Feb 29, 2012

No Mo' Nomi

As you may have read in the announcement on the Star Wars Books Facebook page, my Nomi (and Vima) Sunrider book will not appear "due to changes in direction and concepts in the overall publishing plans."

Feb 27, 2012

Avengers Alliance Art

Check out these cityscapes from the game (there are more here). Evil lurks within...and you'll be able to fight it real, real soon.


New Stuff for the Kindle

Trying out this newfangled electronic publishing thing, I put together a Kindle-only collection called The Dream Curator and Other Stories. It contains the following stories, all of which are also available individually:


Read 'em! Review 'em! (And while you're at it, review all my other stuff on Amazon too!)

Over the course of this year I'm going to be developing some stuff exclusively for the Kindle store, just to see how it works. Until then, check these stories out. They were published in lots of different places with different readerships, so even if you've read some of them, I'm betting you haven't read them all.

Feb 6, 2012

An Avengers Alliance Wiki Is Born

And here's the link. Join up and generate some content!

In other Avengers-related news, I thought it was cool that the movie Hawkeye is left-handed. Southpaws assemble!

Feb 3, 2012

Read A Scattering of Jades for Free

It's been out of print for a while now, but I like this book a lot. It was my first try at writing a novel, and all things considered I think it turned out pretty well. I'd like more people to read it, so I PDFed it and I'm making it available to anyone who cares to click this link or the image at left.

If you're unfamiliar with A Scattering of Jades, it won the Locus, Crawford, and International Horror Guild first-novel awards when it came out in 2002. Here's the flap copy:

The great fire of 1835 burned most of New York City's wooden downtown. Like many people, Archie Prescott thought he had lost everything. His home was a smoldering ruin, his dead wife's body at his feet. And next to her is a child's corpse he assumes was his daughter. It seems like the end of everything.

But it is only the beginning.

Goaded into action by New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett, Archie runs afoul of one of P. T. Barnum's former sideshow workers, Riley Steen. With the help of an ancient book translated by Aaron Burr, Steen has resurrected a chacmool. This ageless Mesoamerican avatar plans to use the blood of Archie's still-living daughter to bring about the end of humanity.

At the same time, Stephen Bishop guides tourists through the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Stephen, a slave, wants nothing more than a world where the color of his skin doesn't deny his humanity. His fateful first meeting with the chacmool leads him to believe that the promise it offers may bring him to such a world.

In the midst of ancient magic and murderous conspiracies, Archie finds himself with the power to save the world or drown it in sacrificial blood . . . but first he has to stop mourning his daughter and undertake a grim cross-country journey to save her.

Read or download it here. (There's a Kindle edition too, but I've never seen a dime from it, so you might as well read for free!)

And if you like it, of course, there's One King and The Narrows and Buyout...

Feb 2, 2012

Review Copies of Mare Ultima

If you are a reviewer and/or blogger and want a PDF of my novella Mare Ultima, drop me a line at alexirvine at alexanderirvine dot net (or through FB, or Twitter, or however). The book comes out this month from PS Publishing.

Feb 1, 2012

Buyout in the World

Yesterday a friend (thanks, Johnny Rog!) alerted me to this story from Ohio, where last fall the state sold one of its prisons to a private operator and turned over the operations of two more prisons to private contractors. This, of course, is one of the processes in the backstory of my novel Buyout, and it's a weird feeling to write a novel set 30ish years in the future and then see some of its elements beginning to appear in the real world. Not that I can claim any particular prescience; I wrote the book wanting to explore the consequences of what I saw as troubling cultural trends toward relating justice and profit, as well as to figure out what I thought about capital punishment. Science fiction, as everyone knows, is lousy at actually predicting things in any sort of rigorous way.

Anyway, I thought this was Ohio story was of interest because of the way it fits together with other events I became aware of after writing Buyout, including:


Taken together, these stories make for a worrying trend, and all of them in one way or another fit right in with the imagined backstory of Buyout. (News of the kickback scheme in Pennsylvania, in fact, broke right around the time the book came out. The judge in question got 17 years.)

I've had an interest in prison-related issues for a long time, all the way back to when I was an undergrad researching recidivism for a criminology class. The seeds of Buyout started to germinate then, while I was touring Jackson Prison in Michigan with an assistant warden named Ernie, but it took 20 years for the book to come together...not least because I hadn't started to think of myself as a writer yet, and wouldn't for several years.


Now that I do think of myself that way, I would be remiss if I didn't suggest that you go read the book and see for yourself what you think...