Archive

Monthly Archives: June 2013

Price Fixing Books Destroys Literature

Quebec is considering fixing book prices, joining nations like France, Sweden, Mexico, Argentina, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Switzerland, Israel, and Belgium.

The hearings on fixed prices for new releases are a direct result of lobbying efforts by the One Price for Books campaign, launched on August 22 of last year. Organized by a roundtable of major book industry players and backed by several high-profile writers and artists…. For the past 15 years, the industry has been requesting that lawmakers fix book prices.

The excuses given are the usual claptrap:

(1) “to prevent operators of big-box stores from cannibalizing small bookstore sales with deep discounts”
(2) “to stop the spate of bookstore closings”
(3) because the “book industry is fragile”
(4) “to protect its bibliodiversity”

These are thin disguises for the real motivation of the campaign, which is to stop competition from new formats (digital) and new authors (indies and small presses). When corporations scheme together to fix prices, the result is collusion and monopoly. When corporations (usually the very same ones) scheme with pocket politicians to fix prices, the result is… collusion and monopoly.

Make no mistake. The goal of price fixing is not to protect bibliodiversity. It is to crush bibliodiversity. The Big Publishers behind the campaigns for price fixing know this very well, of course. What’s frustrating is some authors are taken in by the prettified rhetoric.

To see why, examine this graph, which I’ve borrowed off the blog from Kevin McLaughlin (where it appeared in a different context):

Indie authors, it is well known, flourish by offering their books at low prices. Some indies mistakenly think that this is exploitation of indie authors. Wrong. Indie authors are unknown to readers. Low (or free) prices can tempt a reader to take a chance on unknown authors, or on books that might have more grammar errors or less than professional covers. For a new author, Big Publishers can buy coop and advertising and send out hundreds of galleys well ahead of publication, they can pay for speaking tours and fancy gimmicks, all of which makes the readers feel familiar and comfortable with buying the book. Indies can’t do any of these things, generally. They have one card to play, and that’s price.

The indies use price to even the playing field and lure readers into taking a chance. After the readers have been wooed, then everything changes. My latest release, STRAT, hit the Top Twenty in two genre charts after I released it, despite having no reviews on any bookselling site yet, because by now I’ve built up a modest readership who were interested in buying it. But I gained most of those readers by offering the first book of my Unfinished Song series for free. And even now, I’ve kept the price of STRAT low, to encourage readers who don’t know me to try it out.

Laws such as those proposed in Quebec are slyly but precisely aimed to knock players like me out of the arena. Take a look at the proposed law: all books would HAVE to have the same price in the first nine months after release. How many of those books in the green columns on the above chart would be there if the Big Publishers and their purchased politicians had their way? They are betting–not as many. That’s exactly what they are lobbying for.

It’s estimated that by 2016, 50% of the US book market will be digital. Europe and Asia are far behind. Why? In part because of collusion between Big Publisher and governments, of the kind being attempted in Quebec. In some European countries the taxes on ebooks are astronomical compared to the taxes on print books, leading to the absurd situation that it’s more expensive to purchase 0’s and 1’s than dead trees. As always, protectionism and monopoly leads to the strangulation of innovation, competition and new technology.

The people who gain are the big corporations, the 1% of authors who are already established, and the rich who can afford any price for books. The people who suffer are the little guys, the young, new and unknown authors, and the poor, who can’t afford to move into digital ereaders, which would vastly open up their reading vistas.

Finally, the other kind of diversity squashed by price fixing is the diversity of art itself. Niche markets cannot operate on economies of scale like big, popular genres. The rise of ebooks has not only allowed more authors than ever to make a living from their creative work, but it has expanded and deepened the diversity of topics, genres, and sub-genres that authors are free to explore.

When innovation is crushed by corporate and political collusion, literature as a whole suffers.

“Dad, I don’t care about money”

When I was about twelve, I remember having a conversation with my Dad about What I Was Going To Do With My Life.

I said, “I’m going to be a writer.”

After he stopped laughing, he said, “Okay, now be serious. What are you going to do with your life?”

He explained that only the most skilled of writers could actually make a living at it, and since I couldn’t even spell (still true), obviously, that did not include me. So, if I wanted to make any money, I needed to be “realistic” and pick a more lucrative career. I then retorted, alone with every aspiring artist everywhere and everywhen,

“Dad, I don’t care about money. I just want to be happy!”

😀

A lot has changed since then. Dad has come around to my point of view. He decided that after a life-time of towing the line, he only wanted to be happy, so he changed gender and is now a woman, and also finally published his secret fantasy novel.

