Radio Hope is now Free!

Radio Hope, the first volume in my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series, is now free on all platforms. That's right. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and all other vendors have it listed as free. So if you like gritty, realistic science fiction, give it a try! A blurb is below.

In a world shattered by war, pollution and disease. . .

A gunslinging mother longs to find a safe refuge for her son.

A frustrated revolutionary delivers water to villagers living on a toxic waste dump.

The assistant mayor of humanity's last city hopes he will never have to take command.

One thing gives them the promise of a better future--Radio Hope, a mysterious station that broadcasts vital information about surviving in a blighted world. But when a mad prophet and his army of fanatics march out of the wildlands on a crusade to purify the land with blood and fire, all three will find their lives intertwining, and changing forever.

Tales From The Toxic World Out Now!

Toxic World fans, the wait is over! 

The latest installment in the series is out--Tales from the Toxic World. Here are nine stories featuring some of the most popular characters in the series, plus new characters and a town the citizens of New City have no idea exists! This collection expands the Toxic World setting. The fifth novel in the series, Election Day, will come out next year.

A scavenger with a wondrous artifact from the Old Times sets out to avenge his past …
The sheriff of a post-apocalyptic shantytown investigates a baffling murder …
Two fishermen in a toxic sea make a startling discovery …
A peddler has to compromise his faith to help others and not end up dead …
Here are nine stories from a grim future that’s all too possible. The world has been destroyed by war, pollution, and environmental degradation. Now only a few lonely outposts struggle to keep the light of civilization lit amid vast toxic wasteland filled with human predators.
This collection is a long-awaited addition to the popular Toxic World post-apocalyptic science fiction series. It’s sure to please fans and newcomers to the series alike.

You can buy Tales from the Toxic World here. 

To get it FREE, sign up for my newsletter, Sean's Travel's and Tales, the latest issue of which is coming out later this week. There will be a coupon in there for your free download.

The Fourth in the Toxic World Series is Out Now!

The fourth book in my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series is out now. It's called Emergency Transmission and takes up where We Had Flags left off. Yu-jin is back, and we get to learn more about some of the other characters who have been in previous books but haven't had their chance to shine. A blurb is below:

Trust is the only thing that can save the world.
The problem is, everyone has their own agenda.
When an offshore platform starts emitting toxic fumes that threaten to destroy the last outposts of civilization, the residents of New City have to team up with a foreign freighter to fix it. But a lingering mistrust remains, and neither side has the resources to stop the leak.
That is, until help comes from the least reliable source.
Can old enemies finally set aside their differences for the greater good?

Emergency Transmission is available on Amazon US and all the other Amazons.

My lastest post-apocalyptic novel We Had Flags is out now!

We Had Flags, the third in my Toxic World series of post-apocalyptic novels, is out now. The series starts with Radio Hope and continues with Refugees from the Righteous Horde. The Scavenger is a novelette in the same world.

In We Had Flags, the residents of New City face their biggest challenges yet. For those of you familiar with the series, the main characters in this volume are the Doctor, Pablo Cruz, and someone you haven't met yet. A blurb is below.

A law doesn't work if everyone breaks it.
For forty years, New City has been a bastion of order in a fallen world. One crucial law has maintained the peace--it is illegal to place responsibility for the collapse of civilization on any one group. Anyone found guilty of Blaming is branded and stripped of citizenship.
But when some unwelcome visitors arrive from across the sea, old wounds break open, and no one is safe from Blame.

We Had Flags is available via Kindle's Prime program, so if you're a member you can read it for free!

Book Review: Girl of Great Price

Girl of Great Price by Milo James Fowler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this novella, Fowler blends hardboiled detective fiction with a futuristic dystopian society and delivers with effective storytelling.
Charlie Madison is your typical down-at-the-heel detective with seedy connections in the underworld and a desperate need for a real life. His associates are the kind of people you'd expect in a gritty 1950s noir film and Fowler sets the mood well. I couldn't help but picture the action in black and white!
The twist is that the story is set in a near future where pollution and lawlessness are the rule of the day and the crime syndicates have all but taken over. Madison's case brings him in contact with several players in this world and this helps flesh out the setting nicely. Given that this is a short work, I can't really get into the plot without giving away spoilers, but it's an intriguing story with a hint of fantasy to add spice to the science fiction.
My only criticism is that I would have liked the story to be longer in order to round out the characters a bit more and wrap up the case more completely. Seeing as this is part of a series, I suppose that will happen in later books.
If detective science fiction is your thing, you'll enjoy this book.


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Book Review: Z Boat

Z-Boat by Suzanne Robb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm always up for a good sea tale so I was looking forward to reading this. What I found was a mixed bag.
The plot of this book is basically "zombies on a dystopian submarine". That's not a spoiler because you find that out in the first page. The world is declining rapidly thanks to corporate greed, government corruption, and spreading pollution. While I love a good dystopian tale, I found parts of this hard to swallow. For example, global smog is so thick you can't see the Sun in the middle of the ocean, yet somehow life manages to survive on Earth. Also, even people with relatively decent jobs can't afford clean water. The submarine crew drinks a tainted brown gunk. Even my Boy Scout training taught me two ways to get rid of that--boiling through a retort or filtering. An industrial civilization could no doubt come up with many more techniques.
More curious details emerge within the submarine itself. It's a late 20th century model, now a floating antique, yet it doesn't sound like any known sub. Hallways are five feet wide, doors are large, none of the crew has first-aid training, and the sub's davit (a small crane for lifting cargo or lifeboats) lifts the sub out of drydock, over the other vessels, and into the water. Um, no. Robb needs to research submarines if she's going to write about them.
The lack of editorial oversight is apparent in the text too, with many awkward sentences, misused words, and confusion between "lie" and "lay". The slow middle needs to be tightened up, and Robb has an irritating habit of telling right after showing. I lost track of the number of times a long paragraph would clearly show what a bad situation the characters were in, and end with some banal statement like "It didn't look good."
And yet I kept reading. Robb is a master at bringing characters to life and making you care about them. The crew is a wonderful collection of misfits suitable for the Nostromo or the Serenity and their interactions, loves, and feuds makes this book. The gorefest fight scenes are fun too if you have a high splatter tolerance. The ending is a rollercoaster ride that leaves it way open for a series (which is in fact continuing).
All in all, the most frustrating thing I found about reading this is was watching a bad book smother a good one. Robb has heaps of potential, and with a bit more care for her craft, and a much firmer editorial hand, she could produce some astounding works of fiction.
2.5 stars out of 5.
(I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)

