Tag Archives: fantasy

Stillpoint/Prometheus Authors at Arisia!

New England fans of speculative fiction, take note! Stillpoint/Prometheus authors Heather Albano and Kenneth Schneyer are appearing this weekend at Boston’s Arisia 2017 conference, “New England’s largest, most diverse sci-fi and fantasy convention”!

Keeping Time Kickstarter - Heather AlbanoHeather Albano, game writer and author of the recently published time-travel adventure Timepiece, will speak on three panels:

She’ll also be signing copies of Timepiece at the Dealer Room table of Broad Universe, an organization dedicated to promoting, encouraging, honoring, and celebrating women writers and editors in science fiction, fantasy, horror and other speculative genres. Go say hi, and pick up your signed copy!

CHECK OUT HEATHER’S SCHEDULE ON HER BLOG

 

Kenneth Schneyer, award-winning short writer and author of the collection The Law & the Heart, will be appearing no less than five times:

CHECK OUT HEATHER’S SCHEDULE ON HER BLOG

Check them both out—though you’ll have to choose this evening! In addition to being wonderful writers, they’re both wonderful speakers about their craft.

 

About Heather Albano and Kenneth Schneyer

Timepiece - now availableHeather Albano is a storyteller, history geek, and lover of both time-travel tropes and re-imaginings of older stories. You most likely know her from her game design work (which most recently included A Study In Steampunk, produced by Choice of Games, and contributions to TimeWatch and The Dracula Dossier, both published by Pelgrane Press)—but she writes non-interactive fiction too. Like the Keeping Time trilogy. Read more at heatheralbano.com

Stillpoint/Prometheus: Law and the Heart coverKenneth Schneyer forgot he wanted to be a writer for 25 years, until he was ambushed by a gang of plot bunnies in 2006. Since then, he has sold stories to many science fiction and fantasy magazines and anthologies, several of which can be found on Amazon. His novella “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer” has been nominated for a 2014 Nebula Award and a Theodore Sturgeon Award for best short science fiction.

Ken attended the Clarion Writers Workshop at UCSD in 2009, and joined the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop in 2010. Mostly he writes science fiction and fantasy, but he’s been known to write crime stories, poetry, and anything else that strikes his fancy.
He was a theater major at Wesleyan and briefly a semiprofessional actor before attending law school at the University of Michigan. He teaches legal studies and humanities at Johnson & Wales University, and has published numerous articles on the constitutive rhetoric of legal texts.
Born in Detroit, he now lives in Rhode Island with one singer, one dancer, one actor, and something striped and fanged that he sometimes glimpses out of the corner of his eye. He’s interested in astronomy, history, politics, philosophy, presidential trivia, brain science, and practically everything else. He cooks better than most people you know.

About Arisia

ArisiaArisia 2017 is a volunteer-run convention that covers all aspects of science fiction and fantasy literature and media.

It is taking place this weekend, January 13–16, at Boston’s Westin Boston Waterfront.

MORE INFORMATION

Read the exciting prologue to Timepiece!

Timepiece — Read the Exciting Prologue

It’s June 18, 1815, Waterloo, Belgium, and if Wellington’s beleaguered British army doesn’t get help soon, all will be lost. The indomitable Duke of Wellington sends for reinforcements…

And the aid that comes is not General Blücher’s Prussian forces. Rather, the rescuers of the Empire are a nightmare regiment dreamed up by a mad Genovese scientist.

Read the exciting prologue to Heather Albano’s Timepiece: A Steampunk Time-Travel Adventure — the first volume in the Keeping Time trilogy!

READ NOW

 

Keeping Time
About Keeping Time

You only THINK you know
what happened at Waterloo.

The real story involved more monsters.
And a lot more time travel.

“Waterloo and time travel are made for each other and Heather Albano has done a wonderful job of giving us a delightful cast of characters, tasked with stitching together the proper nineteenth century while fending off several monstrous alternatives. Propulsive adventure with historical insight.” – Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars and 2312

Keeping Time: A Steampunk Time Travel Adventure Trilogy by Heather Albano

It’s 1815, and Wellington’s badly-outnumbered army stares across the field of Waterloo at Napoleon’s forces. Desperate to hold until reinforcements arrive, Wellington calls upon a race of monsters created by a mad Genevese scientist 25 years before.

It’s 1815, and a discontented young lady sitting in a rose garden receives a mysterious gift: a pocket watch that, when opened, displays scenes from all eras of history. Past…and future.

It’s 1885, and a small band of resistance fighters are resorting to increasingly extreme methods in their efforts to overthrow a steampunk Empire whose clockwork gears are slick with its subjects’ blood.

Are these events connected?

Oh, come now. That would be telling.

Kenneth Schneyer on Timepiece: Savor every bite

Foreword to Timepiece by Heather Albano

Kenneth Schneyer

We asked author Kenneth Schneyer to write a foreword to Heather Albano‘s forthcoming time-travel adventure novel Timepiece, which comes out January 3, 2017. What he wrote was so delightful, we thought we’d share it ahead of time!

Keeping Time Kickstarter - A Time Travel Trilogy by Heather Albano Support Keeping Time Kickstarter!

