Linda Nagata: the blog at Hahví.net


Reminders: Storybundle and Goodreads

Thursday, May 4th, 2017

Just a couple of reminders…

LAST DAY:
Only 9 hours left before the SFWA Storybundle is gone! Includes my novel TECH-HEAVEN along with work by Nancy Jane Moore, Paul Levinson, Robert J. Sawyer, and more.

Goodreads Giveaway:
This one is still ongoing. If you haven’t already, enter to win a signed copy of my forthcoming novel The Last Good Man!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Last Good Man by Linda Nagata

The Last Good Man

by Linda Nagata

Giveaway ends June 04, 2017.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

More soon!

OMG Another Storybundle!

Tuesday, April 11th, 2017

Books, books, books!

Due to a strange — shall we say unique? — concatenation of circumstances I am involved in a second STORYBUNDLE that overlaps with the first.

A quick review: Storybundles are themed collections of ebooks, sold together at discount, and available only for a very short period of time.

Time is almost up for the Artificial Intelligence Storybundle. Get it by APRIL 20th, because after that it will be gone. The AI Storybundle includes two of my novels, along with novels by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Lisa Mason, Walter Jon Williams, and Ryan Schneider. Plus! Two short fiction anthologies.

Follow this link for details on the Artificial Intelligence Storybundle, and to read excerpts from each work.

So what’s the new Storybundle?

More science fiction, of course! Here are the book covers:

SFWA Science Fiction Bundle

Cat Rambo is the president of SFWA — the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America — and in that capacity she has assembled the SFWA Science Fiction Bundle to showcase members’ work. This bundle is all science fiction and includes my novel Tech-Heaven.

So what’s it cost?

StoryBundle lets you name your own price, with a $5 minimum. For the SFWA Science Fiction Bundle, a minimum purchase of $5 gets you the basic set of six books:
Saiensu Fikushon 2016 by TOBI Hirotaka, Toh Enjoe and Taiyo Fujii
Borrowed Tides by Paul Levinson
The Weave by Nancy Jane Moore
Truck Stop Earth by Michael A. Armstrong
Children of Arkadia by M. Darusha Wehm
Beyond the Gates by Catherine Wells

If you pay more than the bonus price of just $15, you get all six of the regular titles, plus SIX more!
Unidentified Funny Objects by Alex Shvartsman
Factoring Humanity by Robert J. Sawyer
Strangers Among Us by Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law
Tech-Heaven by Linda Nagatathat’s my contribution!
The Burning Eye by John F. Carr
The Leaves of October by Don Sakers

Like all bundles, this one is available only for a limited time, so get it while you can!

Follow this link for details on the SFWA Science Fiction Bundle, and to read excerpts from each work.

Snippet: Tech-Heaven

Saturday, December 8th, 2012

Tech-Heaven is a near-future political thriller that imagines the rise of nanotechnology in our world through the eyes of Katie Kishida, a mother and business woman whose life takes an extraordinary turn when she is widowed, and her husband’s body is cryonically frozen against a time when advancing technology will allow his resurrection.

* * *

Katie Kishida rode into the little Andean village of La Cruz on the back of a bony black steel mannequin. Through her VR suit she directed each crunching step along the mineral soil of the village’s lone street. A freezing wind whistled through the mannequin’s external joints and soughed past the rim of her VR helmet. She clung to the mannequin’s back, studying the helmet’s video display, anxiously searching the village for signs of life. But there was nothing—not a wisp of smoke or a scrounging bird, or even a cat slinking through the cluster of worn, wood frame buildings.

She commanded the remotely controlled unit to stop. The village made a neat frame for an imposing line of white peaks supporting a heavy ceiling of storm clouds. Bass thunder rumbled there, arriving almost below the range of hearing, a deep vibration that set Katie’s slight, sixty-four-year-old body trembling, and snapped the brittle tethers she’d placed upon her fear.

The Voice cops had forgotten her.

She didn’t want to believe it. Certainly in Panama they’d tried to stop her. Failing that, they’d seized her holding company, Kishida Hunt. They’d confiscated her assets, declared her a criminal, and then . . . nothing. She’d journeyed south for weeks with no sign of pursuit, and that worried her most of all, because the Voice cops wouldn’t give up unless they thought she was dead . . . or disarmed. Maybe they knew about her bootleg copy of the Cure. Maybe they’d seized it before it could be shipped to La Cruz. Or maybe the life-extension schedule was a fraud, and there had been no pursuit since Panama because there was no Cure—and no way to restore life to the cryonic suspension patients hidden in a clandestine mausoleum in the mountains above La Cruz.

Fear had become her default emotion.

She shut down the remote, then slid from her perch on its back to stand on her own stiff legs. Her lean muscles ached and her ass was forever sore. She lifted the video helmet off her head. The wind streamed past her cheeks, its bitter touch oddly familiar. She thought she could feel Tom’s presence in the mountains’ unremitting cold. Tom had been dead thirty years. Or maybe he’d just become a crystalline life-form when his heart had stopped, his body and their marriage both immersed in liquid nitrogen, –196 C, a cold that had haunted her life.

