“Name?” the majordomo program asked.

Nikko, who was in truth only a program himself, a modern ghost, an electronic entity copied from the mind of his original self, had little patience for Dull Intelligences. “The name’s Nikko,” he growled. “Rhymes with psycho. Nikko Jiang-Tibayan. I’ve only been here a hundred times you decrepit excuse for a secretary.”

He could hear Kirstin laughing, somewhere over the electronic horizon, a dim sound in the majordomo’s limited sensorial world. “Are you going to admit me or not?” he snapped.

“Of course, sir. The lady is expecting you.”

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Winner of the 1996 Locus Award for Best First Novel

J Daniel Sawyer has a long but very interesting post up titled Literary Studies, Anyone?, discussing the dubious value of formal Literary Studies.

Having been a biology major, I freely confess I snarled my way through the required “literature” classes in college and otherwise avoided the English Department. It’s not that I don’t like “literature,” (see my post in which I am head-over-heels for the novel The Story of Edgar Sawtelle). It’s just that my idea of a great book didn’t include much of what I was required to read in college. On the positive side, we were required to read books, but not to analyze them.

My only experience with analysis is second hand, via an honors class my daughter took in high school. I talk about it in this post, Pick Books You Like. We learn to be avid readers when we like what we read–and we learn to be writers by reading, by studying diverse fields, and by writing, writing, writing.

Reading Martha Well’s terrific novel The Cloud Roads got me thinking about the archetype of the wounded man, because the hero of this book definitely qualifies, at least under my definition.

The “wounded man” isn’t physically wounded of course. Neither is he weak or incompetent and he can be wonderfully, overwhelmingly manly. But on some level he’s emotionally scarred from the mistreatment he’s received from life, and he’s got emotional issues, and usually he isn’t good at establishing relationships with men or women. So the inner plot is usually about our wounded hero learning to open up to others, in particular the love interest.

My thesis is that women tend to love the wounded man archetype, and men are much cooler toward it. Am I right? Am I wrong? Is it a generational thing? What do you think?

In my own work I’m going to point to two of my novels, Deception Well and Vast, which share two male characters named Lot and Urban. Lot sort of fits the definition of the wounded man. He has emotional issues (though he’s usually good at relationships, ha ha). Lot’s BFF, Urban, is emphatically not a wounded man. He’s cocky and confident. No self-esteem issues here.

My guess is that men prefer Urban’s character, and women tend to prefer Lot. Yes? No? Let me know what you think on the question of “the wounded man,” whether you’ve read the books or not. I always suspect I’m kind of “off” when it comes to being representative of my gender. I’d love to hear some opinions.

This is a terrific book. I thoroughly enjoyed it–and probably spent too much time reading it during an otherwise rather discouraging week.

The main reason I grabbed a sample for my Kindle is because Kate Elliott tweeted how much she liked the story world (again proving the power of word-of-mouth!). If I’d been on my own, I don’t know if I would have picked it up. Honestly, the cover doesn’t do much for me, and I’m fairly meh about the title–but the story’s what counts and the story is enthralling.

The protagonist is named Moon, and he’s a being who can shift between groundling form (basically human) and a rather fierce and dangerous winged being. The Cloud Roads is a fantasy. There is no time spent on trying to concoct an explanation for how or why this is possible. It’s simply magic–and this level of non-explanation works absolutely perfectly in the context of the story.

Moon is an outsider, belonging nowhere, but desperately wanting to belong, though unwilling to admit it. His adventures within an utterly fascinating and incredibly diverse and detailed story world are simply enthralling.

The Cloud Roads is the first book I read after finishing Bob Meyer’s fascinating civil war epic Duty, Honor, Country. I started three or four other books in between, but none caught my interest until The Cloud Roads, and then I was hooked from the first page. It’s not that anything truly compelling happened on page one, it’s just that Martha Wells has such a lively style of writing that I knew right away I was in for a good read. I’ve already grabbed a sample of another one of her books.

Another Goodreads.com book giveaway. If you know any middle-schoolers with a taste for adventure in their reading, have them check out Skye Object 3270a.

