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swipestream · 6 years ago

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Science Fiction New Releases: 6 April, 2019

Arena mech combat, alien ugly ducklings, deep space salvage, and genetic manipulation feature in this week’s roundup of the newest releases in science fiction.

BattleTech: Not the Way The Smart Money Bets (Kell Hounds Trilogy #1) – Michael A. Stackpole

Brothers Morgan and Patrick Kell have just landed on Galatea, the mercenary planet known for its brutal arena ’Mech combat games. They intend to found their own merc unit, building it from the ground up, but there are a few obstacles in their way. The first is a corrupt general fronting for the second, a local crime lord named Haskell Blizzard who crushes anyone he sees as a threat. And the Kell boys offering lucrative contracts for the best ’Mechwarriors and techs on the planet is a definite threat to his illegal empire.

But what Blizzard doesn’t know is that the Kell brothers have faced long odds before, and come out on top every single time. And with the help of some old and new friends, they’re going to take this crime lord down using his own tactics against him.

When the chips are down, the smart money is always on the brothers Kell.

Cannon Publishing Military Sci-Fi / Fantasy Anthology: Spring 2019 – Presented by Cannon Publishing

The military experience is timeless, and echoes down from our past and into our future. Along the way, not everything is as it seems. Thirteen stories from established and new writers in the field of Military Science Fiction and Military Fantasy bring you tales of the terrors of combat and the even greater fear of the unknown in Cannon Publishing’s first Bi-Annual Military Anthology. Includes works by:

Alex Piasecki ~ During the Iraq War, a United States Marine Corps fire team goes to the rescue of a young boy and encounters an ancient evil. It will take massive firepower and violent action to get out alive, if they can. A Joint Task Force 13 story.

Lucas Marcum ~ Trapped in the hull of a badly damaged starship, a young sailor must make difficult decisions to save her ship and her crewmates. A story set in the best selling Valkyrie universe.

Jason Cordova ~ Out of time, the war for Earth rages as scientists struggle to stop two cataclysmic events from happening simultaneously, and possibly save the world while they’re at it.

Yakov Merkin ~ . Another day at the most boring, dead-end job in the Galactic Alliance’s Legion Navy turns out to be the day that you might get killed.

Do No Harm (Four Horsemen Universe: The Omega War #9) – by Robert E. Hampson , Chris Kennedy , and Sandra L. Medlock

When Todd’s critically damaged ship dropped out of hyperspace near the Human colony world of Azure, he had no memory of his past. He didn’t know who he was, or even what he was, and the Humans didn’t either. That didn’t stop the colonists of Azure—they took him in, anyway…even though they didn’t understand how he could do some of the things he could do.

Todd and his descendants consider themselves Human—eight armed and water-breathing—but Human, nonetheless. After seventy years living among Humans, Todd’s descendants are going back out into the Union to make their mark—from fifteen-year-old Verne, who’s a little short to be a mercenary, to Harryhausen, who wants to be the most famous PI in the galaxy. Eventually they learn that the rest of the Galactic Union knows them as Wrogul, intelligent octopus-like beings known for science and the ability to perform surgery like no other race can.

These Wrogul do more than just practice medicine, but they still intend to do no harm. Unfortunately, the Humans, whether they have two arms or eight, have powerful enemies… and the Wrogul may have no choice.

Don’t Call Me Ishmael (The Fallen World # 2) – Chris Kennedy

Don’t call him Ishmael. Or do; he really doesn’t care. Just don’t call him Fred.

No matter what you call him, though, he has a problem. Well, several of them. Ishmael—for want of a better name—woke up in a world that had changed. The Corporations—the wielders of power in a society not long from now—brought about the end of civilization as we know it, nuking each other to the point where it collapsed.

Ishmael doesn’t know any of this, though; in fact, he doesn’t know anything about himself when he wakes up in this shattered world. All of his autobiographical and episodic memories are gone, and along with them, any knowledge of who he was or anything in his past.

Worse, he has made enemies of some very important people, and they are after him. They are armed and he is alone and in…well, he doesn’t know where he is, either.

Can Ishmael stay alive long enough to recover his memories—to find out who he is and how he fits—or will he be just another casualty of This Fallen World?

