I just signed up three of my books for the Southern California Book Festival, which will be later this year in LA. I submitted The Second Predaxian War, The Hive, and Tears of Gallia. If you know any of the judges, put in a good word for me.
If you’re new to my works, please check out the pages of this website, and feel free to e-mail me with any questions at karl@karljmorgan.com.
Thanks!
To help me celebrate the completion of the manuscript of The Accord, you can get a free Kindle version of Tears of Gallia this weekend! Just order it on Friday, July 26 through Sunday, July 28, and it won’t cost you a thing!
Tears of Gallia is an epic adventure, leading Dave from Gallia to beyond the edge of the galaxy. He will face death yet again, and be stranded on a mythical planet in the ancient past.
Tears of Gallia is about hatred and revenge, time travel, and most of all, love and brotherhood. Be prepared to visit incredible planets and experience the history of Greater Gallia. It also introduces The Accord, a race of machines bent on enslaving all of the universe. After you read it, please let me know what you think, and please write a review on this site, Amazon or Goodreads.com.
Book Club Reading List turns book club meetings into memorable experiences. Book novelist, Karl Morgan, to talk about Tears of Gallia at your next reading club gathering.
via Tears of Gallia.
Hooray! I just finished the rough draft of book 5 in the Dave Brewster Series of Sci-fi novels. The working title is The Accord, which relates to a villain encountered in the previous book (Tears of Gallia), and not a very reliable Japanese import car.
The Accord examines how our fears can cause us to do terrible things. In order to protect themselves from a perceived threat, the people of Skee Lotho create a race of machines powered by human brains. The separation of man from his senses will eventually change his perception of others and the universe at large, in this case leading to incredible evil.
Of course, the counter-plot is the story of how Dave Brewster and his friends develop their plans to stop The Accord before all of our galaxy is taken over and our worlds and bodies are reduced to simple sources of metal and protein.
The manuscript is now out for editing and review. I need to come up with a cover design and work with my artist on that. So, it will be several weeks before the new adventure is available. I hope you’ll stick around to learn more and check it out. Join the Adventure!
Allow me to introduce you to Osphalon Balakak, the worst of the villains in my new book, Heartstone: The Time Walker. He looks like a real sweetheart, I know. Who would think this guy is bad? And before you ask, no, I was not the model for his face.
In Tears of Gallia and Time Walker, I wanted to explore the dangers of time travel into the past. In Tears, other mysterious forces acted to stop changes to the past and preserve the reality that existed before the change. In Time Walker, no such entities exist, and fixing the changing course of time becomes the job of those few who can recall reality before the change due to their extreme experiences at that time. It is up to those few who do remember to try to stop the evil doers from achieving their sadistic goals. Our hero, Bill Marshall, is not so lucky. He must face the new realities and try to save his family at every turn, until fate and his friends can turn the tide against Keedu and Osphalon.
As soon as the cover is complete, I’ll post this entire image. I hope you will enjoy this story as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thanks for your readership.
Dear Friends,
I have submitted my latest microstory for the Science Fiction Readers, Writers, Collectors, and Artists group on LinkedIn. You should really check that group out and sign up if you’re interested in the genre. It’s worth it for the opportunity to read all the microstory submissions alone!
For July, the guideline was to focus on something that in the news right now. We also needed to mention summer and mosquitoes. As always, the story has to be 4,000 characters or less, which is LinkedIn’s maximum for a single posting. I’ve been reading the other stories almost every day, and it’s amazing how good they are. I am fascinated by the breadth of styles and the imagination of these authors.
My story focused on the NSA leak and micro-drones, plus I couldn’t help but put myself into it. It is attached to this post, and I hope you take the opportunity to read it and share your thoughts with me.
Here it is: SaturnProtocol
It hit me just after I woke up today. My books, like most sci-fi or fantasy books, have a lot of non-scientific things going on. Whether it’s the many alien races or Universal Power in the Dave Brewster Series, or traveling the universe through a portal inside a Heartstone in the Heartstone Series, the reader has to accept the alternate view of reality in order to keep going forward.