The book is available from these vendors:

Ebook:
Amazon.com USA
Amazon UK
Barnes & Noble

Print Edition:
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble
Powell’s Books

I’ve set up a Goodreads.com book giveaway, offering five print copies of The Dread Hammer. Enter to win! Spread the word!

Or buy the ebook for only $2.99 through May:
Amazon.com USA
Amazon UK
Barnes & Noble

Bob Mayer is a New York Times bestselling author who has “gone indie” with his latest novel Duty, Honor, Country, publishing it through his own company Who Dares Wins Publishing.

It’s a big novel, 175,000 words according to his website. I recently finished reading the Kindle version and found it fascinating.

Here’s the premise: “Who commanded the major battles of the Civil War? —— There were 60 important battles of the War. In 55 of them, graduates commanded on both sides.”

The story starts in 1840 at West Point, when Ulysses S. Grant was a student there. The story is loosely focused around Grant, but there are several other key characters whose lives we follow as the years pass. Both the Mexican War and the acquisition of California are involved, tying together a large piece of American history.

On the negative side, there were too many copy edit errors, especially in the first half of the book. But on the plus side, I looked forward to sitting down with the story every evening–and didn’t find it too long at all!

I’m way behind the curve on this one, but then again I read almost nothing in the science fiction genre from roughly 2002 to 2010, so I’ll hold that out as an excuse for why I’m only now talking about Crystal Rain, a 2006 first novel by Tobias Buckell.

As I’ve mentioned before, I love adventure stories, and this is an all-out adventure with airships, steam-augmented sailing ships, spacecraft, war, a range of settings that includes city, ocean, jungle, arctic, and alpine, and great characters, some with their own mysteries that are gradually untangled.

(See that scene on the book cover over there on the right? That’s actually in the book!)

Whenever possible, I prefer to form my own opinions about a book before hearing what others have to say, so I went to look at the Amazon reviews after finishing this book. It well-deserves its four-star average, but the few who did complain seemed to be focused on a dislike of the Caribbean-derived dialect of the primary culture of Nanagada. Personally, I thought this was very well done. I’m a very “auditory” reader. I tend to hear the words in my head, especially dialogue like this, and it was like listening to actual speakers with a grammar and dialect different from mine.

I thoroughly enjoyed Crystal Rain. Ragamuffin is the next novel, and it’s on my “to read” list.

Keith Brooke at Infinity Plus has put together infinities, a FREE ebook comprised of short stories, novel extracts and a complete novelette from infinity plus authors and friends–and yours truly is one of the friends.

infinities is edited by Keith Brooke and includes work from Eric Brown, John Grant, Anna Tambour, Keith Brooke, Garry Kilworth, Iain Rowan, Kaitlin Queen, Scott Nicholson, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Steven Savile. My own contribution is a sample of my novel Memory, but even if you’ve already read that, get on over there and check out the work of these great writers!

UPDATED July 14, 2013: I haven’t done a “Sample Sunday” for a while, so I thought I’d bring this back up to the front for a day.

MEMORY is “science fiction that feels like fantasy.” Click here to read a very flattering recent review by science fiction author and blogger Tobias Buckell. Click here for places to buy MEMORY.

CHAPTER 1

When I was ten I had a blanket that was smooth and dark, with no light of its own until I moved and then its folds would glitter with thousands of tiny stars in all the colors of the stars in the night sky. But the pale arch that appears at the zenith on clear nights and that we call the Bow of Heaven never would appear on my blanket–and for that I was glad. For if there was no Heaven, I reasoned, then the dead would always be reborn in this world and not the next, no matter how wise they became in life.

This was always a great concern for me, for my mother was the wisest person I knew and I feared for her. More than once I schemed to make her look foolish, just to be sure she would not get into Heaven when her time came. When my antics grew too much she would turn to my father. With a dark frown and her strong arms crossed over her chest she would say, “We have been so very fortunate to have such a wild and reckless daughter as Jubilee. Obviously, she was sent to teach us wisdom.” My father would laugh, but I would pout, knowing I had lost another round, and that I must try harder next time.

I seldom suffered a guilty conscience. I knew it was my role to be wild–even my mother agreed to that–but on the night my story begins I was troubled by the thought that perhaps this time I had gone too far. (more…)