In the latest bold stroke of my continuing campaign to take over the world, I have just released an all-new edition of my very first novel of the Star Rigger Universe, Seas of Ernathe. Eat your hearts out, Lee Child and George R.R. Martin!
Okay, I guess it’s not all new, in the sense that the words are the same, give or take a few corrections, as the book I wrote quite a few years ago. But the formatting is all new, far more attractive than the previous editions, and it boasts a gorgeous new cover by Chris Howard, whose other work you can sample here.
Seas of Ernathe was in fact my first venture into the novel form, though it tells a story set the farthest into the future of all of my Star Rigger stories. Whether that reflects my innate upside-down genius vision of the universe, or my essential backassward way of doing things, I leave to the reader to decide.
Here’s the short blurb:
“Starship rigging is a long-lost art. But the ocean world Ernathe may hold the key to its rediscovery, if a young star pilot can learn the ways of the mysterious sea people, the Nale’nid. A touching story of love and personal discovery, Seas of Ernathe takes us on a journey back toward the mode of star travel that once knit the galaxy together.”
You’ve squandered another perfectly good hour listening to… no wait, that’s Car Talk.
This is Bookbub. That’s right, starting today, I’m practically giving away another book: Star Rigger’s Way, which only recently came back into e-print via my Starstream imprint. Ninety-nine big ones for this novel, for one week only. That’s 99 Lincoln pennies, neatly lined up with all the dates right-side up, please. That’s less than a dollar, and much less than half of a Starbuck’s coffee! What’s not to like about that?
Fun facts about Star Rigger’s Way:
1. A minor character in this book, Legroeder, became the main character of a later book, Eternity’s End. 2. Characters only mentioned in passing in this book—i.e., space-faring dragons—became the central element of two other novels, currently available in one omnibus, called Dragon Space. 3. The original Dell paperback cover for this far-future saga appeared to feature a guy in a NASA-issue spacesuit, taking a space walk from Skylab. (Remember Skylab?) It was a very pretty cover. But a tad anachronistic.
You can get this deal in any of the following book pubs:
I can’t believe I just said that. I hate all the Black Friday and Cyber Monday crap, and the whole BUY BUY BUY ramp-up. Nevertheless, Kobobooks has a one-day 35% off sale today on selected ebooks, and it’s pretty good. My selection is Dragon Space, an omnibus edition of Dragons in the Stars and Dragon Rigger, a pair of books in my Star Rigger universe. You can find it here, and use the coupon code CYBERMONDAY35 to get your discount. Today only!
To see the whole list of books in the sale, go to this page. You have to keep hitting Show More Results at the bottom to see all the books. My favorite book cover in the sale: Pet Noir, by Pati Nagle.
Panglor is kind of a weird guy, and Panglor is kind of a weird book. Much of it takes place on an extremely weird planet. You wouldn’t want to miss that, would you—all the weirdness? The guy feels as if he’s about to go off the deep end at any moment, and for a week the book is going off the deep end, at least with respect to price. (Is this another Bookbub special? Of course it is. Get the ebook for $0.99, for a limited time only.)
I wrote Panglor in my late twenties, immediately following my second novel Star Rigger’s Way, which is a coming-of-age space adventure. Star Rigger’s Way is full of youthful angst. Panglor is full of angst squared, and the thought: What might happen if the frustration, angst, and anger of the young adult of Star Rigger’s Way never got resolved. What might happen if a good space pilot went a little off the deep end emotionally, turning just crazy enough to become a little scary, but still (just) within the bounds of professional competency? And what if he met up with a young woman, smart and a little off balance herself, seemingly born just to become a thorn in his side?
And what if they both wound up on a planet occupying some kind of weird nexus in space-time, a place where reality itself seems broken, concealing a crucial discovery that will change the course of star travel?
You can find out, of course, by reading the book. As I said in an earlier post, this book didn’t get much love in its original paperback from Dell, but has been well received as an ebook. I revised the text for a Tor paperback after the Dell edition, and that is the version in this ebook. (And, by the way, any correlation between the mental condition of the characters and the mental state of the author at the time of the writing is, er, purely coincidental.)
Panglor is listed as Book 1 in The Star Rigger Universe. Actually it’s a prequel to the Star Rigger Universe. It’s about the discovery that leads to star rigging. How we got from the discovery to the actual practice of star rigging is a story I haven’t written yet. Maybe I should!
If you like to buy ebooks at Kobo (they’re the ones with the waterproof ereader!), you might like their sale running this weekend: 35% off on selected titles. I’ve got a couple of books in the sale, as do some of my colleagues at Book View Café. What you do is pick your books from the sale page and apply this coupon code at checkout: UNLIMITED35.
That sale page will let you see the whole spectrum of offerings. For my own books, you can go straight to Eternity’s End and Star Rigger’s Way. But don’t forget to use the coupon code.
Trivia point: The hero of Eternity’s End, name of Legroeder, first appears as a minor (but important) character in Star Rigger’s Way, when he helps the hero of that book out of a jam. The genesis of Eternity’s End was my editor Jim Frenkel asking me, “Whatever became of that guy Legroeder? Don’t you ever wonder?”
…back into ebook, for the first time since June! Yes, the long wait is over. Star Rigger’s Way is now available in all-new clothes, in its long-awaited Starstream edition. Completely reformatted and with a new cover, this is not one to miss! (Wait—have any of my offerings been ones to miss? I hope not.)
Star Rigger’s Way was not my first star rigger novel (that distinction belongs to Seas of Ernathe), but it grew out of my first star rigger story, which was called “Alien Persuasion,” and appeared in Galaxy during the twilight years of that esteemed magazine. (If you want to read the story, you can find it in my collection, Going Alien, along with a cool illustration of the alien, Cephean, by Freff.) In its first edition, Star Rigger’s Way was published by Dell Books, during the twilight years of that publisher’s esteemed science fiction line. (Do you detect a pattern here?) Later, I revised it for a new edition from Tor Books, and that’s the version that’s in this ebook.
Within the Star Rigger Universe chronology, this book falls in the middle. Panglor sets the stage, with the discovery of certain properties of space-time that lead to the development of starship rigging through the Flux. The two dragon books (combined in Dragon Space) come next, well into the era of rigging but before the RiggerGuild, an institution created to protect the well-being of riggers, who are pilots with extreme sensitivity in certain areas of perception and imagination, and often vulnerable personality types. Eternity’s End follows close on the heels of Star Rigger’s Way, picking up the story of Legroeder, a minor character in this book. Seas of Ernathe jumps way into the future, at a time when the rigging techniques have been lost or forgotten.
Here’s the e-jacket copy for the new edition of Star Rigger’s Way:
His shipmates dead, star rigger Gev Carlyle is adrift in the Flux, the subjective hyperspace that carries ships between the stars. His lone companion, and sole hope for survival, is a suicidal catlike alien named Cephean. Only a compatible rigger team, their visions meshed in psychic unity, can safely harness the turbulent currents of the Flux—and Carlyle’s ship is sailing inexorably toward the deadly maelstrom of the Hurricane Flume. For even a chance at survival, he needs Cephean’s help. But the price for that is a complete merging of minds and memories. And Carlyle, at war with his own past, dreads that union more than death itself.
A grand space adventure, from the Nebula-nominated author of Eternity’s End and The Chaos Chronicles. (Etc.)
Available, of course, wherever fine bits and bytes are sold.
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