Foundling by D.M. Cornish

Foundling

by D.M. Cornish

David M Cornish was born in 1972 in Adelaide Australia. He would study illustration at the University of South Australia and up stakes a year after graduating and head to the great city of Sidney for nine years. After that he traveled through the United States, visited London and Paris, and arrived right back where he started from in Adelaide. He got a job illustrating children's books, and one day was sitting around shooting the breeze with his editor when a notebook labeled 23 fell out of his bag. His editor swooped upon it like a starving woman on her favorite meal. Mr. Cornish had to confess that it was the notes and scribbles of the people, places, and creatures of a fantasy world he had been laboring on for ten years. She swiftly demanded he write a book about it. Foundling, the book that resulted from that demand was published in 2006 by Firebird Fantasy, an imprint for teenage/adult fantasy novels under Penguin books which is owned by (say it with me) Random House. Seriously I'm gonna find a way to start playing the imperial march every time they come up here (And I’m going to find a way to use Necromancy to resurrect Theodore Roosevelt). Anyways, enough comparing a publisher that publishes over half the books in your book store to evil empires, back to the book.

The humans of the half continent share their world with a wide variety of creatures that they refer to as monsters. Most of them are sapient, although some of them are not and even among the sapient ones there are a great many malevolent creatures who view humanity as nothing more than a source of meat and leather. Humanity or everymen as they are called in the book have adapted their society to protect themselves from these creatures and fight them for land and resource in a number of ways. They live in fortified settlements with armed guards, constantly patrolling their lands for incursions, and maintain great roads lit by lamps even in the darkest nights. The majority of human settlements are unified into the Haacobin Empire (named after the current ruling dynasty), it's not a very centralized empire though and is divided into semi-autonomous city states not unlike the Holy Roman Empire. Each city state has its own armed force, its own laws and policies and its own ruling family. Although they all owe allegiance to the Emperor. Humanity has also created an organic technology that exists alongside technology that we would recognize (like flintlock pistols and cannons), these organic creations provide their users with abilities like being able to see in the dark or provide power to more mundane objects like river boats. They also employ specialists to combat the monsters, one group being called Skolds. Skolds are a kind of combat chemist, who using their understanding of chemistry to create various potions and brews that serve as anti-monster weapons, repellents, and for medical purposes. So skolds are also a kind of medic on the field of battle as well. Lately they have been overshadowed by a second group of monster hunters known as lahzars but I will return to them later. Both Skolds and Lahzars and other specialists are referred to as teratologists or monster hunters. Monster hunters are considered a glamorous, scandalous lot; living lives of adventure, glory, and hardship and as often as not, dying alone in some benighted wasteland to have their flesh devoured by their enemies.

Our main character Rossamund isn't a monster hunter. He's an orphan boy with a girl's name being raised in the Madam Opera's Society for Foundling Boys and Girls, an orphanage run by and for the ultimate benefit of the navy. The children of the society are raised and trained to the various skills and duties of sailors and the Navy gets first pick of all the orphans. Rossamund himself thinks that being a sailor or a vinegaroon (the oceans are referred to as the vinegar seas because of a collection of exotic salts that create a multi-colored ocean that will kill any unprotected human swimming in it within 90 minutes) is the highest calling that a he could achieve.. As one might guess, Rossamund isn't recruited into the navy but is instead offered a position in the lamplighters. The lamplighters are a branch of the army stationed along lonely roads in wild places to light, protect, and maintain the lamps that help keep the roads from becoming ambush zones for various monster tribes. It isn't glamours work, but it's vital and well paying. Rossamund accepts the offer and for the first time in his life sets out alone into the world. For him it's going to be one hell of a trip as everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Whether it's running into river pirates, monster bandits or having to care for an injured and potentially murderous lahzar able to shoot electricity out of her body or figuring out how to replace his ruined paperwork, Rossamund has a lot to deal with.

Now I’ve got to be honest, in the grand tradition of young protagonists everywhere, Rossamund comes across as not too bright and having a lot of growing to do. On the flip side, he's a brave young man. He’s decisive and his willingness to commit to a imperfect plan and swiftly execute it can make up for a lack of a lot of things. While the book starts him off in the orphanage he grew up in and shows him as a by nature rather timid and reserved boy, he rises quickly to events and learns to deal with things as they come. I also like that while lamplighter isn't Rossamund's first choice of a career, he doesn't mope and whine about it but sets out determined to do the job he was hired for. Rossamund comes across as determined even in the face of understandable immaturity and discomfort in an adult world he doesn't quite grasp. So I find myself liking the kid and cheering him on, even has he does things like jumping off a boat into a monster filled river in the middle of a firefight, or dragging a fully grown but injured woman several miles in the dark to an inn. He is able to accomplish things that men twice his age wouldn't but still acts and feels like a young boy who hasn't even started shaving yet. He's got grit and that's worth a lot. Now, let's talk about that lahzar...

Lahzars are men and women who have had their bodies surgically altered. In a process that is illegal and unknown except in one far away city state, alien (most likely monstrous) organs and glands are implanted into the body of the volunteer. It's an expensive process that can take days of being strapped to the operating table and over a year to recover from. If you survive however you will wield power beyond what any other individual human can whether it be to attack with electricity or invisible force. The price isn't just measured in money however, the human body does not kindly to having strange, alien bits and pieces shoved into it and constantly works to reject them. So there is a constant dull ache and you are forever dependent on taking regular drafts of a potion known as a draft to keep organ rejection at bay. Lahzars are also known to have mood swings and even psychotic episodes as a result of the constant struggle their bodies are undergoing. Miss Europe, a woman who finds Rossamund and elects to bring him along since their journeys are heading the same way, is one of these people. Miss Europe is a mystery to Rossamund, as she is often swinging from nearly affectionate and friendly to stand offish and sullen. While at first she seems rather glamorous, the downsides to her life make themselves rather self evident to Rossamund to his eternal disillusionment. In a lot of ways Miss Europe seems less mature than Rossamund as she simply doesn't deal with people very well. She is however very brave and sure of herself and won't put up with being looked down on. She's better at dealing with people then her servant, factorum and Leer Licurius. Now a Leer is a person who has undergone training in focusing their senses on noticing small details and remembering what they have seen. They have also undergone treatments to their eyes to greatly enhance their vision. They also use organic technology in the form of sensing organs in special boxes that strap on their faces. Licurius is frankly someone on the verge of going insane and Miss Europe is too dependent on him to notice.  While the relationship isn't something that the book goes deeply into, it's an interesting peek at how even a platonic relationship can led you to make excuses for someone you care about and avoid confronting the truth. 

Mr. Cornish creates a very realistic society that reads like something out of Charles Dickens, but with monsters and surgically altered super-powered fighters. That said I do think that Rossamund and Oliver Twist for example would get along with each other just fine. As one might imagine, this society is deeply riven with class differences, one example that really drives it home is when an innkeeper wants to eject Miss Europe from a nice room in her inn under the fright that no one of “quality” would ever want it again if they knew someone like Miss Europe had slept there. I have to admit that hit a bit home for me as it was a rendition of the same old song of being good enough to fight and die for you but not good enough for you to treat as if I was a worthwhile person. I think just about anyone in uniform has at least one story along those lines, even in the United States where things have tended to swing the other way. Sometimes a bit too far but that's another subject. Foundling provides an excellent and distinct fantasy world populated with memorable characters and a likable protagonist serving as our guide to the world. The pacing is wonderful and I love the fact that there's an appendix at the back of the book where it bloody belongs! I do encourage readers to go through it as it is great reading all on it's own. Foundling by D.M. Cornish gets an A.