Oh, the irony.

But meanwhile, now a parent myself, I’ve come around to my Dad’s point of view, that, really, all things being equal, making money turns out to be fairly crucial to that whole Feeding The Hungry Brood part of life. I don’t like telling kids that I have to cancel swimming lessons because I didn’t sell enough books this month. Not that I’m willing to give up on being a novelist. I just wish I’d had more advice about how to balance art and business along the way.

It’s been my experience that those who are pro-business scorn art, and those who are pro-art, scorn business. There are even few other authors, already successful, who are willing to explain in a calm and sensible manner that yes, you can make a living as a writer.

In fact, a lot artists, writers, poets, painters and such not only oppose making any money personally, the oppose the idea of anyone at all making money, they oppose the whole capitalist system.

I came across an interesting article by Robert Nozick seeking to explain why intellectuals oppose capitalism. In a nutshell, verbally smart kids do well in school, and expect to do well after they graduate…but often don’t. Even if they land a lucrative career in academia, they don’t become billionaires like entrepreneurs  with good coding skills. Then they get resentful.

That’s an interesting theory. I think it’s missing a few bits, however.

For instance, I didn’t exactly do well in school. In elementary school, I’d miss 18 out of 20 spelling words on the test and get an Unhappy Face on my report card. (My elementary school didn’t use Letter Grades because that might make us feel bad….uh, how do you think a seven year old thinks about a giant Unhappy Face and being made to stay in recess?) I took Algebra three times and never did get higher than a D. In college, I nearly flunked a course when I blew off finals to write a novel. I was possessed by my muse…what was I supposed to do? Wait to write it, and miss my moment of inspiration, which I well knew would never come again?! Pah!

I think that we humans have two standards to dealing with others. One is for dealing with family and close friends. A friend in need is a friend indeed. A fair weather friend is no friend at all. True love is in sickness and in health, for better or worse. You commit whole-heartedly to those you love. You love them whether they are poor or rich, sick or healthy, reviled or respected…. if you don’t, it’s not real love.

The second way is for dealing with total strangers. That’s where money comes in. If you are a decent person, you deal fairly with strangers, giving them value for their money, being honest in your transactions, and relying on mutual self-interest to ensure the other party will do the same. If someone cheats you, you never deal with that person again, and warn others against him as well.

Both systems of morality are important, but they are completely different. Imagine if you had the attitude that if your child lied to you, you wouldn’t ever do business with them again.

Parent: Did you wash your hands already already?
Child: (hides dirty, sticky hands behind back quickly) Yes!

Uh, that wouldn’t last long.

Anyone who has had a newborn in the house knows that if you didn’t love your children irrationally, you would behave like a lizard parent, just to get a full night’s sleep, and eat them in the first week.

My theory is that our artistic creations, art and novels and such, are the children of our mind. We must love them even if no one else can. Because if we didn’t love our art just as irrationally as we love our children, we wouldn’t keep at it for the 10,000 hours we need to produce works that outsiders are finally capable of recognizing as worthwhile.

The first picture you drew, the first story you wrote, the first work of art you tried to produce, no matter what the medium, was, I guarantee you, crap. Except, of course, to your parents, who stuck in on the refrigerator with an Alphabet magnet. If you were lucky, no one tried to inform you of the market value of those pieces until you were at least into puberty.

Because of that, we disdain and scorn making art for money. It seems…uncouth. Not real art. It would be like parents who said, “We’re going to have a kid to raise some cash.” Wtf…? They should be arrested! An artist or writer who says, “I’m only going to work on that project if it makes a lot of money” is the epitome of slime. (Never mind that there are plenty of them.) And the strange thing is, those who love their art actually achieve greatness more often than those who are trying to turn it into a cash-cow right from the start. So our scorn feels justified.

But once we have put in our 10,000 hours , and the work we produce no longer looks like scribbles, I’d say it’s time to put aside that scorn.

Not while we are in the throes of creation itself. That’s a process like childbirth, and really, the only thing to focus on at that point is to push that product our. (Ok, that’s a very maternal metaphor, so for you dads; hold onto your muse’s hand while she’s in labor, even if she almost breaks your arm.) (I’m not sure that metaphor was better… moving on….)

But at some point, we can put on our business hats without betraying our art. And we can be appreciative that we live in a free market society where we can sell our art on an open market, as opposed to ninety-five percent of history, where we would have had to sleep with our patron and/or praise tyrants you loathe to publish anything.

