Archive for February, 2012
February 21st, 2012 by jdsawyer
For those of you who prefer dead tree to ebook format, I’ve got some excellent news:
Down From Ten, Sculpting God, and Predestination are now in available as handsomely-packaged paperbacks.
They’ll be joined in March by A Ghostly Christmas Present, Smoke Rings, and Silent Victor, and in April by Free Will and the soon-to-be-released Throwing Lead
They are available for order at bookstores across the world, or you can get them now by clicking on the covers:
For those of you outside the US looking for a retailer who will ship to you at reasonable prices, all of the books are available through The Book Depository. Don’t be alarmed by the lack of cover art–my listings just went live there and it takes a while for them to update their images. I promise that the books you buy there will have the same excellent packaging that those here in the US get.
February 19th, 2012 by jdsawyer
I hate bad news–I actually hate giving it more than I hate receiving it. Unfortunately, in this case, I’ve received some bad news that means I have to give some bad news.
Continue reading ‘When Plans Change…’
February 11th, 2012 by jdsawyer
I am proud to announce
my first steampunk story collection Frock Coat Dreams: Romances, Nightmares, and Fancies from the steampunk Fringe, which includes two brand new stories: “A Goblet of Fifty-Three” and “Sleep, Walk.” This will be the first of two or three collections this year of steampunk stories grouped together for easy reading. Unlike the Sculpting God collections, these don’t have special features, but they will be an excellent place to get early releases and load up on short stories for about half of what you would pay to purchase them individually.
Here’s the back-of-book copy:
The author of The Antithesis Progression and The Clarke Lantham Mysteries brings you delicate, humorous, and brutal visions of a future that never was and a past that might have been. Collected her are stories of satire, romance, horror, and promise to delight every sensibility.
Contains:
Train Time
Sleep, Walk
On Matters Most Austere
A Goblet of Fifty-Three
Angels Unawares
and Cold Duty: Selected Readings from the Diary of a Gelusian Repairman, the story that Steampunk Scholar Mike Perschon calls “…probably the single best steampunk short story I’ve read.”
Get it now for all platforms from Smashwords, or grab it for your Kindle direct from Amazon or your Nook direct from B&N.
February 10th, 2012 by jdsawyer
Sometimes, I have 
bouts of madness. In 2010 at OryCon, a particularly whimsical bout of madness struck. I’d just gotten out of a panel on Steampunk and run into someone with a table advocating for public awareness of something-or-other, and it occurred to me that in the world of the Steampunk genre there would be a number of such groups going around trying to cope with large societal changes caused by the sudden disinclination of their fellows to stay dead.
Magazine editors loved it, and sent glowing rejection notes apologizing to me that the premise was simply too weird for their readers. Now, it’s your turn. If you need a draught of the truly daft and funky, check out this Guide for Her Majesty’s Subjects On Matters Most Austere.
From the Greater London chapter of the Committee to Restrict the Accidental Population:
A comprehensive guide for Her Majesty’s subjects on dealing with the social problems and legal issues created by the so-called “accidental population.” If you are finding your world complicated by vampires, resurrectionists, or the undead, this pamphlet will give you the vital information you need to survive awkward situations with your life and social standing intact, and in the process restore the dignity of the Empire.
Read it now on your Kindle or other e-reader.
February 6th, 2012 by jdsawyer
For those of you 
who liked my recent story on Escape Pod (which will hit ebook format this month), I’ve got another tale from the pawnshop for you. Call it a fable about the value of a healthy sense of self. And for me, personally, this is a favourite. So, step into the pawnshop and pay no attention to the cold. The bald cat and his pet man will give you what you need, even if it isn’t what you want.
Sunday Morning Giraffe: A Lombard Alchemist Tale
Aldo is a five-year-old who always gets his way. When he doesn’t, bad things happen. So when he wakes up his father at 3AM on Sunday and demands a giraffe–in spite of the fact that giraffes do not live in the high desert in the middle of winter–his father grudgingly takes him on a giraffe-hunting safari.
Unfortunately, his parents know nothing about the source of Aldo’s will power, and would be shocked to discover that his chief ally is a demon-posessed rat with an agenda of its own involving a toy giraffe from a creepy little pawnshop way out on the edge of nowhere.