Next week, we go east to look at a Soviet classic that has managed to cross the iron curtain and have a lot of influence on western entertainment. Next week, Solaris by Stanislaw Lem.  Keep Reading!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders.

The Dark Paladin By Rex Jameson

The Dark Paladin 

By Rex Jameson

I've covered Dr. Jameson and the publishing last week, so let me just say that, The Dark Paladin was published in 2018. Before I continue, a warning: this review has massive spoilers for The People's Necromancer. You have been warned. Now let's jump right in.

Ashton Jeraldson was a nice kid, happy to spend his days with his best friend Clayton, struggling to learn how to become a decent smith. That was then, now he's a necromancer and wanted all throughout the Kingdom of Surdel for rising an army of the dead and attacking the Mallory Keep, the fortress of his feudal overlord (Workers of the world unite you have nothing to lose but your chains!{I would like to remind everyone that I am not responsible for my editor}). Of course, Ashton was raising his friends and neighbors who were murdered by bandits hired by competing lords looking to cause each other hell in a cut throat political feud. That detail is however overlooked by the great and good of the Kingdom of Surdel in the rising panic, a panic not helped by Ashton accidentally summoning a demon when trying to raise his long absent father (Opps). A demon that killed the beloved Crown Prince and caused the death of the tolerated Lord Mallory. Ashton has bigger problems than his king declaring his life forfeit (Although I am left to question if killing someone who raises the dead is really a good idea? Do we really want to see what happens when you throw someone with the power to cross the boundary of life and death into death?). Ashton, has found himself on a much bigger game board facing much more dangerous players then the King of a rather out of the way nation. Because Ashton is now dealing more than bandits and struggling with the ethics and practical limitations of necromancy; but literal Lords of the Abyss and the legions of world-ending demons and abominations. What may be even worse is that he's also attracted the attention of a creature older then those lords and likely much, much more dangerous. The self styled Queen of Chaos and the being who claims to have created the demonic races in the first place. When one of those Demon Lords reaches the surface and begins raising his own undead army of a size and scale that puts Ashton to shame, he begins feeling the clock ticking. Worse is the fact that he's been kidnapped, you see the Crown Prince wasn't the only loved figure that was killed in the fighting. A young man name Frederick, one of the best young knights of his generation was also killed trying to fight off the bandit army. The big issue is the that Frederick was the son of the King's General, who has grabbed Ashton and is willing to do anything to force him to bring his son back. Even risk loosing another demon within the very halls of the King's palace itself. Of course Ashton can get himself out of this. All he has to do is accept the Queen of Chaos' offer. Become her general, do her bidding, save his world and possibly lose his soul in the process.

Interestingly enough, while the Queen of Chaos will bargain with Ashton, try to seduce him, bribe him, threaten him and more; she doesn't seem to lie to him, or at least everything she tells him is true up to a point. She does feel perfectly free not to volunteer information however and to try getting out of telling the whole story though, so I can't say she's perfectly honest. In fact I'm pretty sure I wouldn't trust her or take everything she says at face value, but throughout the story she makes it a point not to directly lie to the people she speaks to and lives up to the terms of her bargains to the letter and in some ways to the spirit of the bargain as well. So while the other Demon Lords want to pull Ashton's world to the Abyss and turn it into a miniature hell for their own gain, I kinda believe her when she says that she has no such interest in this world and in exchange for helping her find the things she's looking for, she get rid of the Demon Lords and simply leave. Of course I'm also thinking that she may have engineered the whole situation so that everyone would have no other option but help and support her. Bluntly she is not a good or benevolent force and is perfectly willing to let good or innocent people die to get what she wants. She is however also willing to give the mortals in this story what they want to get what she wants. We get a sense of what being in a Pact with her is like because Ashton isn't the only character she's involved with.

Cedric Arrington is a paladin, a warrior who wields the power of light to defeat the undead and demons menacing the people of the land. Now in most fantasy stories paladins serve a god/ess of light and order and go forth to smite evil from temple fortresses. Cedric's order has been outlawed and reduced to a couple dozen families huddled in the forests around a mountain where demons appear regularly (in a world without cars you want to be able to walk to work after all). Cedric's order also isn't in the service of some great divine being of light and order. Instead their Pact is with the Queen of Chaos, or as they call her when discussing her with outsiders, The Holy One. Interestingly enough the name isn't entirely a lie but something that the demons call her, as they credit her with their creation. The Pact is pretty simple, kill demons, obey her in all things, keep the Pact secret and bring your sons to take up the oath when they are old enough and she'll empower you and your weapons with the ability to smite demons and protect your world, when you die, you will be welcomed into the afterlife she keeps for all her faithful servants. Break the Pact and she destroys every member of your family down to the tenth degree and fling your bleeding soul into the abyss to suffer for eternity. Dr. Jameson shows us this by taking us back to when Cedric swore the oath and lets us feel the shock and horror that Cedric feels when he realizes that instead of swearing to a Holy Goddess, he's made an oath to a creature that is just as indifferent to life and justice as a demon. We also met Cedric's family; his wife and children as well as his father in law and see his motivation for continuing even as he feels he has made a bad bargain (see kids this is why you have to be careful with your soul, it's hard to get it back once you've sold it). Dr. Jameson however, provides a counterpoint in Cedric's wife, Allison, who is also a paladin. Allison while having made the same oath at the same time as Cedric, sees the Queen of Chaos as the best possible hope for her world and doesn't feel like she was trapped into the oath. If anything she feels the opposite that she would have still chosen the Pact with full awareness of the Queen's true nature.

The Queen of Chaos isn't the only one recruiting however. A Demon Lord named Orcus has escaped to the surface and is unleashing his own army of the undead on the world. To counter the Queen of Chaos' recruitment of champions, he goes hunting for his own lieutenants. Orcus offers those who would follow him a dark bargain, follow him, abandon all morality and empathy, and he will give you power and eternal existence as a remorseless predator on those you used to love and cherish. As Pacts with forces go, it's fairly standard (I’ve always wondered who takes these bargains…){Generally people who are dying or have a dying loved one, or people so backed into a corner that they don't care}. Which brings us to why I've been using the word Pact to describe the relationship between the Queen of Chaos, Orcus and the mortals they bargain with. An Oath is a solemn promise that doesn't have to be a two way street. I can swear an Oath to someone to do something without an expectation of payment. However the oaths the Paladins swear, the deal Ashton makes, and the bargain that Orcus all offer the same thing. A formal agreement between at least two parties. In this case it's a formal exchange, the Queen and Orcus get servants that can carry out their agendas and plans without needing their constant attention and supervision. On the flip side the mortals get the power needed to carry out their own goals.