Art and business do not have to be enemies. They can be allies.

Anyway, that’s what you can tell Dad next time he asks you What Are You Are Going To Do With Your Life.

Barnes and Noble Firesale on Nooks

Rumor has it that Barnes and Noble is planning to give up direct production of the Nook. Microsoft might take it over, or a breakaway child-company.

The firesale on Nooks seems to lend credence to this rumor. The upside though is that you can get Nooks at incredible prices right now

Wouldn’t that make a great Father’s Day Present for dad or hubby? Hehehe. My husband got his three days ago, a little early! (He is the nook fanatic, and I’m the kindle girl.) I also bought him Daddy’s Little Princess… sequel to the equally poignant yet side-splittingly hilarious Vader and Son.

Of Mechs And Men

–>
In yesterday’s post, I discussed the pre-existent ideas about the future that a sf author should be aware of when world-building. In fact, if you think of these as a series of scales or levers, just answering these questions can toss up an interesting setting for a SF story.

Questions:
1. Will artificial intelligence ever expand, change, or overtake human intelligence?
2. How might we travel Faster Than Light?
3. What would be the biggest challenges to establish colonies on other worlds?
4. Has life evolved more than once? Do aliens exist? If so, how might they interact with humanity?
5. How will genetic engineering change what it means to be human?
6. What social, political, and military changes will emerge in response to new technology and new discoveries?

I’m going to talk about the decisions I made while building the STRAT universe, and explain them.

1. Artificial Intelligence

STRAT is a story about artificial intelligence
 but not hypersmart robots. In fact, even though “mechs” are an important part of the story, they are not Transformer type mechs, with human intelligence and a taste for pop music. Nor are they Kill All Humans obsessed Terminators. They are merely tools that extend the fighting leverage of human soldiers.
This isn’t to say that mechs never turn on humans. During training for the Galactic War, the hero and his platoon are taught two different ways to program strats into their mechs, one using “chained tactics” and the other, “freestyle.”

–>
–>
Chained tactics meant you stacked a decision tree with a long list of tactics, and the mechs followed that order of operations. You could program complex stratagems that way, creating traps and bluffs and long-term deployments. The downside was that if any of your planning assumptions were wrong, your whole decision tree would be hacked down at the root, and the long chain of tactics would be worthless, leaving the mechs helpless to readjust without direct oversight.



Freestyle tactics meant that you gave your mechs a multitude of short decision trees, and let them shuffle through the tactics randomly as they traversed the combat terrain, learning on their own which worked best. The drawback was that freestyle mechs took a while to learn what worked, so they could be sucker-punched by the other side. Worse yet, sometimes they learned wrong.

Mechs operating freestyle could screw you up royally, if they fell into a bad rut, which sometimes happened for no obvious reason. Sometimes they even turned on each other, or worse, on you. When you had your own mechs bite you in the arse like that once or twice, you tended to shy away from freestyle. But despite a few spectacular screw-ups, freestyle mechs usually beat chained mechs in most dust-ups. The longer and more chaotic the engagement, the more likely freestyle mechs were to triumph over mechs chained to a pre-ordained decision tree.

Even freestyle mechs are tools, however, not people made of metal.
The real artificial intelligence tech in the story is “meme” tech, the ability to store and transfer memory from one mind to another. In addition to meme tech, there are also two other forms of neural adjustment technology: emotivation, which is imprinting an emotional state or attitude (i.e. loyalty to a lord, or love for a husband); and mindwiping, which is turning a human into an obedient doll… programmable much like a mech.
Is meme tech all-powerful and irresistible? Is human nature like plastic in the hands of the architects of direct neural propaganda? Or does reality bite back? That’s the question.

2. Faster Than Light Space Travel

In the STRAT universe, I hypothesize two types of FTL transportation. One is the old stand-by in SF, the wormhole, or “jump gate,” suitable for large ships at the edge of star systems. The other, which is called a “synapse,”  works on the principle of quantum entanglement. Neither idea is new to SF. What was important to me was to choose a method that could conceivably evolve and improve over the course of time.
ArthurBlue

3. Colonies in space

Since FTL travel is possible, colonies on other planets are also possible. (In this particular series, I don’t explore anything more exotic than other planets–that’s for another book…) Here I hypothesized that in seeking another world, the single most important “Earth-like” quality humans would seek would be the right gravity. They have no easy way to create that in the STRAT universe, whereas if they can create spaceships, I figure, they can also create self-sufficient archologies that have air, water, plants and living space for humans.
Because of this, planets which might seem inimical to human life, like Neraka, with its atmosphere, glaciers, volcanoes, and seas all oozing sulfur dioxide, are colonized. Neraka is not easy to terraform, but it has the right gravity, so that makes it “habitable.” Ironically, this means that once established there, the denizens are condemned to mad scramble for breathable gases. They mine oxygen and carbon from the rocks, to keep themselves and their crops alive. Mass asphyxia, not famine, has been the great killer in times of want.