What coalesced in my mind this morning was that the truth is usually stranger than fiction. Following the latest trends in quantum physics and cosmology is my hobby. That’s weird too, I know, but bear with me a minute.
According to physics, matter is almost entirely empty. If you could enlarge a typical atom to the size of a tennis court, the nucleus (which holds virtually all the mass and material) would be the size of a grain of sugar in the center. Therefore, matter is really open space. The couch I am sitting on is almost entirely not there.
On the other hand, according to quantum physics, the vacuum of empty space (the entire universe less the galaxies and their stars and nebulae) is not empty at all. It is a seething caldron of massless particles (or strings) that pop in and out of existence continually. Therefore, emptiness is really fun of stuff.
Now perhaps the empty space in an atom is also a seething caldron. In any event, empty is full, and full is empty. And that’s science! I wish I’d come up with that theme for one of my books!
I just noticed a new trend in my most current books: Heartstone: The Time Walker (waiting for cover art) and book 5 in the Dave Brewster Series, entitled The Accord (currently around 50% complete). While I am not a vegetarian or anything like that, both of those books raise questions about the morality of consuming other living things.
In both novels, the food of choice is other humans, which I hope we can all agree is totally disgusting. In the following paragraphs from Time Walker, the bad guy, Os, justifies his appetite for humans by comparing it to the desire to eat any kind of living food:
“You suck the life force out of others to keep yourself alive,” Baku replied. “That seems pretty horrible to me.”
Os laughed at the thought. “You think you are so pure and innocent, but almost all life feeds on life. The tubers in this stew were alive until you ripped them from the ground and sliced them up. When you wish to eat meat, you slaughter the animal, gut it and cook it in a pot. You take life so you can extend your own, just like me. We are all guilty of the same crime, but my method is not so barbaric. On my new planet, there live six billion sentient Beings. I can survive by taking only a fraction of a second from each every day. Those creatures have natural lives around one hundred years long. My nourishment may cost them an hour or two. No one is killed and sliced into steaks for me.
That bit of dialogue hit the paper without me even thinking about the words. Afterward, I wondered where that choice of words came from. Is someone trying to tell me something? Well, I don’t really know, but it’s an interesting thought that carries forward into The Accord. The bad guys in that book are not as kind to their prey as Os. And other than those few words above, Os is not so kind himself, which you’ll see when the cover is available. Please let me know what you think? And I hope you check those books out when they become available. Thank you for joining the adventure!
I belong to a LinkedIn group for Sci-Fi Readers, Writers, Collectors, and Artists at: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=45166&trk=anet_ug_hm
This Month, I uploaded my first story to meet their Microstory guidelines of 4,000 characters or less. I’m attaching it here for your review. I really hope you enjoy it. My story is about love, piano keys, and a contradiction, which you can also follow in my new books:
Heartstone: The Time Walker
The Accord: Dave Brewster Series
Karl
Here is my new story: 8seconds
I am giving away ten autographed copies of Heartstone: Sentinels of Far Sun through Goodreads. If you want a chance to get a free copy, go to http://www.goodreads.com and look for the giveaway and sign up. I already gave away copies of The Second Predaxian War and The Hive. If you’re already a Goodreads member, sign up to be my fan and/or friend! If not, you should check that site out. It’s a great way to share your reading list with friends, read and write reviews, join groups of like-minded readers, and interact with your favorite authors.
The timing of this giveaway coincides with the upcoming release of the next book in the Heartstone series, Heartstone: The Time Walker. That book is ready to go once the cover art is finalized. In Sentinels of Far Sun, Bill Marshall had a lot of help as he faced many challenges to save his family and humanity. The tone of The Time Walker is much darker. Bill will face incredible challenges, often alone, as the black mages change the past in order to stop him from the victory he achieved in Sentinels. I hope you check them both out.