Cedric and Ashton are the main character focuses of the book here, with Allison and the returning Dark Prince Jayden mainly playing supporting roles to give us a better look at their characters. I would like to note that the magic items that we see Prince Jayden using, a whip of plasma from a far off star and a hilt that generates blades of ice from a far off world are amazingly creative. In the last review I mentioned I didn't feel like we got a real look at Ashton, in this book we get a better look at his character. Out of all the characters in this book, he's the one who puts up the most resistance to forming a Pact with a greater power, to the point of forcing the Queen of Chaos to basically lay everything out for him in black and white with no quibbling. He doesn't do this by being especially clever but by being wise enough to realize that he can't in good faith make a deal without vital information and doggedly clinging to that point even when his life might be at stake. Even when he caves, I got the feeling he did so because he couldn't figure out a better way to save his world. Not out of any self interest. Ashton is in a lot of ways the most selfless character in the story and the story does a good job of showing us how even being selfless can lead to you being hated in extreme circumstances. Cedric is also a selfless character, he's willing to risk his life for people who hate and fear him after all. He does so in a battle that in many ways seems hopeless, there are only maybe 2 dozen paladins left in his order against an endless sea of demons all looking for a way out to the surface. What makes Cedric different is that he is way more sure of his place in the world and his sense of pride, which is deeply injured over having made the Pact with the Queen of Chaos. His pride causes him to constantly wrestle over it and makes him believe he is damned no matter what he does. This makes his insistence on fighting to protect the people around him more heroic honestly at the same time this does blind him to certain things that are going on around him.

The characterization and worldbuilding have been expanded in this book, aided by the fact that it's a direct continuation of The People's Necromancer. It also manages to tell a complete story in it's own right. That said entire chapters are also devoted to planting seeds for the next book with no pay off in this book. I think that is going to affect how much you enjoy the story. I’m also disappointed to see Clayton drop out of the story, although I did enjoy seeing what the undead that Ashton had already raised were up to. I have to say that The Dark Paladin is an improvement over The People's Necromancer but there's still issues with plot pacing and spending time sequel baiting that I'm not a fan of, although there is less of it. I'm giving The Dark Paladin a B. I should mention that I am onboard with the next book and you should expect to see it reviewed here at some point.

Next week, we hit the Monster Blood Tattoo series with Foundling. Keep Reading!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

The People's Necromancer By Dr. Rex Jameson

The People's Necromancer

By Dr. Rex Jameson

Dr. Rex Jameson was born in Alabama, near the beginning of the 1980s. He was raised in the Mt. Juliet area of Tennessee and graduated high school in 1999. He then attended college looking to get a degree in Computer Science but left after a year to get a job in a software startup in Minnesota. However after the dotcom bust in the mid 2000s he moved back to Tennessee and enrolled at Middle Tennessee State and finished his Computer Science degree. He would proceed to Vanderbilt University in Nashville Tennessee to get his masters and PhD focusing on operating systems and AI. He currently lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and works with Research Stall at Carnegie Mellon University. He wrote the Primal Patterns series and The People's Necromancer (By the way, I am really liking the title for obvious reasons) is the first in a new series of books; with the first installment being self-published. Thus bridging our theme of last month with more self published work and bringing us something a bit spooky for Halloween.

The Kingdom of Surdel has had it relativity easy all things considered. While there are orcs on the borders, they are held off by the armies of feudal lords in alliance with the local wood elves. The Dark Elves are allied to the Kingdom but heavily focused on their own affairs in their last city of Uxmal. While there are great empires to the south doing mighty deeds and using fell magics, the Monarchs of Surdel have had to deal with smaller scale struggles between their feudal lords, easily solved disputes with their allies and tribal level raids and invasions by the above mentioned orcs. The easy life is over however and things are about to get worse. This is because things aren’t as nice as they seem; the Dark Elves of Uxmal are focused on holding back a demonic invasion and bluntly... They're losing. Meanwhile unaware of what's cooking beneath their feet the blood feuds and quarreling of the nobility is about to explode as two noble families using bandit armies to wreck each other’s land are about to tear open a box they can't close again. (This seems like a very stupid strategic move for the Dark Elves. Shouldn’t they be sending an ambassador up screaming bloody murder about a demonic invasion?)

Meanwhile Ashton Jeraldson is having a bad day in a bad life. It's not enough that his father disappeared on him as a child, his mother died, and that he's struggling as a blacksmith's apprentice. Ashton's best friend Clayton is dead too, killed when he was run over by the local lord's carriage without so much as an Ooops from said lord. In fact the book opens with Ashton attending the funeral with Clayton's widow Riley, a woman who has been rendered heartbroken by her loss. Ashton isn't much better and finds himself at Clayton's graveside screaming at him to get back up, because he's still needed. Ashton's bad life is about get even worse, because Clayton is doing exactly as he’s told. This kickstarts Ashton entry into a much darker and confusing world of competing supernatural beings, strange mystic rules and of course, power politics. Because Ashton, whether he likes it or not, is a necromancer. Ashton has to figure out how and on whose behalf he's going to wield a power that is widely feared and considered evil. He doesn't have a lot of time or space to do his figuring however, as his fellow villagers react to the idea of a necromancer among them by embarking on a witch hunt. The wild lands aren't safe either as a bandit army gathers, one that is capable of destroying entire towns and putting their populations to the sword. Ashton has to answer the question of whether he can he be a force for good and aide his fellow man; or is he doomed to a dark path where he becomes a plague and terror upon the innocent?

Now necromancy was originally believed to be the art of summoning the spirits of the dead in order to find out information and divine the future. By the time of the Medieval era, it was widely believed that necromancers were tricksters as only God could resurrect the dead or summon forth their spirits. Therefore it was widely believed that necromancers were summoning demons from hell to take the form of the dead and lure the unwary into damnation. In the modern era, the necromancer has been tied into the zombie (which actually comes to us from Haitian beliefs, which were in turn derived from beliefs from west and central Africa... Isn't a globalized mythology fun?) and turned into a figure that violates tombs and cemeteries to raise armies of undead monsters as his slaves and soldiers. I should note however that there's been a modern move to give zombies more depth then just mindless slaves. You see this in TV shows like Izombie for example. Ashton seems to raise both types of zombie. For example Clayton and at least one man he raises at the request of the man's young daughter, are sapient. They can speak, think and operate independently of Ashton, they have separate desires. Others seem more mindless, driven by Ashton's call for vengeance for their own violent deaths and the deaths of other common folk at the hands of forces beyond their control (So… they ARE killing the nobility and the class traitors!?<Editor Laughs in Communist>). That said both Clayton and the mindless horde seems to share a taste for human flesh. Clayton murders and devours bandits trying to kill Ashton, while the horde destroys the army that killed them in the first place. Dr. Jameson also weaves in medieval beliefs about necromancy, while Ashton has the ability to bring back a person's soul into their dead body... He can call something else into a dead body if he isn't careful. I won't go to far into it as we run the risk of spoilers but suffice to say necromancy in Dr. Jameson world is a dangerous occupation, not just to you but to everyone around you. So it's no surprise the first reaction people have is panic and terror.