4. Aliens

Aliens, and their relationship to humanity, are extremely important in STRAT, but not in the usual way. That’s because the aliens do not (usually) interact with humans, so their influence is felt only at arm’s length. Who the aliens really are and what they want, and whether they work for humanity’s harm or benefit, are huge questions in the background of the novel. STRAT is in many ways a straightforward military adventure novel, but this was an element that I wanted to remain ambiguous and uncertain, as real life is ambiguous and uncertain.

5. Genetic Changes to Humanity

It’s possible that humans on other planets would change their own genetic make-up rather than their environment. After all, it’s easier to manipulate DNA—we can do that already to some extent—than change the weather
at least in the direction we want! However, I treat this conservatively in STRAT. Humans prefer to genetically engineer microscopic symbionts to help them adapt to poisonous environments. They also use genetic engineering on animals, such as the mouse-cows that provide miner families with fresh milk, or the unicorns that adorn the gardens of the nobility.
The main ways that human groups differ from each other are the accidental and incidental results of the separation of different lineages over long periods of time. Racial differences, in other words. These are not important, except as a cause social friction: “Sagittarians and Cygnians,” the hero observes, “differ from one another in subtle ways, the cast of the eye, the tint of the skin, trivial divergences that fools make much of.” (He also finds that decapitation does marvels for discouraging attacks by racist hooligans.)

6. Social Changes to Humanity

Social change is really at the heart of STRAT. Many SF stories take a snapshot of the future
the technology is already different, and people have adjusted to this new way of life. Often, if the author is good, the characters take their amazing new abilities and circumstances for granted. However, I wanted to show a society experiencing an accelerated rate of change. There are a few authors who have done this well, and they happen to be among my favorites: Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, of course; Haldeman’s Forever War; Olaf Stapledon’s First and Last Men and Star Maker; Stephan Baxter’s Evolution….
Where else would change be most rapid, most obvious, and most lethal, than in war? That’s why I wanted STRAT to be specifically military SF. What if a millennia worth of change in military technology all occurred within the lifetime of one man? How would he deal with that? It’s said that generals are always prepared to fight the last war. In the STRAT universe, that’s a particular danger, because both military and social technologies are changing so rapidly.
It’s hard enough to show change. It’s even harder show change accelerating. It’s hardest of all to show accelerating future change—by definition unknown! So, I admit, I cheated a bit, and looked to the past for inspiration. This is a time-honored tradition in military SF too, by the way. The Honor Harrington series is basically Horatio Hornblower in space, StarshipTroopers references WWII, the Forever War can be read as an allegory of Vietnam, and after 911 a whole new slew of military SF featuring sneak attacks and terrorist suicide bombers emerged. In Star Wars, they fight with glowy swords. Really? Swords? Really?
Also, have you ever noticed how common monarchies and empires are in SF? What’s up with that?
Well, I can’t criticize. The society on Neraka at the beginning of STRAT is also feudal. While the hero belongs to an equalitarian, democratic clan-based society, who live as outcastes out in the “Wayout,” or wilderness, the majority of people are ruled by lords and their armsmen, who are equivalent to knights or samurai. My hero aquires a knightly weapon called a vajram, which has several modes, including a sword-form. (Though it’s really more like a slender, super-powered chainsaw.)
This is not because I actually think that the future will recapitulate the past.
The real reason I did this was so that I could show society moving from a feudal base to a more complex form—and show war grow larger in scope at the same time. However, within the story universe, the rise of “space feudalism” is explained in an faux academic Aside by “Demographic Density Theory,” or the hypothesis that when the majority of people are dispersed but tied to the land (by agriculture in Earth’s past, by mining for gases during the age of galactic exploration), they become vulnerable to bandits, and must turn to a strong central military caste for protection.
The hero too must give up the freedom he believes in to join this feudal system and fight for his abducted wife. That, however, is only the beginning of the story. For the feudal system is soon itself overturned by new technological and social developments. The question at the heart of the novel is whether freedom is sustainable, and what is required to defend it.