A child’s laughter broke her reverie. Katie looked up. Motion drew her gaze up the street to a single story building slightly larger than all the others, with a hand lettered sign by the door declaring Provisiones. Katie remembered. This was the same store where she’d bought a cup of hot coffee fifteen years ago. Back then, the building had been painted a shade of blue that matched the sky. But time had bleached and chipped away the paint until now there was only a hint of color left between the cracks. The walls were further abused with rusty staples, a few still clenching the tattered corners of handbills that had long since blown away. A little girl was peering past the partly opened door, bouncing up and down in excitement as she exclaimed in lilting Spanish over the skeletal aspect of the remote.

In her eagerness, Katie dropped the helmet in the street, forgetting it before it hit the ground. She hobbled toward the battered building, fighting muscle cramps in her legs. If the Cure had been successfully shipped from Vancouver, then it would be here, in the village store. She could claim her package and push on, higher still into the mountains, to the hidden mausoleum where Tom waited. If she could get to that quiet place, with the Cure in hand and no cops on her trail, then perhaps she could finally confront the ghost that had haunted her for thirty years.

* * *
For more on the book, see my blog post “Musings on Tech-Heaven.”

Available in print and ebook editions.

Musings on Tech-Heaven

Monday, July 2nd, 2012

Tech-Heaven by Linda Nagata; cover by Bruce JensenPowerful women populate my novel, Tech-Heaven, in a story that explores the impact of cryonics, the slow development of nanotechnology, and political issues surrounding both.

But is Tech-Heaven a feminist novel? What is a feminist novel anyway?

The protagonist of this story is a woman, Katie Kishida. The two primary antagonists are women as well — Senator Ilene Carson and Roxanne Scott — who are both complex characters in their own right, though they also serve as the face of broad-based social forces.

But here’s the catch: at the center of the conflict between these three women is a man, Tom Kishida. He’s Katie’s husband, Ilene’s brother, and Roxanne’s friend. He’s also the dead man the story revolves around, his body preserved in liquid nitrogen while those who love him wrestle over his fate. Katie wants to rescue Tom, to see him through to a time when advancing technology can repair his body and restore his life. Ilene and Roxanne see things differently.

As several reviewers noted, at its core, Tech-Heaven is a romance, but be warned: it’s a grimly determined one.

What I like most about the character of Katie Kishida is that she’s not remotely a superhero. She’s starts the story as a nearly ordinary wife, mother, and businesswoman, but after her husband’s death her obsessive determination to make cryonics real and workable changes everything: her life, her relationships, and the world around her.

Out of all my novels, I think Tech-Heaven is written closest to a “mainstream” style, with scenes of daily life and reflection included in what becomes from time to time, a bizarre narrative.

The story is a very American one, set primarily in California and reflecting many aspects of American culture.

It’s not directly concerned with the role or status of women, assuming instead that women are capable players — or more accurately, that people in general are as capable as they choose to be. Alliances between characters are not made across gender lines, but are founded on shared beliefs and shared goals.

The story also includes mixed-race marriages while paying hardly any attention to them, because in my experience, when you’re living inside one, that’s how it is. But the story does pay attention to love, family, obligation, ethics, politics, and the determination to see a task through to the end.

Tech-Heaven is not a book aimed particularly at men or women, but at readers interested in exploring different sides of controversial ideas and the fallout of advancing technology.

Is it a feminist novel? If it’s not, then the meaning of “feminism” is uselessly narrow. Is it a humanist novel? I like to think so. From a marketing perspective, I consider it a near-future thriller. We’re already into the early years of that future and it seems to me the story still holds up disturbingly well.

 

Where to sample/purchase the ebook:
Book View Café (worldwide)
Amazon.com USA
Amazon UK
Barnes & Noble (USA)

Where to order the print version:
Amazon USA
Amazon UK
Booktopia (Australia)
Barnes & Noble (USA)
Powell’s Books (USA)

The Nanotech Succession Omnibus Edition

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

I’ve had a few requests for an omnibus edition of The Nanotech Succession, so here it is. The ebook is available in epub and mobi formats, at a cost of $15.00 USD, which is a savings of 25% over the cost of the books purchased separately.

Right now it’s only available at my website. It’ll eventually go up at Book View Café, but it won’t be at Amazon, where books priced over $9.99 pay only a 35% royalty to the publisher, as opposed to 70% for books under that price. It’s a similar deal at Barnes & Noble.

More details here if you’re interested.

The Nanotech Succession: Print Version

Thursday, October 6th, 2011

I just wanted to announce that all four books of The Nanotech Succession are now available as trade paperbacks–at least in the USA. Three of the four are presently available in the UK and Australia, while the fourth–Tech-Heaven–will hopefully show up in those markets in a week or two.

The books are print-on-demand, produced by Lightning Source and published under my own imprint, Mythic Island Press LLC.

I was so very lucky with these books to have Bruce Jensen prepare the front covers. They are beautiful!

Here’s the series, all together:

Prices vary by vendor, but here are general links to my print books:
Amazon.com USA
Amazon UK
Booktopia (Australia)
Barnes & Noble (USA)
Powell’s Books (USA)