New Releases 9/27/16

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Hardcovers

The Gradual by Christopher Priest

Alesandro Sussken is a composer living in Glaund, a fascist state constantly at war with another equally faceless opponent. His brother is sent off to fight; his family is destroyed by grief. Occasionally Alesandro catches glimpses of islands in the far distance from the shore, and they feed into the music he composes.

But all knowledge of the other islands is forbidden by the military junta, until he is unexpectedly sent on a cultural tour. And what he discovers on his journey will change his perceptions of his home, his music and the ways of the islands themselves. Bringing him answers where he could not have foreseen them.

A rich and involving tale playing with the lot of the creative mind, the rigours of living under war and the nature of time itself, this is multi award-winning, master storyteller Christopher Priest at his absolute best.

Time Travel: A History by James Gleick

From the acclaimed author of The Information and Chaos, here is a mind-bending exploration of time travel: its subversive origins, its evolution in literature and science, and its influence on our understanding of time itself.

The story begins at the turn of the previous century, with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book and an international sensation: The Time Machine. It was an era when a host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological: the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilizations, and the perfection of clocks. James Gleick tracks the evolution of time travel as an idea that becomes part of contemporary culture—from Marcel Proust to Doctor Who, from Jorge Luis Borges to Woody Allen. He investigates the inevitable looping paradoxes and examines the porous boundary between pulp fiction and modern physics. Finally, he delves into a temporal shift that is unsettling our own moment: the instantaneous wired world, with its all-consuming present and vanishing future.

E-Books

Avenging Steel 5: The Man From Camp X by Ian Hall

It is October 1941... German troops have held Britain for over a year.

James Baird, a 21 year old student has joined the SOE and has proven his worth in the resistance against the Germans in Edinburgh.

Unknown to James, his superiors have plans for him. It is time to expand his training; the SOE are sending him to Canada's Camp X.

For the first time in his life; James is going overseas. He thinks he's going for a medal ceremony or something...

What he doesn't know... he's about to enter the most rigorous six weeks of his life... and that's just the beginning of his adventure.

Avenging Steel 5 is the latest in the saga of James Baird, Secret Agent.

In long novella parts, we follow James's story as a nation begin to rebel against Nazi jackboots.

Thus continues, Avenging Steel, a new Alternative History series.

Get your teeth into a brand-new version of World War 2.

Guardian by Joe Haldeman

During the Alaskan gold rush, a woman pursues a destiny that will change the world in this alternate-history novel from a sci-fi legend.

In the tradition of Robert Heinlein (Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land), multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winner Joe Haldeman set a new standard for military science fiction and hard sci-fi with The Forever War and his phenomenal Worlds series.  Now the Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master dabbles brilliantly in alternate-history fiction with the world-altering adventures of a remarkable woman during the gold rush in late nineteenth-century Alaska.

Sent from her Georgia home to Philadelphia to escape the carnage of the Civil War, Rosa Coleman studied astronomy and mathematics, ultimately settling into a new life as the wife of a wealthy man and mother of young Daniel. But when she discovers an unforgiveable secret about her reprobate husband, Rosa takes the boy and flees to the West on a desperate escape that takes them from Dodge City to San Francisco one step ahead of the Pinkertons hired to bring them back home.

On the run in a strange and exhilarating new world, Rosa and Daniel find a haven where they might never be found: the wilds of Alaska among the dreamers drawn to its magnificent wilderness by the promise of gold. It is here that her spiritual guide first appears to Rosa in the form of a raven—an incarnation of the trickster god of Native American and Eskimo lore—suggesting that her destiny lies not in sparkling riches but in something far greater. This mystical harbinger has come from a distant, alien place, and will set her on an astonishing course . . .

A magnificent blending of historical and speculative fiction, Joe Haldeman’s Guardian is a breathtaking departure for the author whom Peter Straub calls “one of our most aware, comprehensive, and necessary writers” and David Brin praises as “one of the best prophetic writers of our times.”

