Announcing: The Cunning Blood on Kindle
I am most pleased to announce that the Kindle ebook edition of The Cunning Blood is now available on the Kindle store, for $2.99. It's also available through Kindle Unlimited as part of KU's monthly subscription service. No DRM, not now, not ever.
Cover by Richard Bartrop.
My regular readers know that this is not a new book. In fact, it's now sixteen years old, having been written between November 1997 and April 1999. I shopped it between 1999 and 2005, and eventually sold it to ISFiC Press, which released the first edition hardcover at Windycon in Chicago in October 2005. The hardcover (which is still available) reviewed well, getting a thumbs-up on Instapundit and a rave in Analog the following spring. I still have some reservations about the cover, but in general, given that it was a $28 first-edition hardcover, I consider it an almost-complete success. ISFiC was particularly good at promotion, and got me reviews in places I didn't know existed.
I fretted and prevaricated for a long time before putting my back into creating the ebook edition. Why? Not sure. As best I can tell, after so many years of trying and failing to make a name in SF, something in me just couldn't quite believe that it was possible to self-publish an SF ebook and get any kind of hearing for it. Granted, I have some promo work to do, and am researching mechanisms like BookBub and KDP Coundown Deals. But the hardest part was just getting off the dime and doing it. Some credit for that goes to Eric Bowersox and especially Sarah Hoyt, who got a little tough with me last Saturday and motivated me to get the final 10% finished and put the damned thing on the market.
The Cunning Blood is hard SF with a vengeance, perhaps the hardest SF I have ever written. The premise (and primary world-building concept) is this: In 2142, Earth's risk-averse world government (controlled by the Canadians) creates an escape-proof prison planet by releasing a self-replicating bacterium-sized nanomachine into the ecosphere of Zeta Tucanae 2. The nanobug seeks out and corrodes electrical conductors carrying current beyond a few tens of microamps. Nothing depending on electricity works for long on the prison planet, technically the Offworld Violent Offenders Detention Station (OVODS) but informally referred to (especially by its inmates) as Hell.
Because the nanobugs make surface-to-orbit travel impossible, Earth handed control of the planet to its inmates, and drops convicts on Hell in disposable lifting-body landers. Earth assumes that Hell will always remain a gaslight-and-steam neo-Victorian sort of society, forgetting that the Victorians were ignorant, whereas the Hellions are handicapped. They know what's possible, and over the next 200 years create a high-tech civilization complete with mechanical/fluidic computation and (as the story opens) spaceflight.
Earth gets a few hints about what's going on down on Hell in 2374, and frames an ace pilot for murder, then offers him his freedom if he will travel to Hell, gather intelligence about Hellion technology, and return alive via an unspecified mechanism. Pete Novilio accedes, and not only for his freedom. Peter is a member of a secret society developing a distributed and highly illegal nanotech AI that lives in human bloodstreams. The Sangruse Society (from "sang ruse," French for "cunning blood") would like to establish a chapter on Hell. The Sangruse Device, after all, is not electrical in nature and could thrive there, beyond Earth's heavy hand. So Peter descends into Hell with Geyl Shreve, a grim but talented agent of Earth's CIA-like Special Implementers Service. What they discover astonishes them--and ignites a three-way war between Earth, a faction of American rebels intending to overthrow Canadian rule, and the Hellions themselves.
If you like action, SF ideas, and a sort of optimistic exuberance you don't see much of in fiction these days, I don't think you'll be disappointed. Give it a shot.