Buy it now for the Kindle and for all other readers.
February 3rd, 2012 by jdsawyer
Ladies and gentlemen 
and those who prefer neither title, I am very proud to announce the continuation of The Clarke Lantham Mysteries.
This is the biggest one yet, ringing in at nearly the same length as Predestination, and the adventure scales with the book. Teaming up with his assistant Rachael and his new squatter Nya Thales, Lantham gets to match wits with alien hunters, Chinese assassins, and FBI agents in his attempt to solve an apparent alien abduction before the only witness is…but I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s the back-of-book copy, to give you a better feel for what’s going on.
The California Academy of Sciences, a bastion of integrity in scientific public relations, has agreed to play host to one of the most valuable travelling exhibits in the world: a Mars rock with microbial alien life. But the attention it’s drawing isn’t just international, it’s interstellar. When a commando team of gray aliens steals the rock and abducts a security guard, in full view of the cameras, the head of the security contractor has only one place to turn: Clarke Lantham Investigations.
Clarke Lantham already turned down an alien-related job earlier in the week, and has had his fill of kooks, cranks, and crooks of all kinds. Unfortunately, with an old client suing him, a employee to pay for, and a new ward chewing through his finances, he needs the paycheck. This time, though, he’s not the only one looking for a missing person: the FBI, Lloyd’s of London, and the Chinese Ministry of State Security are all breathing down his neck.
From the dark underbelly of the Tongs slave trade to the shark-infested waters of Bolinas Bay to the skies far above the concerns of mere mortals, Lantham races against spies, assassins, and conspiracy theorists to find the missing man–and the treasure that went with him–before the theft becomes a diplomatic incident between the world’s most fearsome superpowers and the alien overlords they allegedly support.
When the field gets that crowded, someone’s bound to get hurt. But even that might be okay for Lantham…if he didn’t have to sleep on the couch.
Read the first couple chapters here.
Then, grab the book and dive in. It’s available right now through Read the rest on your Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords.
I hope you have at least half as much fun reading it as I did writing it. Enjoy!
February 2nd, 2012 by jdsawyer
I spend my life cultivating and exploring questions at all levels from the inane to the putatively profound. Part of my job is asking questions–in fact, if you squint hard enough and look through enough lenses, you will be able to find a question or cluster of them behind every story I write.
As I prep to tackle the next round of The Antithesis Progression and another pair of SF novels later this year, I’m having fun wrestling with some biggies. Long story short, I thought it would be fun to share some of them with you guys, partly for the fun of the conversation, and partly to give you a peek behind the curtain for those of you who are interested in seeing the process that begins with a question and ends with a story or a novel.
So, to kick it off, here’s my nomination for one of the biggest questions anyone has ever asked.
“Where is everybody?”
Biggest question…seems kind of a grand claim, but I’m going to go a step further: I think it might be the single most terrifying, and the single most exciting, question anyone has ever thought to ask.
To illustrate why, I’ll give you a little context. This is the question that a man named Enrico Fermi asked when he turned his radio telescope at the heavens to listen in on television and radio broadcasts from alien civilisations, and found only static.
The universe is a big place. If carbon chemistry is common (as it seems to be), and if life bootstraps really easily, (which is now virtually certain), then in a big universe there should be at least some other folks out there who are building civilizations, and since all civilization is defined by energy use, they should be making some noise.
So…where is everybody?
It only took humans one generation between the invention of the radio (the ability to make cosmic noise) and the nuclear bomb (the ability to silence that noise forever, without reprieve). What if everybody eventually, inevitably, succumbs to self-destruction? Terrifying, isn’t it?
On the other hand, what if we’re the first? What if we are truly alone? This one’s terrifying too, but it sure is exciting–there’s a lot of universe out there that’s not being used, and oh, the places we’ll go!
But there are other answers, and some of them are very intriguing. Certainly, we haven’t figured out all the potential answers yet. I’ve got some ideas that I’m exploring in projects I’m currently working on, I’ve even got a few opinions.
It is a big question, though, maybe one of the biggest. Because whatever the answer is, it will forever define our relationship with the universe around us, and will profoundly affect the way our civilization unfolds as it winds out into the solar system and beyond.
Read more about this question here, then tell me…What do you think about this question?