Spartan Beast (The Hellennium Book 2) by PK Lentz

The war between Athens and Sparta is over.

But not for Demosthenes of Athens, who has but one purpose: kill every Spartan. In his possession is a weapon that might achieve it, the living, unstable weapon which fell from the stars, Thalassia. At present, she lies dead, but that is sure to change. Demosthenes will need her help, for Sparta has a weapon just as deadly in the form of Eris, the white witch who takes her name, not without reason, from the war-god's slaughter-loving sister.

The pre-order sale has ended. BUT... sign up now at IRONAGE.SPACE and start reading this book immediately with a 50% Preview Edition. Then I'll send you a reminder to come back & buy when the price is $2.99 again starting 9/24.

The Hellennium takes place in an ancient world depicted with brutal realism, weaving threads of cosmic SF into bloody and graphic historical fiction.  At the heart of the series is the ever-evolving, dysfunctional relationship between Demosthenes and Thalassia, whose 'anti-romance' is destined to leave a trail of slaughter and ruin down the centuries.

If you're a fan of David Drake's Northworld series, or Gene Wolfe's Soldier series, you'll want to join Demosthenes and Thalassia as they cut a bloody path of destruction through the ancient world. Frequent readers of David Weber, David Gemmell, Michael Moorcock, and even Bernard Cornwell have also found much to love.

To readers, authors and publishers...

Is your story going to be published in time for the next New Releases? Contact us at ahwupdate at gmail dot com.  We are looking for works of alternate history, counterfactual history, steampunk, historical fantasy, time travel or anything that warps history beyond our understanding.

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Matt Mitrovich is the founder and editor of Alternate History Weekly Update, a blogger for Amazing Stories, a volunteer interviewer for SFFWorld and a Sidewise Awards for Alternate History judge. When not exploring alternate timelines he enjoys life with his beautiful wife Alana and prepares for the day when travel between parallel universes becomes a reality. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, DeviantArt and YouTube. Learn how you can support his alternate history projects on Patreon.

The Symposium Where Everyone Dies

Guest post by PK Lentz.

In fiction, Greece is not the word. Putting aside the present Scotland craze, for every one novel set in Greece, there are probably ten Roman books. That's understandable. Rome ruled the known world for a good long while, and not by making friends and signing treaties. That makes for good war stories. Meanwhile, when most people think of Greece, it's all silent temples and jury duty and drinking wine at symposia while sharing theories on the nature of virtue.

I studied ancient history in college and read a bunch of Homer in the original epic Greek dialect, from when grammar was a loose set of suggestions. When I decided that instead of writing SF, as I had been, I would put my degrees to use in fiction, there was never any possibility I would draw from anywhere other than Greece. But if not that tranquil Greece of Socrates and Plato, then what? There's the Iliad, of course, arguably the ultimate war epic and deserving of all the praise it gets. But it's been used to death, really, by authors of Historical, SF, and Fantasy alike.

No, my starting point could only be Thucydides. If you only ever read one book on Greek history, it should be Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War (abridged is fine; I understand). The Greece you'll read about there is not the Greece of Platonic dialogues. It's a bloody, brutal world where disagreements between factions of one city turn quickly to open slaughter, where towns are emptied of life because they gave the wrong answer to a herald, and where there are no such things as morality or human rights, only what is most favorable and expedient for a given side. This was the Greece that appealed to me—well, creatively, anyway.

Given that you're visiting this site, you'd probably agree with me that however not-boring history is, there can be a certain something lacking in straight historical fiction. Hence, even though all my viewpoint characters and setting would be purely historical, I planned to have a far-future woman drop in from another dimension and change things. But just as I didn't want any over-civilized, stereotypical Greece, I didn't want your typical time-traveler, either, always thinking things out and fretting about the time-stream. Mine would be pure ass-kicking chaos, the kind of girl your parents would ban from the house if you brought her home.