Dr. Jameson’s characterization of Ashton is interesting as he's a basically a nice person who wants to be helpful. There's not really much else there I could grab onto in the story however. So Ashton comes off as a nice young man who is devoted to his friend and has some unresolved issues over his absent father but... There's not a lot else. A lot more effort is put into Julian the noblemen who actually killed Clayton and kick-started this whole thing in the first place. Julian is a the heir to the Mallory lordship, which is locked in kind of a on again-off again feud with the Vossen noble family. Both sides have turned to using bandits as disposable assets in causing damage to each other but it's mostly the common folk getting damaged. This is one of the better done parts of the book, it displays a level of political backstabbery that is believable, without getting so complex that you don't start wondering why the the plans don't collapse under the weight of all the moving parts. Julian has mixed feelings about unleashing bandits on people but is mostly focused on hiding a secret from his father. He’s also dealing with the guilt of killing Clayton, as he had intentionally sped up the carriage not because he needed to but to give his half sister Julia a thrill. Julia unfortunately doesn't really get a lot of time on scene. Her role seems mostly to tempt Julian into doing things he shouldn't. Julian doesn't come across so much as evil but as morally weak really. He’s unable to resist temptation and despite feeling guilty for his mistakes and misdeeds, he's unwilling to stop doing them. We also spend a bit of time with Prince Jayden, the prince of the Dark Elves who is desperately looking for some means to save his people from the endless onslaught they face. Jayden comes across as a man who is caught in quicksand, knows he's caught in quicksand and is begging for a rope but everyone keeps throwing him bricks while screaming about how they're helping. Dr. Jameson does a good job letting Jaydens tightly controlled frustration leak through here and there while having him maintain a diplomatic front.

The world building is fairly simple, if solid. In short if you've read fantasy or played dungeons and dragons, you kinda know this world. Part of that is the fact that book clocks in at 220 pages and is trying to cover a lot of ground, which doesn't allow him to get too deep into depth on any one thing. I kinda feel like there were parts of the book that could have cut or moved to the second book without hurting the plot and leaving more room to focus on Ashton so the readers could get a better sense of the protagonist or focus more deeply on the world. As it stands are there are a lot of secondary plots that get rolling in this book but aren't completely resolved. This leaves the book feeling like something like a prologue as there are a lot of set ups that do not pay off in the book. That said none of this is done poorly, it's just not done enough for my taste. I do also want to mention that the battles are well written, with Dr. Jameson showing among other things why a fully armored knight is a very scary thing to face if you're not a well armored and armed man and why you should never remove your helmet until you're out of a combat zone and I'm not kidding about that. For anyone in our armed services, take this tip from an old Corporal, keep your helmet on until you are out of the combat zone. The skull you save could be your own. I honestly feel that most of the issues I have with the story come from Dr. Jameson trying to cram in so much into so few pages. That said he presents an interesting view of a young man grappling with powers we normally reverse for the villains of our stories and trying to turn it around and do good for the people around him. I'm giving The People's Necromancer a B-. I have high hopes for the next book though, so rejoin us next week!

Because next week we tackle the sequel to The People's Necromancer, The Dark Paladin!

Poor Man's Fight By Elliott Kay

Poor Man's Fight

By Elliott Kay

Elliot Kay was born in the United States and grew up in Los Angeles. He has since then lived in Phoenix (What is up with Phoenix? Is it the heat? Does it warp our brains and turn is into authors?), Seattle and various other places. Before turning to writing Mr. Kay served in the Coast Guard and taught High School, as well as managing to pick up a bachelors in History. He also managed to survive at least one motorcycle crash and several severe electric shocks. His first novel was the kind that can't be discussed on a review series trying to avoid an adults only rating (Give us the title at least come on! Probably straight smut though? Gross.), it was published on Amazon in 2011. Poor Man's Fight, the first of a five book series was his first science fiction novel and was published in 2015 under the Skyscape imprint of Amazon Publishing. It is one of fifteen such imprints that Amazon maintains. This has a been a mixed blessing for some as a number of bookstores flat out refuse to carry Amazon published books, seeing Amazon as a competitor and the publishing company is seen as under-performing in its first decade. I kinda see this as a good look at the radically changing world of writing and publishing, but we're here to talk about a specific novel.

In the far flung future, humanity has expanded to the stars and colonized hundreds of star systems in a grand expansion across the galaxy. We have found ways to extend the human life span and perhaps more importantly extend our youth for decades if not more. Advances in medicine, infrastructure, and computer technology have made life easier, longer, and better then they have ever been. Also? We have for some profoundly bizarre reason completely privatized our education system (GGAAAAAAAHHH!). As far as I can tell, every human government contracts its education system out to a multi-planetary corporation who in exchange provides education to every citizen and when you're 18 and have finished high school, you take a test. How well you do on the test determines your debt. Do extremely well and you can walk out completely debt free, do poorly and you could be in the kind of debt that only PhD students can tell you about (*Editor Weeps* I’m probably never buying a house. Also what the fuck kind of exploitative bullshit is this? Without reading any further, this is going to trap billions into a cycle of debt because the ones who do poorly in school get the crappy jobs, and as a result can’t pay off the debt.). There are ways to adjust your odds of course, if you're a good student whose parents can pay the monthly dues for a corporate sponsored honors society, why you can get the kind of study materials and tutors that will ensure a pleasant test taking experience, as well as a test tailored for you. If not, well your test will still be tailored to you, just not in a way that's beneficial to you. My good readers, if you are smelling a rodent here, it's because the system has been so infested with rats that they have built a society and are plotting our downfall from the shadows!

Enter our hero, Tanner Malone; intelligent, helpful, good natured, and an utter nerd. He also has parents that aren't wealthy, and have informed him the night before the biggest test of his life that they are moving out of system (Jesus Christ, they couldn’t wait a day?). So he'll have figure out his own living arrangements if he wants to stick around for the unpaid internship (yeah it's not bad enough you're in debt for your bloody high school education, but we still have unpaid internships in the future!?! This shit keeps up and I'll start singing the Internationale at this rate! [Hi there.  I’m here to tell you the good news about the most important economist and political philosopher in all of human history, Karl Marx.] At least Lenin would just shoot me and get it over with!) that will seal the deal on an academic future of success and glory. Tanner, being 18 and middle class handles this stress about as well you would think. Facing a test rigged against him, with no sleep and no breakfast... He's now always 70k in the hole, will have nowhere to live in a week and no way of supporting himself while laboring for free in a lab. Tanner of course calmly and coolly considers his options while being a nervous wreck and joins the military on the advice of a girl he has a crush on. I should note that I do actually like the relationship between Madelyn and Tanner, she knows that he has a crush on her but isn't interested in that way. He takes the rejection and moves on without being an entitled ass about it and as such leaves himself open to relationships with other girls who are actually interested in him. In other ways though Tanner has a lot of growing up to do (Well he is eighteen. He’s still a child no matter what the law says. He hasn’t even finished neural pruning yet.) and he doesn't handle stress very well. He also has trouble standing up for himself. To be fair, Tanner is a product of a system that doesn't do a good job teaching people how to handle stress, despite it making stress an everyday part of life. Put a pin in this because I'll come back to that.