Maledictions – Edited by Black Library

Eleven stories from the worlds of Warhammer explore the darker side of the 41st Millennium and the Mortal Realms, with tales of psychological torment, visceral horror and the supernatural from Black Library authors old and new.

Horror is no stranger to the dark worlds of Warhammer. Its very fabric is infested with the arcane, the strange and the downright terrifying. From the cold vastness of the 41st Millennium to the creeping evil at large in the Mortal Realms, this anthology of short stories explores the sinister side of Warhammer in a way it never has been before. Psychological torment, visceral horrors, harrowing tales of the supernatural and the nightmares buried within, this collection brings together a grim host of tales to chill the very blood…

READ IT BECAUSE: It’s a spine-chilling look into the dark places of the Warhammer universes, from some incredible talent, including a host of new-to-Black Library authors such as Cassandra Khaw and Lora Gray.

ReEvolution: a CRISPR Novel – Alex Grant

John Ordell, a young scientist, moves to Washington, DC and wants to work in biotechnology using the cutting-edge gene editing innovation called CRISPR. He is drawn into a money making scheme driven by greed, corporate espionage and international intrigue, all while harnessing the incredible power of CRISPR . The science is real, frightening and easily misapplied. This book scrutinizes what could go wrong when people and governments toy with CRISPR, a technology which makes Darwinian evolution obsolete and can change the nature of what it is to be human. John, his co-conspirators and other foreign actors use artificial intelligence and supercomputers, and combine it with CRISPR to great effect – but is humanity ready for this new era of ReEvolution?

This novel explores human nature and its ability to deal with this explosive technology. It examines how CRISPR works, its unlimited potential and how advances in computer technology can combine to make this period a turning point in human history. It is a must read in this day and age when the birth of healthy genetically engineered twins is announced on U-tube by a Chinese scientist instead of in respected journals. It is an exploration of the perils facing humanity at this precipitous time.

Strong and Courageous (Echoes of War # 2) – Daniel Gibbs

Colonel David Cohen has one goal: drive out the League of Sol. After a string of successful engagements, the warship Lion of Judah is ordered on a goodwill mission to assist neutral border planets long caught between both sides of the galactic conflict.

What David finds on Monrovia sends shockwaves of horror through the Terran Coalition.

Monrovian citizens of all faiths are being rounded up and sent to reeducation camps, while others are exterminated to cleanse the population as the planet seeks to join the communist League. Mass graves containing thousands of murdered men, women and children dot the landscape.

David vows to use whatever means necessary to stop the holocaust.

To face down the overwhelming brutality of the League, David will need more than the prayers of the faithful.

He’ll need a miracle.

Super-Sync – Kevin Ikenberry

Lew Armistead Holmes’ life was about to get better…much better. Part of the crew of the salvage ship Remnant, she just got a contract to go further into space than she’s ever been before, to retrieve a satellite that is so big it will take two ships to bring it back. The payday is equally large, and her share is big enough to get her off Remnant and away from her peculiar captain and his secrets.

Unfortunately, the captain of the other ship tasked to the job harbors a grudge against Remnant’s commanding officer from the last time the two worked together on a project. Separately, they are each like dynamite—ready to go off at any time. When they’re together, it’s like lighting the fuse.

But the payoff on the unknown satellite is huge, leading both crews to wonder what the satellite holds, and what they aren’t being told about it.

Both crews must work together to bring the satellite back to Earth, but there are plans within plans, and no one is exactly who the others think they are. Who will come back with the satellite at the end of the mission…and who won’t come back at all?

Tiamat’s Wrath (The Expanse #8) – James S. A. Corey

Thirteen hundred gates have opened to solar systems around the galaxy. But as humanity builds its interstellar empire in the alien ruins, the mysteries and threats grow deeper.

In the dead systems where gates lead to stranger things than alien planets, Elvi Okoye begins a desperate search to discover the nature of a genocide that happened before the first human beings existed, and to find weapons to fight a war against forces at the edge of the imaginable. But the price of that knowledge may be higher than she can pay.