As for ancient characters, there was only ever one choice for a protagonist. Most people familiar with ancient history know the name Demosthenes as that of an orator of the fourth century BCE. But another Athenian named Demosthenes lived a century earlier and served as an elected general (yes, Athens elected its generals—which makes more sense when you consider that every male citizen of fighting age was in the part-time army). Thucydides provides the primary record of this Demosthenes' existence. He doesn't really give him much attention, but the few mentions suggest Demosthenes was ahead of his time as a strategist, conscious of notions like surprise and ambush and taking advantage of terrain at a time when battles generally were fought by lining up and pushing, with the gods bestowing victory on the worthier city. One of Demosthenes' attempts to be clever ended in disaster, leading to a brief period of disgrace in which he was afraid to go home, lest the voters decide to exile him, as would later happened to Thucydides.

The historical Demosthenes avoided exile and erased his disgrace with a tide-turning victory at Pylos, where he made several hundred besieged Spartans surrender—even though Spartans never, ever surrendered. Ever. Years later, he would go on to co-command Athens' ill-fated Sicilian Expedition, an operation conceived by the much more famous Alcibiades. With very good reason, Demosthenes was not pleased with the assignment. During the expedition, he was captured by Sparta's Syracusan allies and executed on the spot with his fellow (also more famous) general Nicias, essentially winding up 'dead in a ditch.'

My Demosthenes, armed with help from above, could avoid that fate and shape the war to a far greater degree. The aforementioned Athenians, Alcibiades and Nicias, would make appearances. But I would need a Spartan viewpoint. Who better than Styphon, who according to Thucydides was the Spartan to whom fell, after the deaths of two superiors, the unprecedented decision to surrender to Demosthenes? Poor Styphon; it's the only mention of him anywhere in history. And hey, maybe in a brief aside I could even kill off Socrates so those dialogues that Plato gave us never happened...

Crafting alternate history is a bit of a highbrow pursuit, what with the need to work out plausible consequences for a change, and successive changes after that. But at some point in the process of creating my series The Hellennium (from the words Hellenic and millennium, if that's not clear) it became something other than that. Demosthenes and Thalassia (the aforementioned ass-kicker from elsewhen) took over. Their highly dysfunctional relationship became the driving force of events, and I think there's something to that. Real history is not shaped by gray-bearded Father Time sitting in a drawing room crafting consequences: what if this, what if that? It's shaped by humans; by their fears, their loves, their jealousies, their bitterness, their rage, their hatred, their grief. And thus did the world of The Hellennium become populated with broken people, both Greek and alien—because the more broken the people, the more broken the history. It's more fun that way, and ultimately I didn't want to write 'Sci-Fi-Historical' novels as an intellectual exercise in politics, society, and economy. However dark and violent things get (which is very, mind you), I wanted this to be fun. For you and me anyway. Maybe not for Demosthenes.

My original draft of Athenian Steel ended with a Greek army assaulting the young Roman Republic, but on the advice of a literary agent (currently managing the biggest Historical Fantasy series in the world) I cut back the plot and pushed off Rome to Book III. I didn't think there was such a thing as 'too epic,' but I guess there is. Some of the material from that original ending was too good to go to waste (in my humble opinion) so I turned it into a novella with the subtle and intellectual title, Roman Annihilation. You can get it free on Amazon or at my website linked below. In the latter case, you'll also get a free Mythological Fantasy novel and a short story about an ancient Athenian in space which was a bit of a precursor to Athenian Steel.

It's been loads of fun giving the 'other Demosthenes' a do-over, and I have much more in store. He might not exactly enjoy it, but at least I can guarantee he won't wind up dead in a ditch.

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P.K. Lentz is author of Athenian Steel, the sequel to which, Spartan Beast, is due out shortly. Get three free SF&F ebooks by joining his newsletter at www.ironage.space. Signing up will also get you an alert when the full-length Athenian Steel is free for a day or two (including later this month), so you can be ready for Book II. In addition, you'll get access to a 50% preview of Spartan Beast prior to publication and exclusive related bonus material afterward.