This book also spends a good amount of time with our villain. The Space Pirate Captain Casey. (Really? Because it looks like the Villain is the entire society in which this poor kid lives.{Yes, but Captain Casey throws children out of airlocks, it's hard to top that}) Unlike modern media, which has a tendency to whitewash what pirates actually do, Casey is the kind of guy who attacks a luxury liner and tortures the passengers and officers for their money and then throws them out an airlock, including the children. In short, while Captain Casey uses rhetoric about the awfulness of the corporate system, he's honestly just a faster, less restrained, more charismatic version of it. Mr. Kay actually shows his history chops here as the pirates in his book operate a lot like the actual factual historical pirates. The ship crews are democratic, with the Captain only having authority when they're on a combat operation, the loot is divided fairly and they're as likely to attack a port or city as they are a ship in the void. Mr. Kay takes us through the process of recruitment and how the pirates operate actually letting us get to know the pirates. The result of this is when Tanner and the pirates end up fighting each other for their very lives, it's not Tanner Malone versus a bunch of faceless mooks, it's Tanner Malone versus a group of villainous viewpoint characters that we've spent chapters with. This actually is a pretty good twist, as it increases the weight of the confrontation and brings home rather vividly the human costs of violence. That said I can't sympathize with the pirates too much here. This is because the story makes it clear that the pirates aren't rebels against the system, they are parasites on that system; using the excesses and abuses of the corporations as a recruiting tool while never actually doing anything to undermine or overthrow the system because they're too busy criminally profiting from it. This is also something that real life pirates and bandits would do; claim to be heroically resisting very real oppression while in fact just using it as a cover for their own benefit. Ironically in doing so they help the forces they claim to be against by providing a justification for their oppression. In this case the corporations can claim that increased costs are necessary for greater security because of pirates, who use the great costs to claim their own aroticities as heroism and thus we go around and around.

Ironically, if there are any rebels to be found here, it's in Tanner's own government. Throughout the book, we see the elected government of Archangel pushing back against corporate power and abuse. We see the President and his staff privately and publicly maneuvering to provide services and protection to their citizens over the objections of foreign states and the multi-planetary corporations who see them as just another revenue stream. While they're not angels, they do come off as authority figures who are actually interested in serving the interests of the people who elected them. In fiction with super powerful corporations that's a rare thing to see. More often it's that the corporations have captured the government and turned it into a lackey (although I should point out that Max Florschutz's book Colony also had government/corporate conflict). So Mr. Kay presents us an honestly good elected government led by thoughtful people struggling to do right by the common voter in a complex and dangerous system.  Even when doing so arrays them against powerful actors who are willing to operate on several fronts to destroy this resistance. I honestly enjoyed seeing this for a change, as all to often the power of a national government or the desire of elected leaders to do well by their voters is often cynically dismissed as mere posturing. This book also doesn't glorify or villainize the military, we’re shown that the ship that Tanner serves on isn't full of good people, in fact a number of them are jerks. However, we do see good people in the military trying to do a demanding and dangerous job under circumstances that they have no control over. Speaking from experience that's pretty much true to life, you'll find good people, you'll find terrible people, and every kind of person in between while serving in uniform. By presenting a military full of human beings Mr. Kay gives us a balanced view of what the service is like.

Which leads me to the system itself which is really just an exaggeration of our own system in a lot ways (I say looking at my college debts, that I racked up despite having the GI Bill, which isn't nearly as generous as y'all might think). Tanner lives in Archangel, a religiously founded colony system that has turned into a more or less secular nation state where the population is wracked by heavy debate over the role of corporations in their public life. He's driven by economic necessity and an ambition to better his life to enlist in the military despite his misgivings about the role the military plays in politics. If you're an American, you might be forgiven for feeling a sense of deja vu on reading that, as Poor Man Fight's is not only a good adventure story about a young man coming of age but a really pointed commentary in a lot of ways on our own system. Tanner emerged from a schooling system that did not really prepare him for the test that would determine his life's direction nor did it prepare him for dealing with stress. (Something that the school system is very likely systematically designed for.) It's also a system that provides advantages to people who already have them and disadvantages to those who are already struggling. Poor Man's Fight uses an action adventure set in space to hold up a mirror to elements of the modern day and ask us if we really care for what we see. That's something that science fiction can do really well and while this wasn't a story of deep political thought, preferring to focus on things happening on the front lines, it still pulled off its commentary rather well.

Poor Man's Fight is basically the story of Tanner Malone coming to age in some of the worse possible circumstances and then he has to fight pirates. It's a fun story with plenty of action, good characters, and fairly solid world building. Mr. Kay's choice to follow along with the pirates and giving us a peek at what is going on in the corridors of power provides us with a wider view of Tanner's world and gives us context for his actions. I honestly recommend this to anyone interested in science fiction or anyone just interested in a good book. Poor Man's Fight by Elliott Kay gets an A. I’ve got high hopes for the other four books in the series.  I'd also for no reason what so ever would like to remind everyone that I am not responsible for my editors comments, nor do I always agree with his statements.

Next week, I'm kinda feeling good about this streak of self published books and it is Halloween, so I suppose we should get spooky. So next week, we examine The People's Necromancer by Rex Jameson. Keep Reading!

Red text is your editor, Dr. Ben Allen. 

Black text is your reviewer, Garvin Anders.

The Editor's Chair I

Hello everyone. This is your editor Dr. Allen speaking, and we need to talk. No, I’m not going to bemoan my never-ending war to keep the reviews readable. No, today we need to talk about biology in speculative fiction. You’ve all been subject to my screaming red-inked rants lately, and for good reason. You see, physics in speculative fiction often gets discarded in the interests of storytelling. You see, in space nobody can hear you scream and writing space combat at a light-second remove is boring. Plus Faster than Light Travel is necessary. These are deliberate choices the authors make, and that’s okay. Biology though, it just gets forgotten, or mistakes are made in absolute ignorance because the authors just don’t care to look something up. This is unacceptable.

Don’t believe me? Gaze upon some of the recent reviews for evidence of it. The Noble Ark? What is this? Let’s leave the half-human/half-alien out of it for a moment, at least there probably is some explanation for that in subsequent books even if it’s bad. But why do the aliens have a craving for human CSF? If they need it so much they’re willing to torture people to death, how did they survive without it? Why not just make their own? It’s mostly electrolytes with a very low concentration of extremely common proteins like albumin. There is absolutely nothing there that couldn’t be synthesized! Then there’s the inbreeding. Everyone always forgets the inbreeding.

This problem goes far beyond relatively obscure science fiction novels and extends into extremely popular works as well. Let’s leave out the fact that raptors in Jurassic Park should have feathers and can’t bend their wrists the way they’re portrayed. The novel and movie have problems going down to the very core of the narrative; specifically that all the dinosaurs would be female. No. Reptiles don’t develop the same way mammals do. Denying a reptile the hormonal signals for sex differentiation will result in males because in reptiles, it’s high levels of the hormone aromatase that create females. With birds, we don’t even know for sure whether males or females are the developmental default, and it’s entirely possible that sex is determined at the cellular level before morphogenesis even progresses beyond a hollow sphere of cells. That whole thing is just wrong. Also, no biologist in the history of humanity would fill in the gaps with DNA from amphibians. They’d use the nearest relatives like crocodiles or birds to minimize the chance of genetic interactions leading to embryonic death. And the author is an MD for hell’s sake! Then there’s Interstellar. Don’t even get me started on Interstellar and the “blight” that somehow metabolizes nitrogen and yet somehow kills plants. Or how all the crops are dying but the trees and grass are somehow not completely denuded from the face of the Earth.