Of course time travel represents an inversion of the way we experience the world. The arrow of entropy is reversed.  People gain knowledge of the consequences of their actions before they take them.  In this, it resembles both the prophecy story and the flashback: more than one author has imagined Tiresias and Cassandra as time travelers. Continue reading Kenneth Schneyer on Timepiece: Savor every bite

Review: The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett

https://i0.wp.com/ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51HYs6odAGL.jpg?resize=162%2C250
The Shepherd’s Crown: the final Discworld novel

It is difficult to know whether the elegiac mood I felt while reading The Shepherd’s Crown was due to the book itself or to the fact that the fifth Tiffany Aching novel (and forty-first Discworld novel) was in fact the late Sir Terry Pratchett’s final work.

The Shepherd’s Crown focuses on the young witch Tiffany Aching as she comes fully to find her place both in the non-hierarchy of the witches’ world, in the land of her birth (the Chalk), and in her own life. She finds herself pulled between two steadings, the districts for which, as a witch, she is responsible for doing “what needs to be done” — whether visiting the old and sick, birthing babies, or protecting the inhabitants from supernatural invasion. And, as the book begins, a supernatural invasion does in fact loom: Nightshade, Queen of the Faeries (whom a nine-year-old Tiffany defeated in the first book in the series) finds that the boundaries between her world and Tiffany’s are weak, and she is planning large-scale revenge. Discworld faeries have much more kinship to the Celtic sidhe than to the cute winged creatures of most children’s books or than to Tolkien’s aristocratic elves: they are  (literally) glamorous, pitiless creatures who take delight in mayhem ranging from spoiling beer and stealing sheep to kidnap, torture, and murder.

Continue reading Review: The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett

Rest in Peace, Sir Terry. You’ve Earned It

As you probably know, Sir Terry Pratchett died today. His is a great loss to the world of letters — but I still can’t think about him without smiling.

I can’t help but think that he’s got Death chuckling. In small caps.

He was a very funny writer of wildly amusing fantasy novels, and so it could occasionally be easy to overlook how profound some of the ideas were that he was exploring in his books.

Here’s one of my favorite bits, a piece from one of his wonderful Discworld novels, Witches Abroad. It focuses on the nature of narrative: Continue reading Rest in Peace, Sir Terry. You’ve Earned It

Man and His God iTunes Link

A Man and His God cover
A Man and His God by Janet Morris

Since a few of you asked, here’s the link to the Man and His God audiobook on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/audiobook/man-his-god-sacred-band-tale/id602908220

News! A Man and His God is now available!

A Man and His God, the audiobook that I produced for Perseid Press, is now available on Amazon, iTunes, and Audible! Woohoo!

It’s just under two hours of high-fantasy fun. (Oh, and the folks at Audible insisted that I let you know: if you sign up for an Audible account, it can be one of your three free titles!)

The Sound and the Fury: Audiobook Fun

I’ve just finished one of the more enjoyable projects I’ve worked on in a long time — creating an audiobook for Janet Morris’s A Man and His God. Handling the narration, the recording, and all of the post-production, that was fun. But getting to do all of that with a novella that I’d loved when it first came out as part of Robert Asprin’s Thieves’ World shared-universe fantasy series and then launched Morris’s own Sacred Band of Stepsons series? That was a blast! Continue reading The Sound and the Fury: Audiobook Fun

The Next Big Thing Blog Hop

Risuko
Risuko

Ken Schneyer tagged me for this meme in his own post last week.

I’m a bit late posting this… Been madly finishing work on an audiobook and trying to care for my very flu-felled wife. But here’s my response!

What is the title of your book?

Risuko. That’s Japanese for “Squirrel,” which is the protagonist’s nickname.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

A couple of places:

First of all, I read an article about a war widow in sixteenth-century Japan who set up a  school (of sorts) that trained young girls to be kunoichi  (female assassins, spies and bodyguards), all under the guise of being shrine maidens (miko) — something like the Shintō equivalent of novice nuns.[†] I’d always been fascinated with the Japanese Sengoku (civil war era), so when I read that, I thought, Wow! There’s a story someone should write! A while later, I had an image of a girl climbing a tree… and realized that someone should be me.

The other thing that got this started was reading the Harry Potter books with my kids, loving them, and thinking, Now, what about these has to be fantasy? As I’ve been writing Risuko, my intent has been to write a story that feels like a fantasy — but isn’t. Continue reading The Next Big Thing Blog Hop

Bending the Story without Breaking It: Prophecy and Time Travel

Prophecy and time travel - Hourglass by Rachel Caitlin (TrueLovesKiss) on flickr.com. Used under a Creative Commons license.

I was just reading a really fun time-travel story (Heather Albano’s Timepiece), and a thought that had been bouncing around in my head for a long time came clear to me: from a purely narrative point of view, time travel is prophecy’s long-lost (and possibly evil) twin.

Don’t get me wrong — they’re clearly very different plot devices, and stories that include one or the other tend to play out in somewhat different ways. But they do essentially the same thing to and for a plot. They bend narrative logic so that it can snap in interesting and unexpected ways. Continue reading Bending the Story without Breaking It: Prophecy and Time Travel