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What National Novel Writing Month Taught Me

National Novel Writing Month is just around the corner! Are you participating? If you're a writer--pro, amateur, or aspiring--it can be a great help. I did it for the first time last year and will be doing it again this year. Below is a reprint of a post I did after the 2013 NaNoWriMo talking about what I learned.

Like many fellow indie writers, I participated in National Novel Writing Month. I managed to finish an entire post-apocalyptic novel of 71,000 words in the month of November. It's a post-apocalyptic thriller called Radio Hope.

OK, enough self-promotion. What did writing a novel in a single month teach me? Here are ten things I learned.

1. If you are mostly unemployed (I recently lost my travel blogging job when Gadling laid off all their regulars) your word count goes way up.

2. Keeping your word count up helps with your self-esteem when you're mostly unemployed.

3. Keeping your word count up after the challenge is over maintains your self-esteem. I'm working on the sequel right now. (Update: that's called Refugees from the Righteous Horde. It's now out. I'll be working on book three of the series this year).

4. You'll help your confidence if you get a jump on the game by writing a lot on the first day. November 1 was my most productive day, with 5,300 words.

5. Write every day, even if it's just 500 words (my worst day) because that forward momentum keeps you from getting stuck.

6. It's good to find a group to help you. I was down in Madrid on November 1 and got to hang out with other members of my old writers group. We took over the back room of a cafe and wrote like mad!

7. If you give the project sufficient focus, you will not have a drop in quality as you increase quantity.

8. You will, however, make more typos. A lot more. Really embarrassing ones.

9. The online community at the NaNo website is super supportive, helpful, and friendly, and disappears after November 30.

10. It's really, really fun!

Refugees from the Righteous Horde out now!

Book Two of my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series is out now! Refugees from the Righteous Horde picks up where Radio Hope left off. Here's the blurb:

When you only have one shot, you better aim true.
In a ravaged world, civilization’s last outpost is reeling after fighting off the fanatical warriors of the Righteous Horde. Sheriff Annette Cruz becomes New City’s long arm of vengeance as she sets off across the wildlands to take out the cult’s leader. All she has is a sniper’s rifle with one bullet and a former cultist with his own agenda.
Meanwhile, one of the cult’s escaped slaves makes a discovery that could tear New City apart. . .

Refugees from the Righteous Horde continues the Toxic World series started in Radio Hope, an ongoing narrative of humanity’s struggle to rebuild the world it ruined.

The book is available on all the Amazons and will soon have a print edition. If you could help me out by tweeting, blogging, and sharing this info, that would be awesome!

Post-Apocalyptic A to Z: World War Three as envisioned by science fiction author Mark Geston

Out of the Mouth of the Dragon by Mark S. Geston
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Back cover blurb:

Amon VanRoark heard the prophet speaking in the marketplace of the decaying city. Timonias spoke with all the glowing words and crystal clarity of his calling. And the young man listened and he followed. The call was to the Meadows, to the Wars, to the Armageddon in which all the forces of Good and all the forces of Evil would meet, would clash, would decide the fate of the already doomed world. There had been other Armageddons, false ones, so Amon believed, in the lifetimes of his father, and his grandfather before him. But when Amon looked at the ruined world around him, at the lost technologies, the vestiges of dying cultures, the warped rays of the sun, he knew he must answer the call to this last Armageddon, in which Creation would either be renewed or finally be let to end.

This is one of my all-time favorite science fiction novels. Its grim view of the future has stuck with me for twenty years. Future warriors in a blasted land march off for yet another world war. It seems everyone wants to bring on Armageddon but can't quite pull it off, so instead they keep gearing up for new wars that further scar the world.

Geston is an overlooked master. His prose is rich and complex, with a surreal quality that haunts you. This is a continuation of his previous book, Lords of the Starship, written when he was still in high school! I highly recommend both books, although you don't have to read Lords of the Starship first since the connection is tenuous. I read them out of order and my understanding and enjoyment weren't diminished.

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Post-Apocalyptic A to Z: V for Vendetta

One of the most original mass market films of the first decade of this century has to be V for Vendetta. I'm sure most if not all of my readers have seen it and thus know why anarchists like to run around in Guy Fawkes masks. That's the film's most visible legacy.

What I think remarkable about the movie is that Hollywood actually produced a film espousing anarchist principles. They did it before with Fight Club. Perhaps they're trying to subvert radicalism by packaging it as entertainment?

If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. Not only does it bring up important questions about state control in the Information Age, but it's also a slick bit of science fiction with some great acting and intelligent script writing. If you like your sf with a bit of politics, you'll love this movie.