Do not despair. There are those who do their homework. Hambone (the person who writes Deathworlders) actually did do his homework. He thought through the consequences of different species growing up in different environmental regimes, not just biologically but psychologically and culturally. Even better, he thought through the consequences of certain exotic pharmaceuticals and what their mechanisms would be; then what the consequences of those mechanisms were. He never actually laid it out verbally, but those side effects are plainly obvious. Basically, there’s an anti-agapic/regenerative drug that works by messing around with some cell signaling pathways. However, the consequence of doing it that way is that people (special forces) on this drug are basically psychologically stuck in their late teens to early twenties. It is magnificent. Honestly, the whole thing is magnificent as far as I am concerned and it’s recommended reading. Warning, it is at this point rather huge.

None of this means, oh dear aspiring authors, that you have to shackle yourselves to known science or anything like that. What you should do - if you don’t want me to rip my hair out - is think about how biology affects your story and what kind of consequences there are for what you decide to do. You don’t want to have your plot turning on the fact that you’ve made a massive error by forgetting the consequences of a thousand years of ruthless inbreeding. So do your homework.

Brute Force By K.B. Spangler

Brute Force

By K.B. Spangler

Ms. Spangler lives in North Carolina with her husband Brown and her many dogs. Among her hobbies is struggling with the upkeep of a famous American poets house when she's not laboring to write and draw her webcomic. K.B. Spangler is one of the more successful independent authors I've had on this review series. Her first novel was published in 2013, Digital Divide (feel free to check out my review on that) was set in the same universe as A Girl and her Fed. In the five years since she’s published seven more books and a graphic novel; along with a number of short stories. With the exception of Stoneskin (which I reviewed back in October of 2017) they're all set in the universe of a Girl and her Fed. There are spoilers so I'm not going to cover everything but let me give you the basic setup if you haven't read the other reviews.

Right after 9/11, everyone was in shock and the average member of the civil service community were horrified at what happened on their watch and desperate for ways to ensure it would never happen again. In the following year a wealthy businessman would offer the government an exciting new technology that would allow government agents to exchange information and coordinate on a level that couldn't be matched. All it would require is massively invasive brain surgery and a lifelong commitment on the part of the agents, so you know, nothing too big. They approved the program and used 500 volunteers from across the civil service. The agents in question were from everywhere, IRS, FBI, the military, CIA, etc. They received a cybernetic implant that basically connected their brains not just to the internet but gave them the ability to access any electronic device capable of being communicated with, even if it didn't typically have networking capability. Of course dealing with all of that would be overwhelming so an ever-so-helpful interface was added, it would appear as a cartoon version of President George W Bush. The interface proceeded to drive the agents insane (readers feel free to insert their own political joke here [Can I? Please?! There are so many!]). The powers-that-be, realizing they had made a teeny tiny mistake by utterly destroying the lives of 500 loyal Americans with improperly tested technology (or was it?) and that the voting public had a shocking inability to take such minor mistakes with grace and humor, decided to bury it as deep as possible. Before someone demanded heads roll for this one. So the 500 volunteers who wanted to serve their nation were all rolled together into a single agency with two departments and given quiet non-demanding busy-work and all the drugs they would need to make their lives marginally bearable. Five years passed and they learned that if they just stopped feeling feelings and thinking thoughts, that the interface was almost workable. It's about this point that an agent was assigned to shadow a very special young lady named Hope and things broke open.

Brute Force is the 4th book in the Rachael Peng series, which takes place after the public revelation of everything that happened in the above paragraph and the agents received the help they need to live as human beings again. Rachael Peng, as a former member of the Army Criminal Investigation Command, was seconded out to the Washington DC Metro Police. She often finds herself on the forefront of difficult and politically sensitive cases that could spell doom for herself and the remaining 400 or so cyborgs who are fending off political threats that could see them reduced to tools or worse. This is on top of dealing with the other parts of her life that complicate matters, such as being a 3rd generation American born Chinese woman, being gay, and technically blind thanks to a really bad reaction to her implant. Agent Peng may have used direct sunlight to reduce her eyeballs to barely functional bags of jelly, you see. That said, she kinda sees better than the rest of us combined, with her eyes down, her implant has taken over and allows here to see on a number of spectrums that are unavailable to us mere mortals. Among them is a spectrum that seems to allow her to directly observe someone's emotions (she sees them as colors, so for her the average person is a rolling combination of colors and shades that constantly shift according to their emotional state). This makes her really good at sussing out when someone is lying or hiding something. She can also see the density of objects and if she wants, see through things at times. This helps her be a really good shot among other things. So Agent Peng is a cyborg with superpowers with her own police unit that she fights crime with and she is gonna need every superpower and every friend she can get because crime has come knocking with boots on.

So Hope Blackwell, the woman who was instrumental to freeing the agents from their imposed hell; and Avery the barely-out-of-diapers first born child of a pair of agents (also the first born child of any agents) have been kidnapped by a militia being led by a Sovereign Citizen Lawyer (Oh look, a contradiction in terms!) named Jeremy Nicholson. A Sovereign Citizen (which I should note is a label not all members of the movement accept) to put it briefly is someone who believes that federal laws do not apply to them and they can declare themselves not citizens of the United States but citizens of their states and thus opt out of having to follow federal laws. Most of the time this involves refusing to pay taxes, but there have been times when it turns violent and sovereign citizens have killed police officers for a variety of reasons, including have a police officer pull over their car. So there's every reason to worry that the militia may turn violent (Kidnapping is violent. Ship sailed!) ... More violent and worse Hope and Avery aren't the only people they've kidnapped. The hostages and the militia have holed up in a ruined factory that was owned by Jeremy's father but closed down by a corrupt EPA agent decades ago. On top of that, this has turned into a media circus as the militia as made sure every news outfit who can reach them has been told what's going on. Jeremy claims he's doing this as a protest and tells everyone that Hope and the other hostages are there willingly (Because clearly the toddler can hold high ideals about Militias). No one's buying that and while everyone is worried about the confrontation with the militia turning violent, they're actually a bomb ticking away here. You see, Hope is perhaps the most dangerous woman in the world, being burdened with a number of mental issues (I'm pretty sure she has ADHD just to start with) and has a natural talent for the art of maiming and murder, as if she was the unholy spawn of Bruce Lee and Miesha Tate. If that wasn't bad enough she also great at escaping and if her meds should wear off while she's tied to a chair and being starved...