At the heart of the empire, Teresa Duarte prepares to take on the burden of her father’s godlike ambition. The sociopathic scientist Paolo Cortázar and the Mephistophelian prisoner James Holden are only two of the dangers in a palace thick with intrigue, but Teresa has a mind of her own and secrets even her father the emperor doesn’t guess.

And throughout the wide human empire, the scattered crew of the Rocinante fights a brave rear-guard action against Duarte’s authoritarian regime. Memory of the old order falls away, and a future under Laconia’s eternal rule — and with it, a battle that humanity can only lose — seems more and more certain. Because against the terrors that lie between worlds, courage and ambition will not be enough…

Time Storm – Gordon R. Dickson

The time storm had devastated the Earth, and all but a small fraction of humankind has vanished. In the rubble of the world, three survivors had formed an unlikely trio: Marc Despard, determined to find a way to stop the time storm; a leopard, dazed by the storm and following after Despard like a kitten; and a young woman with an unbreakable bond to the leopard.

Now, Marc searches relentlessly for a clue to the nature of the storm, not guessing that the time storm threatens not just the Earth but the entire universe—and that his two companions were the only hope of reversing the distortions in the fabric of the cosmos that were about to bring an end to all of space and time . . .

A classic of post-apocalyptic science fiction from Grand Master Gordon R. Dickson.

The Ark – J. Swift

New Amerland was designed and built by survivors of the Incident.

Those were the people who, by some miracle, managed to get underground before the bombs fell; managed to lock away themselves and their families, and to survive the worst nuclear attack in history.

A lucky few would be selected by lottery and handed a ticket for free.

At least fifty per cent failed the test and were fated to die on their desolate and degraded planet…

Science Fiction New Releases: 6 April, 2019 published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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spynotebook · 7 years ago

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Dynamite has sent us a new writer’s commentary for their brand new Barbarella series. Mike Carey goes page by page through the first issue. Here we also see covers by Kenneth Rocafort, Joe Jusko, and Joseph Michael Linsner with interior art by Kenan Yarar.

Page 1:

We had a lot of ground to cover in this first issue in terms of world-building – giving the sense of a society that’s both familiar and alien, getting Barbarella into prison and out of it again, introducing her and the supporting cast and laying the groundwork for the wider conflict. So it seemed to make sense to hit the ground running, with a space battle in progress and Barbarella flung into the middle of it.

Some of the first sketches I saw from Kenan [Yarar, artist] were of the crew of the Parosian flagship as we see them in this scene – and I knew at once that he was a great fit for the book. He embraced the weirdness of this alien theocracy and brought his own craziness to the party. The stained glass window is a particularly nice touch.

Page 2:

If you want to sing We Labour in the Vineyards of the Seven, like a good son or daughter of the church, it fits in a rough and ready way to the tune of Oh, What a Friend We Have in Jesus.

It was my editor Matt’s [Idelson] suggestion that we make the Parosians polytheists, so as to minimise the sense that we were getting at any specific religion. Any of our readers who are believers are more likely to believe in a single god than a whole pantheon (all due apologies to the comic fans who are Hindus, Buddhists or Shintoists).

In the original outline I had the Parosians worshipping a mother goddess, but matriarchal religions are usually much more laid back when it comes to matters of sex. The Parosians are fairly uptight, and their sexual hang-ups are very much a plot point.

Pages 3-4:

I thought long and hard about how to bring Barbarella on stage for the first time. Jean-Marc L’Officier, who is a creative consultant on the book, said at one point that he saw the original Barbarella stories as a kind of adult Alice in Wonderland. Like Alice, Barbarella wanders into outrageous situations and takes them in her stride. She accepts the insane logic of the universe she lives in, but she never allows it to compromise her own sense of how things should be. I really like that definition of the character.

So here Barbarella finds herself in the middle of a war, but she’s not intimidated by the Parosian military. She knows her rights. She also knows her ships, and she’s already reading a lot into this military encounter. We get to hear some of the clues she picked up here, and more later when she meets Jury Quire.

Incidentally, I didn’t originally have any sound effects for the scene in which Barbarella’s ship is snared. I added them when I saw how beautifully and playfully Kenan had interpreted that scene.

