“Nonlinear war” is a concept I used in Going Dark. This weekend seems like the perfect time to revisit Peter Pomerantsev’s 2014 Foreign Policy article discussing the idea. In “How Putin Is Reinventing Warfare” he says:

“…look closer at the Kremlin’s actions during the crisis in Ukraine and you begin to see a very 21st century mentality, manipulating transnational financial interconnections, spinning global media, and reconfiguring geo-political alliances […] This is a world where the old geo-political paradigms no longer hold. As the Kremlin faces down the West, it is indeed gambling that old alliances like the EU and NATO mean less in the 21st century than the new commercial ties it has established with nominally ‘Western’ companies.”

Read it in full here.

The list of finalists for this year’s John W. Campbell Memorial Award was just released, and I’m very pleased to report that Going Dark was included.

Back in 2014, The Red: First Light also made the list.

The Campbell Memorial award honors the best English-language science fiction novel published in the prior year.

For the full list of finalists, and information about the award, visit the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction.

For those of you who like to nominate for the annual science fiction and fantasy awards, including the Nebula and Hugo awards, here’s a roundup of my 2015 award-eligible work.

In the short story category…

“The Way Home” is a military fantasy story that reads like science fiction. It belongs to the subgenre known as “portal stories” in which ordinary people pass through some sort of portal to an extraordinary world. Bluntly, I think this is one of the best short stories I’ve ever written. I like its structure, its characterization, and its compactness — it contains an action story with multiple characters in only 6,300 words. Since I tend to write long, I take the latter as a personal victory. All that said, the story has garnered very little interest. So judge for yourself! “The Way Home” was reprinted at Lightspeed Magazine where it’s available to read free online.

In the novel category…

The Trials
book 2
The Red Trilogy

Going Dark
book 3
The Red Trilogy

The books in The Red Trilogy are fast-paced, near-future, high-tech science fiction thrillers. The Trials continues the story begun in the Nebula and Campbell-nominated The Red, and Going Dark completes that story.

A short history for those of you new to The Red Trilogy: The Red was originally self-published in 2013. It was republished by Simon & Schuster’s Saga Press this past June, with The Trials following in August, and Going Dark released in November.

Edit: this sale price is no longer available. As of this writing, the ebook of The Trials (and also of The Red) is on sale at most ebook vendors for $1.99, so if you’re interested, this is a great time to pick them up.

Edit: For the month of February 2016, the Saga Press ebook editions of all volumes in The Red Trilogy are priced at $2.99 each.

SFWA members: ebook and PDF editions of all three volumes of The Red Trilogy are available for download in the SFWA Forum. Once you’re logged in, you can find them by following this link.

That’s it! Thanks for stopping by.

For those readers in the United Kingdom, the ebook edition of Going Dark is now available from Amazon UK. Find it here.

As I’ve mentioned before, when I sold The Red Trilogy to Saga Press, I was able to retain the right to publish the books separately in the United Kingdom, and I’m doing so under my own publishing imprint, Mythic Island Press LLC, though I’m only publishing the ebook edition, at least for now.

You’ll find the United Kingdom editions of The Red and The Trials at Kobo Books as well at Amazon. Right now Going Dark is only at Amazon UK, but it will eventually be available at Kobo too.

Amazon links:
The Red: First Light
The Trials

Kobo links:
The Red: First Light
(9781937197193)
The Trials
(9781937197186)

ALL THREE BOOKS IN THE RED TRILOGY ARE NOW OUT

GOING DARK:

“No Real Allies, No Fixed Enemies, No Certain Battlefields”

Presumed dead by those closest to him and with no intention of setting the record straight, former army Lt. James Shelley is recruited by a black ops outfit devoted to two things: guarding the Earth from existential threats, and the Red.

Operating for almost two years among soldiers who are enhanced, and controlled, just as he is, Shelley believes he’s learned a proper caution in working with the mysterious artificial intelligence—until the Red’s increasingly erratic behavior ignites an accidental war, and launches Shelley on a collision course with his old life.

In the final book of The Red Trilogy, Shelley must choose who—or what—to trust, while struggling to contain an escalating conflict that threatens to plunge the world into chaos, and destroy those he loves.

Some online booksellers (USA):
☆ Amazon
☆ Barnes & Noble
☆ Powell’s Books
☆ Mysterious Galaxy
☆ Tattered Cover

Or get the audio book, narrated by Kevin T. Collins, and available worldwide from Audible:
☆ Audible

Information on the United Kingdom ebook edition is here.

Oh. Hey. TWO WEEKS UNTIL GOING DARK IS RELEASED. Be sure to sign up for my New Books/Newsletter in the right column, and I’ll send you an email when it’s available.

Edit: And a couple of hours after I posted this, UPS dropped off advance copies, one each of the mass-market paperback and the hardcover. Just like the first two books of the trilogy, Going Dark will be published simultaneously by Saga Press in mass-market paperback, hardcover, and ebook, with an audio book by Audible. All are due out on November 3.

So last night, just shy of 0200, I sent the “final” manuscript of Going Dark to my editor, Joe Monti, at Saga Press. I put “final” in quotes, because I’ll get one more pass at the manuscript after the copyedit, and another chance to tweak things when the page proofs arrive. But for practical purposes, I’m done with The Red Trilogy.

It’s been a three-year project, and now that it’s winding down, I’m starting to realize how much I’m going to miss these characters and this story world. For all the frustration, and the struggle to get the story down, I’ve really loved writing these novels. For all the self-doubt, and regardless how it turns out, I’m glad I took the shot.

Going Dark. No that’s NOT my planned career path. It’s the title of the final novel in The Red Trilogy, with another amazing cover by Larry Rostant — and Going Dark is well on its way to publication.

My first drafts tend to be pretty solid, but my initial ideas for a new novel are not. I was reminded of this when I was reading an email I’d written last year, when Going Dark was just getting started. The direction I had in mind for the book at that time changed radically as I worked my way past the opening, and the story is a lot better for it.

Right now I’ve got editorial notes on Going Dark from Joe Monti, my editor at Saga Press, and for the past few days I’ve been working on final revisions. I’m happy to say, the requested changes and additions are fairly minor. But it’s always the case in this process that as I get close to the final-final updates, I’m amazed at the difference even small changes can make. The final polish of a novel is always exciting.

I haven’t yet posted a back cover description for Going Dark, because that needs work. But here’s the tagline:

“No Real Allies, No Fixed Enemies, No Certain Battlefields”

Sound exciting? I hope so!

The Red Trilogy has been a big project. Though I’d written ten prior novels, this is my first real trilogy — not that I planned it that way. It just sort of happened — and now it’s nearly done. For me, anyway! I hope not for you. As the books are published, I hope you’ll come along for the ride. All three books are due out this year. Here are the dates:

The Red — June 30

The Trials — August 18

Going Dark — November 3

Yes, you can preorder!

If you read the books, if you like them, I hope you’ll let other people know. Buzz matters.

And if you’d like to get a look at the opening scene of the first novel, find it here on my website.

Okay, back to those revisions…