Look guys, speaking from my own experience, strength, speed, and size do matter in a fight. Bigger stronger people tend to win and the bigger and stronger you are the less skill you need to put people down. That said, with enough skill and raw screaming desire to hurt people? You can make up for a lack in size, strength, or speed. Add in this, none of the militia guys are big enough, strong enough or fast enough to make up for the difference in skill level between them and Hope. So if her discipline snaps? She will kill a good number of them before one of them finally shoots her, which will drive her husband - a man big and strong enough to lift cars for fun and skilled enough to spar with his wife even without his cyborg super powers - over the line. Before I forget, the factory is also full of stolen Chinese firearms, so it's entirely possible that the Chinese government is involved or at least someone wants everyone to think so. Rachel has to figure out what the bad guy’s game actually is, because there's more going on here than a protest about an unjustly shut down factory. Who is backing Nicholson, where did he get the equipment, how did he come up with this game plan and who is this plan really aimed at? Can she crack this before her bosses or before Hope cracks? Can she do this without turning it into a public relations disaster and triggering a political backlash against the Cyborgs that might just turn them into tools of the government without legal rights? But she also has to tackle this while dealing with ghosts of her past haunting her. An old enemy has shown up out of nowhere, wearing the face of her old army buddy and having moved into her neighborhood. So now Rachael has to deal with the fact that a cold blooded killer is attending the neighborhood cookouts; a cold blooded killer who knows too many of her secrets for her to just turn in to the police. So Rachael has to work backwards using a person she cant trust to hunt down the origin of a militia armed with stolen Chinese firearms led by a rich kid lawyer turned sovereign citizen, and do so without letting any secrets leak out. At least she's not under pressure right?

K.B Spangler does a great job telling a tense story with complex characters and motivations while keeping the plot moving at a good pace. Although I'll admit that I think she glossed over a good amount of what Sovereign Citizens actually believe and might have been a tad too generous to them (despite making one of them the bad guy). That said, Ms. Spangler does a good job presenting people who believe that they're doing things for the right reason, even while they're crossing just about every moral line imaginable. Of course her protagonists also do a number of shifty things, but I would argue they never get near as dirty as their enemies. Her books tend to show a very good understanding of how things work in the federal government and present a convincing example of the culture within the civil services that actually make our country functional, even when they're under attack. Rachael is a great character and plays well off the others, although I have to admit that I am disappointed that Santino (her partner) was barely in this book. In fact a good amount of the supporting cast doesn't really get to involved in this one, with most of the supporting work taken up by fellow agents like Josh Glassmen or the gentleman I'm going to refer to as Wyatt. To be honest Wyatt and Rachael don't play off each other as well as Santino, Hill, and the others do. That might be because I just flat out don't like Wyatt. I just don't find an outright psychopath (or is he a sociopath with violent tendencies?[Depends on personal history. Psychopaths are born, sociopaths are made… usually but not always from psychopaths]) a compelling character and if we're going to be honest, I may have been really looking forward to Rachael finally tracking him down. It's still a fun read with a well thought out plot, good crisp action, and as always snappy dialogue. Brute Force by KB Spangler gets an -A.

Next week, we go further into science fiction with Poor Man Fights by Kay Elliott, this Sunday our very own editor would like to discuss something in our first From the Editor's Chair. Keep reading!

Red text is your editor, Dr. Ben Allen.
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders.

Other reviews in this series are:
Digital Divide http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2016/11/digital-divide-by-kb-spangler.html
Maker Space http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2017/01/maker-space-by-kb-spangler.html
State Machine http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2017/04/state-machine-by-kb-spangler.html
Greek Key http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2017/06/greek-key-by-kg-spangler.html

Worldbuilding by Max Florschutz

Review Sidebar: Worldbuilding

by Max Florschutz

Hey all! My name is Max Florschutz, and I'm the author of a couple of Science-Fiction and Fantasy books you might have heard of, like Colony and the more recent Shadow of an Empire. Today I'm going to talk a little about worldbuilding.

I love it. I'm just going to open with that. Part of the experience of opening up a book is discovering a new world to get lost in. Seeing all its nooks and corners, figuring out how all the pieces stick together, and discovering fantastic places or people. As an author that makes one of my primary responsibilities to the reader to make those people and places come to life. To give them dimension, depth, and character. For characters, sure, that's a given ... but in many books, the world in which the story takes place is just as much an important "character" as the characters themselves are. Shadow of an Empire wouldn't feel the same, for example, without the harsh desert landscape that the protagonists journey through (and sometimes battle against). Colony wouldn't be the same without the world of Pisces that much of its story takes place on, complete with its people, culture, and unique requirements for living there.

So it is with just about any other story. A setting really does matter: A good setting can be the difference between an okay story, and a great one. I like to use video games a lot as examples, mostly because they're so visual they're an easy bridge, but if you look at standout games such as Resident Evil 4, Metroid Prime, or even the first Halo, one similarity you'll notice between them is that the world they take place in leaves an impression on the player. The village in Resident Evil 4, for example, oozes atmosphere and contributes heavily to the tone of the game's opening areas. Now, I'm not here to talk about games, rather books, but the illustrating principle remains the same: the setting, IE the world in which your story takes place, can leave a vast, massive impression on the reader. The more sense this world makes, and the more it fits together ... the better off your story will be.

Now, a lot of different writers and creators go about achieving this "togetherness" a lot of different ways, but the point of this sidebar is for me to share my methods and what matter most to me, as well as how I sit down and work out that process. And for me, the process of building a world for the characters to inhabit is one of the most important and early parts of the process, because that world will shape everythingthe characters do and say.

On a side note, this is why some "epic" books out there come off flat: Their world is generic, and therefore the characters actions and reactions, no matter how well-written, don't have much to play off of. Think of it like a pinball table: A good player (character, for a story) can "succeed" on any table, even if it's just a flat surface with a few bumpers and the flippers, but a good pinball table? It has bumpers, ramps ... all sorts of bits of scenery and mechanics for the player to interact with. And yes, that last bit is important enough to warrant a highlight. "Poor" pinball tables are often explained as those where the elements are just flashy and for show, or don't interact with one another. The great ones? All those elements of the table don't just provider interaction with the player, but the can interact with one another as well. For example, bouncing off of a series of bumpers to end up on a ramp that sends the player to another part of the table—the player has to interact with the bumpers first to get to the other elements, usually with some sense of skill (or dumb luck).

So, when I sit down to work on a story? The world had better be one of the first things I look at, because it's going to be something that directs and interacts with the characters on all levels.

For example, the first thing I did with Shadow of an Empire was work out the magic system. I sat down and built on the initial idea I had (gifted folks who can absorb and then emit the basic forms of energy), writing out the different kinds of energy at their disposal, and how an individual used their powers. From there, though, I wasn't done. In fact, just laying out what the powers were was barely half a job. I next had to sit down and say "Okay, we have people that can absorb and emit heat energy. How would this change the society in which these powers were discovered? How long ago were they discovered?" From there I worked backward and forward, reaching into the past (Where did these powers come from? When did they first arise, and how did people react?) and into the "future" (How would culture look if these powers had been around for several hundred years or longer? How would people refer to them? What would religion think? What would science think?).

