Thank you so much to everyone who came out to East Bay Booksellers in Oakland for the launch of The Guardian! We had a full house, the books sold out, and I think I’m getting marginally better at reading my own work (despite some minor microphone malfunctions). Wine, cookies, and pretzels were consumed, books were signed in gold sharpie, and — as far as I could tell — a good time was had by all.
Reviews so far are great, at least in terms of average ratings. I could definitely use more reviews; as of today I only have nine reviews on Goodreads and three reviews on Amazon. If you’ve read The Guardian please take a second or a few minutes to leave a rating or review (both appreciated, including short one sentence reviews). As I’ve acknowledged before, writing reviews is much harder than it feels like it should be, so I will definitely owe you one if you write me a review (feel free to cash in if you need me to water your cat or walk your plant while you’re on vacation).
Reclaimed Earth
The Guardian is exactly what I’m hoping for when I pick up a sci-fi novel – richly descriptive worlds; the scientific elements are advanced and incredible but written in such a way to be plausible and the interesting, generally sympathetic cast of characters are thrust into situations which are exciting and thought-provoking. – Karen Cole (Hair Past a Freckle Book Blog)
If you’re not familiar with my Reclaimed Earth science fiction series, here’s a blurb to give you taste of what’s going on:
In the year 2737, Earth is mostly depopulated in the wake of a massive supervolcano, but civilization and culture are preserved in vast orbiting ringstations. Tem, the nine-year-old son of a ringstation anthropologist and a Happdal bow-hunter, wants nothing more than to become a blacksmith like his uncle Trond. But after a rough patch as the only brown-skinned child in the village, his mother Car-En decides that the family should spend some time on the Stanford ringstation. Tem gets caught up in the battle against Umana, the tentacle-enhanced ‘Squid Woman’, while protecting a secret that could change the course of humanity and civilization.
I’ve had some generous reviews from book bloggers, including Karen Cole who writes: “The Guardian is exactly what I’m hoping for when I pick up a sci-fi novel – richly descriptive worlds; the scientific elements are advanced and incredible but written in such a way to be plausible and the interesting, generally sympathetic cast of characters are thrust into situations which are exciting and thought-provoking.”
The Sacramento Sea
My first ever cli-fi story The Sacramento Sea was just published in Issue #14 of Into the Ruins, a deindustrial/post-industrial/economic collapse magazine edited by Joel Caris. Whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist regarding the fate of humanity (or the fate of humanity’s ongoing “civilization” experiment) it’s useful to imagine collapse scenarios. It’s useful because they are continuously happening (Puerto Rico, Haiti, the U.S. Executive Branch), even if your part of the world is peaceful and overflowing with abundance. My short story imagines a devastating, isolating local environmental collapse in California as the rest of the world continues business as usual. That seems to be the way these things often play out. Of course global economic and/or environmental collapse is possible (and some would say probable), but localized collapses are far more common.
The California inland sea also makes an appearance in my drafted-but-not-yet-finished novel The Savior Virus, and though the short story and the novel don’t share any characters, both works take place in the same fictional world. The levy system that prevents flooding of the bay delta during surges is somewhat precariously maintained, and sustained sea level rise of just a few feet could turn the Sacramento Valley into an inland sea, just as it was during the Great Flood of 1862, and before that as described by Native Americans.
Upcoming Posts
- The Benefits of Negative Visualization
- Shared Location Tracking Among Bay Area 11-Year-Olds as a Security Measure
- Gaming Update