In the Future, We Will Look Like Zebra-Lemurs (5 Things To Remember About SF)

Nickelay Lamm predicts we will have huge, lemur-like eyes in the far future.  Presumably this will be driven by sexual selection from millennia of watching Anime. I added the zebra stripes. Because, really, who doesn’t love zebras?

5 Things To Remember About SF

1. Science Fiction can be about the past, the present, or the future.

Short cut answers to the question, ‘what is sf?’ reach for topics typical to the genre: “SF is about the future,” or “SF is about space travel,” or “SF is about aliens.” Of course, SF doesn’t have to involve space travel or aliens, nor does it have to be set in the future. In fact, there is a whole sub-genre of SF that is set in the past: Alternate History. (One of my favorite sub-genres, in fact!) But whether it takes place in the past, the present, or the future, all science fiction deals with the question of how things change.
In a SF story, the author is proposing a thesis about change:
“If this happens, then that will happen.” (Future)
“If this had happened, then that would have happened.”  (Past)
“This is happening, because that is happening.” (Present)
So is SF about predicting the future? No, not really. It’s about predicting change, but that’s not the same thing. Which brings us to our next point. 

2. Science Fiction is about extrapolation, not prediction.

Prediction would be saying, “This is what the future will look like.” Humans are notoriously poor at predicting the future, and although, arguably, sf writers have done a better job than most futurists, if we judged sf works only by how many of their descriptions had been true predictions, it would be a sorry record.
Take Orwell’s 1984. The world in 1984 was not a dreary dystopia completely dominated by three warring totalitarian powers. In fact, the Soviet Union, which was most like the societies he depicted, fell only six years later. Taken as a futurist, Orwell failed.
However, that wasn’t the point of 1984. Orwell, a former Communist who was horrified by the direction he saw the ideology going once it was in power, wanted to show, in vivid and personal terms, what it would mean to live in a world where there were no longer any free societies, only rival totalitarianisms. 

3. Science Fiction is about extrapolating social and technological change.

SF is about extrapolating change, but only certain kinds of change. Supposed the story question was: “What if a waitress fell in love with a billionaire?” That situation would no doubt involve change in the emotional and financial state of the waitress, but it’s obviously a better set-up question for a romance than a SF novel. Now, if the question were, “What if a waitress fell in love with a billionaire
and then she found out he was a robot?” that would clearly be SF. But why? Not just because it involves robot billionaires, which don’t yet exist (correct me if I’m wrong), but because suddenly this love story has implications far beyond the mating game of two individuals. The question of whether a human can love a robot, at least if he’s rich enough, has implications for all humanity.
Or suppose the story question was: “What if anti-gay terrorists were going to release a bomb in San Francisco?” That would make a good premise for a Thriller. But it’s not a SF question, because we already have terrorists, and anti-gay movements, and San Francisco. Now, if the question were: “What if anti-gay terrorists were going to release a bioweapon in San Francisco, using a new technology that only infected anyone with the ‘gay gene’?” That would be SF. Why? Because this premise now asks a larger question about how a new technology (such a targeted bioweapon) and/or a new discovery (the ‘gay gene’) could interact to be a game-changer in human history.
SF is about change, but that change has to have larger implications than changes to individuals, even though SF stories are, of course, about individuals. The social and technological changes indicate something critical is different from our known present. 

4. Science Fiction is not written in a vacuum.

Science Fiction is not written in a vacuum, but in response to other SF and ideas about the future, the past, and technology. This has ups and down.
On the down side, you have to fight against falling into ready-made clichés. You might come up with what you think is a terrific idea, but readers immediately recognized it as a re-hash of Star Trek/Star Wars/Battlestar Galactica. You have to work hard to push past the obvious, easy answers, which are probably sloppy borrows from other SF, and search for true originality.
On the upside, as long as you are aware of the dangers of clichĂ©s, you can also lean on them strategically. You can use conventions, complete with acronyms, such as FTL drives (faster than light), without having to waste your info-investment opportunities. You focus your originality on the area that is relevant to the thesis of your book—at the heart of the issue you are interested in exploring. You can let sci-fi conventions fill in the rest of the story, the way literary writers use their readers’ knowledge of the contemporary world (and other literary works), and regency romance readers use their readers’ knowledge of Regency England to give a leg up in world-building.
David Farland calls this ‘resonance.’
For example, in Orson Scott Card’s classic military sf book, Ender’s Game, his aliens are amorphous BEM (Bug Eyed Monsters) intent on conquering the Earth. (Other books in the series may complicate that, but I’m referring to the first novel, which, after all, stands alone on its own merits.) Card is perfectly capable of building more complex, less clichĂ©d aliens, but that was beside the point in Ender’s Game, which was about children fighting wars, not really about the aliens at all. Card could use his readers’ knowledge and expectations of BEMs as a prefabricated building block in the story structure he wanted to build. 