Re: Barbarella’s outfit: she lives in outer space, mostly on ship-board, so as in the original series she wears a serviceable space suit that covers most of her body – not a spandex bikini or a costume with strategically placed holes in it. She gets naked when she feels like it: the rest of the time she dresses for serious sh*t because it’s generally not far away.

Apart from the boots, of course. She wears high-heeled boots with fold-down tops because her fashion sense was forged in the ’60s.

Page 5:

We weren’t being coy in avoiding the word “vagina” here. Barbarella uses it herself a little later in the story. I just wanted to generate a little curiosity about what Barbarella is supposed to be smuggling.

We did try to make sure the scan as un-erotic as possible, though – by blurring the line between Barbarella’s naked body and her sub-dermal muscle and tissue. At the back of my mind here were the millimeter-wave scanners now in common use at airports, which produce a photographically real image of a passenger’s entire body. I know there are measures in place to make that less intrusive – including blurring faces and introducing a “double blind” system where the scanner’s operator doesn’t see the passenger. It still freaks me out a little that there is now a working version of the X-ray specs that used to be advertised in the back of DC comics in the 70s. What happens to Barbarella here is possible with technology we have today.

Page 6:

Alert readers will see some odd details in this cityscape. They’re meant to be there, and they’re indications that there is more for Barbarella to discover about Parosian society. That’s for issue 2, though. For now I just wanted to give Kenan enough space to draw a panorama. He didn’t disappoint me. He did point out that if I let him have a double-page spread he could have done even more. Soon, Mr. Yarar, soon.

The billboards look like a homage to Futurama, but I was actually remembering those wayside pulpits with their terrible clever-clever messages that are meant to make you think but generally just make you wince. There was one in my neighbourhood that (for many months) read: SOUL-AR POWERED BY THE SON OF GOD.

“She has demonic powers to tempt men’s souls.” Woman as the devil’s gateway into the human soul is a fun feature of many orthodox religions. The Parosians didn’t invent it. In orthodox Christianity, Eve was the one who listened to the serpent and was responsible for original sin, something that medieval clerics never got tired of bitching about. You eat one lousy apple and your entire gender has its cards marked for the rest of time.

Page 7:

I’m not sure where I got the idea of a rifle that fires sermons. I needed to insert some exposition, and I wanted to do it in a way that didn’t seem forced. After all, the defendant in a criminal trial has a right to know what she’s being accused of: the judge in this case chooses the most direct means.

I use a lot of different words to describe the ranks of the Parosian religious hierarchy. Deacons, prebends and lictors are all present. We also meet a number of people like the ship’s captain in the opening scene and the judge here, whose military and civil roles seem to overlap with a religious one. The state religion is the axle tree on which the whole of Parosian society turns – like the Communist party in Stalinist Russia, say; or in the UK, talking about the weather.

Page 8:

“My body is my own concern!” Of course it is. But that has never stopped religious authorities from trying to control what you do with it. Or civil authorities either, to be fair. If this position can still be read as controversial in the 21st century, I don’t hold out much hope that the sort of idiocy embodied in the judge’s reply will go out of fashion by Barbarella’s time.

I like trial scenes. I seem to have written a ton of them in recent years. I would not, though, want to contest a speeding ticket in a Parosian court.

Page 9:

And now we come to the body loom. It’s not entirely clear what sort of physical reconfiguration Barbarella undergoes. The conceptual rifle in the earlier scene talks about “the organs that embody and channel desire.” At the very least, this would seem to imply a clitoridectomy.

There’s a real-world analogue for this, of course, in the female genital mutilation practised by both Christian and Muslim groups in Africa and Asia. I don’t want to get heavy, but this is not a historical curiosity. It’s a hugely serious issue NOW. If you want to learn more about it, there’s a WHO fact sheet here.

Barbarella gets to meet this technician again in #3. When she says she’ll be back, as with Arnold Schwarzenegger, you can take her at her word.

Pages 10-11:

“Whatever you were bringing in, I’d like a taste.” I make no apology whatsoever for this smutty joke.

Quire is a character we’ll see again later on in the series. I wanted a foil for Barbarella who is as strong-willed and resourceful as her but follows a different agenda. Quire’s role as an agent of Earth calls for a lot of moral compromises, and throws Barbarella’s sense of right and wrong into sharp relief. By the way, although we don’t see it Quire’s prison greys reveal that she’s in jail for heresy.

