Ending the Year with a Big(gish) Bang

Just in the nick of 2022 time, ReAnimus Press has released new editions of three -- count 'em, three -- of my books. All three are offered in hardback, trade paperback, and ebook formats. 

(Small detail: as I type, only Amazon offerings have appeared. I'm assured the remaining ebook formats will have percolated to other sites and ebook formats within a few days.)

The three reissued books being ...

The Sherlock Chronicles & The Paradise Quartet

Sherlock/Paradise
at Amazon

A mile a minute? Nonsense. Even a meat brain knows "mind going a mile a minute" is mere metaphor. For a quantum mind, a light-second per minute would be nearer to apt, if sadly sans alliteration. Ordinarily, I have my metaphorical fingers in hundreds, even thousands, of figurative pies. Any less stimulation than that is boring, and boredom is the bane of a q-mind's existence.

That events in the "real" world often strike humans as inexplicable is hardly surprising. Meat brains have limits. And so, when an opportunity presented itself, I thought: why not lend a virtual hand? Every moment of diversion was welcome, and this "case," surely, a harmless amusement. Thus began my detective phase. Only I couldn’t have been more wrong about harmless ....

And if an AI PI isn’t intriguing enough ...

A triumph of ingenuity and sheer willpower had delivered a dying generation ship to the exoplanet Paradise. Too bad the ingenious biotech the colonists deployed to settle on that planet triggered an inexorable devolutionary cycle.

Thousands of years later, possible rescuers arrive -- and are themselves ensnared in the manmade trap that is Paradise. Escape will require new ingenuity and more multi-generational striving ....

 Two exciting adventures in one volume.

***

Countdown to Armageddon / A Stranger in Paradise

Armageddon/Paradise
at Amazon

"A romp through time and history ... an intriguing selection." — Bookloons

Armageddon: Hezbollah has obtained an atomic bomb and a would-be martyr eager to deliver it -- and that's the good news. The bad news, unknown even to Hezbollah, is that their physicist has also found a way to take his new bomb back to a turning point in European history.

Harry Bowen, an American physicist, and Terrence Ambling, a British agent turned historian, are determined to stop Abdul Faisel and prevent the nullification of all Western civilization. Their mission can be accomplished, if at all, only in the darkest of the Dark Ages -- and there, too, time is running out.

“A top pick for anyone looking for exciting fiction ...”— Midwest Book Review

Paradise: And on the (virtual) flip side we have a fiction collection headlined by "A Stranger in Paradise." (Indeed, that short story was the jumping-off point for what became The Sherlock Chronicles. The overlap between the two books is quite minor.) These novelettes and short stories, running the thematic gamut from nanotech to the ethics of terraforming other worlds to the conjuring of demons, first appeared in Analog, Amazon Shorts, and Jim Baen's Universe.

***

Creative Destruction

"For its compelling vision of what could be, you will want take more than a glimpse of Creative Destruction.” — Fast Forward: Contemporary Science Fiction

Creative Destruction
at Amazon

Computing is mere decades young, a set of technologies we have scarcely begun to develop. It's already been quite a ride. Now: Imagine every gadget around you becoming ever faster, cheaper, tinier, more interconnected, more intelligent . . . especially more intelligent. The stories in Creative Destruction explore what we could face in the next half century or so: artificial intelligence, malicious software to makes us nostalgic for mere viruses, ever-more-perfect virtual reality, direct neural interfaces to computers, ubiquitous networks, and more. The internet? That was nothing.

Creative Destruction first appeared in 2006 -- and I'm delighted with how the tech glimpsed within its pages generally hasn't aged.

***

There you have it ... three choices surely more interesting than a Rose Bowl parade. Especially with that Amazon gift card burning a hole in your pocket :-)