New Star on the Horizon
by wjw on June 26, 2014
My novelette “Video Star” is now available at Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, Amazon, and Baen. Smashwords has probably already distributed it to iBooks and various other sites.
It’s a mere $0.99! Which is practically nothing these days! You can get this story for practically nothing!
“Video Star” is set in the same world as Voice of the Whirlwind— in fact, it used to be in the same book. “Video Star” was originally a subplot in VotW, but it grew too long, and I replaced it with the chapter where Steward visits Los Angeles and ends up running for his life. Ever thrifty, I retained the piece I’d cut, changed the names of the principals, left the Flagstaff setting alone, and sold the result to Asimov’s. Ric wakes up in the same hospital as Steward, and he ends up with a somewhat less acute version of Steward’s girlfriend.
The story also manages to predict this. (Though in the story, it’s a nightclub.)
If “Video Star” had remained a part of VotW, it would have made for a much darker book. Steward would have been far less a victim, far more the complete manipulative bastard.
So I’m kind of glad the novelette calved off from the novel, because now there’s two whole pieces of awesome instead of one.
Enjoy!
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My novelette “Video Star” is now available at Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, Amazon, and Baen. Smashwords has probably already distributed it to iBooks and various other sites.
must… have… it…
I know you’ve gone a different direction in recent years, but I’d sure like to see some more HW / VotW style novels from you.
Voice of the Whirlwind is one of the half-dozen books I keep spares of, to loan to people who don’t read for entertainment. “Here, read this book. It won’t hurt you…”
Hold it a second. Is the Steward Reese shoots at the beginning of Wolf Time, related to (or a clone of) the Steward in VotW?
Is Wolf Time also a chunk of VotW that was cleaved off?
Wolf Time is more of a sequel. Reese shoots Steward at the end of VotW, and I just carried on her story from there.
Ohhh! I never put two and two together there. I never read them in proximity before. First read Wolf Time in Asimov’s and then VotW several years later. Rereading them both now.
Since exoskeletons are all the rage these days, Wolf Time would fit right in as a movie.
The Army’s Hardiman exoskeleton was highly publicized in the mid ’60s. I think a version was even on the cover of “Popular Mechanics.” So when I saw a similar one in “Alien” I didn’t think much of it; it was 15 years later, after all. I was surprised to learn much later that Ripley’s exoskeleton was a combination of full-size and miniature models with a lot of fancy photography. I was seriously impressed when I saw the “Making Of” video; I’d even seen the movie at the theater and never suspected it was all just special effects.
DARPA has let out a few “robot pack mule” research contracts, but apparently there was difficult problems even with quadruped designs.
Seems simple enough, all we need are a clean high-density 50KW or so power source and some high temperature superconductors…
Ah! *That* explains why, when I re-read VotW and WolfTime on the tabletty-thing I couldn’t work out why I had a memory of Steward being in a video clip. D’accord! 🙂
Can’t wait to read. Unfortunately, today is spoken for. Tomorrow!
I agree completely with TRX. Voice of the Whirlwind is one of my favorite SF novels. Along with Hardwired and Days of Atonement, those are the three books I recommend of yours to people looking for SF to read.
Why thank you! I’d really like to figure out some way to give DoA a boost: it’s down on the bottom in terms of sales.
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