because I think it turned out very well. Booklist had some nice things to say about it: “Fans of The Expanse series will enjoy this engaging and fast-moving combination of corporate machinations, police procedural, and interstellar naval combat.” And while we’re on the subject of reviews, LOCUS gave AFTERSHOCKS a very nice review in their April 2020 issue, calling it “a great start to what should be a fun, thought-provoking series.”
I hope you’re all doing well in your respective isolation headquarters. Maybe one day we’ll have conventions and bar-hopping again, but I have a feeling it won’t be this year. Alas, that will make the company of our friends ever so much sweeter and the overpriced hotel cocktails ever so much tastier.
I’ve been informed that BALLISTIC, second novel of the Palladium Wars series, has been moved up in the schedule for a publication date of May 26, 2020.
If you’d like to pre-order it, you can do so via this link. BALLISTIC will be available in paperback, hardcover, Kindle, and Audible formats. (Lots of pre-orders will make my publisher happy, which means an increased chance there will be more Frontlines and Palladium Wars novels past 2020. Just sayin’.)
Here’s an interview with me over on Paul Semel’s blog, in which I talk about the ideas and motivations behind AFTERSHOCKS and the general world-building and setup of the Palladium Wars universe.
I spent part of the weekend in New York City, to have lunch with my editor and take the German nephew along so he could see the Big City. NYC in August is….not my favorite time and place in the world, I have to say. It’s hot, full of tourists (especially Midtown, which is where the visitors I bring along invariably want to go too), and we got there on trash day, which means the olfactory experience was spectacular. But it still has its charms, and some things about NYC will never get old for me. Like the view from the observation deck of the Empire State Building:
And the building itself is beautiful, of course.
There’s an Amazon Bookstore right across the street from the lobby entrance of the Empire State Building, so naturally I had to go check it out and get the rare pleasure of seeing one of my books on the shelf of a bookstore. (B&N and BAM won’t stock my books because 47North is an Amazon imprint, so I don’t usually see my name in a dead-tree store.)
Another cool thing about browsing the SF/F section was seeing the names of lots of friends on the book covers. I get a kick out of that every time I go into a bookstore, even if it’s one where my stuff is not on the shelf. It’s fun to be able to put so many faces to names and be happy for their successes.