5. Science Fiction must answer, implicitly or explicitly, current commonly held expectations about what kinds of technology will change.

Because SF is not written in a vacuum, a writer building a new story universe must address, current commonly held expectations about what kinds of technology will change. This can be don implicitly or explicitly. Keep in mind, though, that if these things aren’t explained, or explained away, readers may wonder about them:
–       Artificial Intelligence
–       Faster Than Light Space Travel
–       Colonies in space
–       Aliens
–       Genetic Changes to Humanity
–       Social Changes to Humanity
Suppose, for instance, you want to hypothesize a future in which humans have evolved bigger brains, lemur-like eyes, and zebra skin. Also, they all live in Antarctica, the only habitable continent left. You don’t specifically have to say that they don’t have robot servants, don’t have faster than light travel, aren’t living on another world, and haven’t met sexy aliens from Zor-la. That will be obvious in the context of the story.
But at the back of your mind, you must have answered the question of why these things don’t exist
It could be as simple as the premise that faster than light travel and aliens don’t exist, or at least still haven’t been discovered yet after another 100,000 years. In other words, your worldbuilding premise is: What if all the dreams of a Singularity, colonies in space, leaving the Earth behind, and a dramatic break with our present biology were not possible? How might we still change in 100,000 years? (Stripes! Anime eyes!) You might even allow that those things do exist
 maybe at some point, humanity was divided into “Those Who Left” and “Those Who Stayed,” but this story is about the latter.

STRAT: A New Military Scifi Novel

On a hell-class world where feudal lords joust with mechs and use memetic tech to imprint loyalty onto their vassals and thralls, all Charlie and his people ask is to be left alone, free to think for themselves.

Then, on his wedding day, Charlie’s bride is kidnapped to be a thrall. As he fights for his life and her freedom, he discovers the war helm of an ancient and powerful lord. He needs the knowledge in the helm to bring the battle to his enemies. But if he uses it, he risks losing himself… and becoming embroiled in a war that will soon span the galaxy.

Peek inside the novel:

“Whhhhy doeth thou hhhhesitate?” the alien Sulphine queen asked.

“Sorry, ma’am.” I shook my head. “I can’t put on the helm. Not even to save my life. It will steal my mind.”

With that decision, I felt a deep peace and joy. I wasn’t scared of death no more, I just felt good.

“And what of thhy mate?” the Sulphine asked me. “Hhhumans fighhht for many thhhings thhat to us seem worthhless but yet thhou wilt not for thhy mate?”

All my fine feeling left me. I choked. The sound of them bandits flyin away with Benisse on the plane rang in my ears. There was no way I could save Benisse if I was dead. Hell, wasn’t no way I could save Benisse if I was alive neither, not unless a miracle occurred.

A miracle, like, say, findin a weapon that would let me take the fight to them what took my girl.

Shit.

I hadn’t never been sure I believed I had a soul till I had to make the choice to give it up.

To save her, you gonna have to fight them on their own terms and win.

Better to lose my life than my mind; but better to lose my mind than to lose her.

I unzipped the kit of Lord Brin. For a minute, I stared at him, or what was left of him, a skinny white skeleton grinnin at me. Once I had got to knockin his bones out of my way, I sat into the lee of the open kit. Kits is designed with smart-threads so that an old one will weave off you and a new one weave on you without exposin you to the poison gas about you. The whole lot slid on smoothly.

“Thhhou hhhast made thhhy chhhoice,” said the Sulphine “Thhhou hhhast chhhosen life. We shhhall bidhh thhhee farewell now.”

Suddenly, I was blind and in pain again. But I was breathin better and I could feel Brin’s kit and helm. Can’t explain how, but I knew that me and the plane wasn’t in the Sulphine palace no more. It’s like them Sulphines was able just to melt clean away once they was satisfied they was done with me.

I took a deep breath of the stale air in Brin’s kit and pressed the button that welded the implants of the Helm of Brin into my skull.

STRAT is available for download on Amazon, Kobo and Barnes and Noble. After you’ve finished reading, be sure to leave a review where you purchased it or on Goodreads/Shelfari to help other readers find STRAT.
1 2 3 4