There are other differences between them, too. When Rho prays, Quire dismisses her as being wholly enslaved to her Parosian beliefs. Barbarella is less willing to write someone off on such scant evidence, as her later rebuke of Quire shows. Overall, Quire is an ally – and will shortly become more than that – but she may not always be a reliable friend.

Page 12:

I didn’t have a whole lot of time to draw in the prison regime, so I just hit the highlights. Unremitting hard labour, terrible food and endless hectoring from the prison officers. And the officers are all robots, which just makes the whole thing that bit more alienating.

Someone smart said something quotable about judging a society by the way it treats its enemies. I think we should be judged by the way we treat our prison population.

Pages 13-15:

Sex as political subversion was a big part of the original story idea. I love the idea of Mills & Boon-style romance novels being illegal contraband – and it’s a theme we return to later.

But the true revolutionary act is the orgy, initiated by Barbarella when she kisses and embraces Quire. The salient fact here is not that these are women making love with other women, although the Parosian church would presumably not approve of that. What’s crucial, in my mind, is that they’re prisoners giving each other pleasure in defiance of the state’s attempt to confiscate that pleasure via invasive surgery.

I had to re-read George Orwell’s 1984 recently for a panel I was on at Norcon in Oslo. There’s a scene in that book where Winston Smith describes Julia as “a revolutionary from the waist down”. She doesn’t reply “don’t knock it until you’ve tried it”, but mainly that’s because she lets her actions speak for her. And later in the same book there’s a speech where O’Brien talks to Winston about the Party’s quest to “abolish the orgasm”. Sex is subversive because it’s yours, not theirs. They hate that. [Fill in a “they” of your own choice here.]

Page 16:

We don’t know whether Quire’s body modifications were elective or not. The original script had her wearing a more conventional prosthetic. In my imagination Quire had birth defects affecting one arm and one leg, and turned those physical disabilities into assets in her chosen work. That’s absolutely compatible with what Kenan has done here, but his surreal scrolling flesh makes for a much more powerful visual – and makes it more plausible that the Parosians’ search regime missed the incredible amount of gadgetry Quire smuggled into jail with her.

We also see here how much Barbarella can pick up from minimal cues. It’s easy to forget this in the general whirl of events, but she’s crazy smart and she doesn’t miss a thing.

We want the nudity in the book to feel natural and casual, not titillating. It used to gripe me sometimes when I was writing superhero books and the artist would sneak in a butt shot or a ridiculously cheese-cakey pose. After sex, you sprawl around companionably, or if it’s cold you get back under the covers and huddle, and that’s what’s going on here. Jean-Claude Forest, in the original books, similarly included a lot of after-sex moments, and I had those in mind when I wrote this sequence.

Pages 17-18:

Barbarella thinking outside the box again, and also laying down the rules for the jailbreak. Of course, she regards robots as fully sentient. She has had more than one robot as a lover (in the original books), so she knows what she’s talking about.

Pages 19-22:

The prison break was fun to write. Again, the contrast between the two women is very much to the fore. Quire sticks to the letter of Barbarella’s “no killing” rule, by not firing directly at the lictors and vaporising them. But bringing a wall down on their heads is a fairly liberal interpretation of non-lethal damage.

It would have been cool to see the gorgeous baroque structure of the cathedral in all its glory as Barbarella whangs the top off one of its spires, but visibility was low over Parosia’s capital city that day. “Was that your first act of blasphemy?” I’m guessing not, but Barbarella’s moral compass is a strictly personal thing. She doesn’t define herself against anyone else’s codes. Hence: “I don’t keep count.”

At one stage Kenan wanted the razor-doves to look like modern military drones, but in the end we went with a design that was more in keeping with the Parosians’ weird tech as seen elsewhere in the issue.

I love the coloring on that final panel, and the way the NEXT teaser sits in one of the pieces of falling debris.

Okay, now I’d better think of a way to get them out of this…

The post Writer’s Commentary: Mike Carey on the Important Messages in Barbarella #1 appeared first on Bleeding Cool News And Rumors.

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