Why start there? Because such a system would change the world, which meant it was going to be one of the most important things that shaped the world I was about to write. For example, a culture in which people can absorb and emit heat would sidestep some of the problems of creating steam engines, such as a high-energy fuel source—which meant that steam power was going to rule the world I created, and be a bit more capable and important than steam power in our world ever was (as well as hang on longer over alternatives). Likewise, since this heat was so important, cities would likely spring up around areas with access to heat in addition to other things ... Which lead to the capital city of the Indrim Empire being founded on a host of geothermal springs for that readily available heat energy (Just toss your heat-absorbing employee in a hot spring for a few hours!).

However, I didn't stop with the big changes. As I sat and worked out the larger pieces (the Indrim Empire, its history, how people reacted to the gifted, etc), I also started working out smaller, more down-to-earth details. Culture and clothing, for example. Folks who can absorb light through their skin and emit it later, for example, are going to want to wear clothing that protects but also exposes a larger amount of their skin to light. People that can control that visible emission are probably going to create "art" with it (and then there were light-dancers). People who can absorb sound will be in high demand by those who don't want to be overheard, or even by those who just want to keep something loud quiet.

And it didn't stop. I came up with slang names for each type of gifted, sometimes more than just a few. And in figuring out how these gifts changed the society of the world I was building, I was able to answer other questions about the world as well. Government, religion, markets ... the list goes on.

Was all of this important? Well, yeah! It outlined the world that the characters lived in, the world that they interacted with and were acted upon on a daily basis. Greater steam power meant that steam trains were the lifeblood of this empire. Roads between towns? Not as much of importance, at least in outskirt areas of the civilization. The presence of that magic also meant that their steam trains could be much larger and more powerful than ours. And is that important to the story?

Well ... yeah. It was. Not only as an element of the setting, but the characters themselves took trips aboard the trains, traveled on them, and even faced death on them. They interacted with them.

Pisces (from Colony) was a similar situation where worldbuilding was concerned. I had to sit down and ask a whole host of questions, from logical applications of the technology present in the story to how people living on Pisces would find solutions to certain problems. Sands, or even what those problems might be. Extrapolation, in other words. How is this fixed? What could someone else do with that? Etc, etc, etc. Again, there was a whole host of things to consider with how sweeping differences could occur, or what they were.

Oh, and did I mention the research? Yeah, research plays a big part in this. I won't go into details, but a lot of this development often involves sitting down and reading/looking up information on whatever it is I'm creating. For example, the jump drives used by the subs in Colony actually stem from a real-world "supercavitation drive" technology that involves ... well, exactly what it was in the story: Use of an electrical field to create low-drag vacuum bubbles around something. In the real world thus far, that has meant torpedoes that surpass speeds of 320 KPH. Sometimes worldbuilding has meant digging into real-world approaches, events, and people to see how similar problems were dealt with or solved. Can an old-world solution to long-distance communication, for example, work in a new way within what I'm working on? It may seem like an odd question, but in Shadow of an Empire, there is a mention of a group of folks experimenting with shockers' electrical talents to send electrical signals down lengths of wire ...

Which, by the way, is a one-off line in the book, but was there for another reason other than just "I thought of this." It was there to make the world feel organic. Which leads into this next part of what I do ... After I've got the big stuff figured out (like the magic, and how that changed the society, and the history), I start thinking about the important small stuff. One of the key ones?

Money. No joke, with Shadow I sat down and wrote a whole system out. Why? Because part of worldbuilding is the small details, the little tiny ones that we all know of but don't always acknowledge ... until they're missing.

Money? That's a small detail ... but think about how much of a day to day life can revolve around money. How it's used, who uses it ... even how to pay for a sandwich.

If that still seems odd to you, think about it this way. When was the last time you commented to a friend about their lunch, and they replied "Yes, I bought it with money!"

Seem weird? That's because it is. Most folks don't talk like that. If they tell you how much it was worth, it'll likely be something like "Yeah, and it was only like four bucks!"

Spot the slang is in that last sentence? If you're thinking "bucks" then you're right. "Bucks" is slang for "US dollars." Now how many of you have read a book where a detail-oriented character simply says 'I gave the waiter some money to cover my meal" or something similarly vague? I've noticed it before. The issue there is that the one doing the worldbuilding didn't think of the small but important details in their world, like cash.

Think of it as the difference between a picture of a scene that doesn't move, and a video of a scene where the flowers gently sway back and forth in the breeze. One feels more real than the other. Similarly, the small details of worldbuilding can go a long way. In my Being a Better Writer articles, I've sometimes referred to this as 'remembering the butterflies near the flowers.' A character that says 'Give 'em five bucks" to pay for information feels a little bit more real than a character that says "give them their money" because readers use money on a daily basis. Even if the form of currency isn't quite the same, just having the characters stay consistent with it can really ground a reader in a story.

In summation? I work out all the big, large pieces of the world first, but then after that I sit down and poke at all the details to make sure they all line up with one another, or at the very least exist beforehand so that if they do come up in my story, rather than panicking and making something up on the spot that feels "rough" by comparison, I can simply nod, check my notes, and then roll right on with my story. I have the large bits, and the small bits, and if I've done my job right, they'll come together without grinding against one another (unless, you know, that's part of the plot).

And again, this stuff isn't window dressing. It's not flashy lights that the characters just walk past. The characters live in the world I build, which means that the story, their day-to-day actions ... all of it will be shaped by it. Amacitia Varay is a serial killer that uses her power over sound to hunt and deceive her victims, and likewise the peacekeepers responsible for hunting her use their own powers (as well special tools just for dealing with gifted criminals). The city around them is shaped by these powers. And they make choices based on that city (that holds true for Colony as well, but with science and location rather than magic powers).

Okay, this is getting long (though it is my process), so I'm going to wrap this up with a final point to make: I've had some that aren't writers say that my worldbuilding process sounds too detailed, like too much work. Some even say it's "wasted time I could spend writing."

I disagree, obviously. My rebuttal would be this: If I weren't using what I spent so much time worldbuilding, then yes, it would be wasted time. If I wasn't using my worldbuilding to shape the story, wasn't putting it into effect? Yeah, no disagreement.

But that's not what happens. Instead, I spend a good amount of time (usually a week or so) working out all these details, big and small, about the world. Then, when I drop my characters into this setting, they can interact with it, be shaped by it, shape it in turn, etc etc etc, because it's all already there. There aren't any "blank" spots in the setting that stump the story, because even if things bounce in a new direction, I still have all the tools and elements that shaped the rest of the world to work off of. And what results ... well, it's a world that feels real, from the characters to the setting. It feels like a place that could exist.

That's a win for me and my readers.

A quick summary, just as a recap: The world and setting can be as much a character for the reader as the characters. What's more, they should both act on the characters and be acted upon by them, rather than just be there. I worldbuild by starting with the biggest elements, such as magic or an underwater planet, and extrapolate what sort of "world" would come from those elements. I also work out the tiny details, like money. The little stuff. I do research!

And then? I get to writing, and bring that world to life.

If you liked the sound of what you read here, feel free to swing by my site, Unusual Things, and check out Being a Better Writer, a weekly series on ... well, it's not a misnomer. Writing tips, advice, and so on. Plus books, some of which have been reviewed by your reviewer!