fiction

The Magic Battery: Now on Smashwords!

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My novel The Magic Battery is now available as an e-book on Smashwords. As an expression of thanks for reading my blog, I’m offering it for $1.99, instead of the usual $2.99, with the coupon code RW83R through the end of June.

This is a novel for fans of thoughtful historical fantasy. It presents an alternate Germany where magic works, and where the authorities allow only Christian men to practice it. Thomas Lorenz discovers a way to store magic spells in gadgets that people can buy or rent, putting magic in the hands of anyone with a little money. The conflict that develops parallels the effects of the real-life innovations of Luther, Paracelsus, Copernicus, and others.

In sixteenth-century Saxony, magic is a trade. Mages draw power from the World Behind, but they don’t understand it. Thomas knows that magic needs to be scientific, that it follows mathematical laws. He draws inspiration from his master Albrecht Ritter, who knows nothing is ever “good enough,” his teacher Johan Brandt, who is hiding an infamous past, and later his wife Frieda, who sees the prospect of a more enlightened future. He faces the persistent opposition of Heinrich Gottesmann, a fanatical lawyer and witch hunter. He learns that there is more at stake than just a new way of making lamps.

I’ve been to some of the places used in the book: Heidelberg, Wernigerode, Quedlinburg, Hildesheim. I’ve engaged in considerable historical research to get the period right. Apart from the magical elements, the setting is as close to the historical Germany of the 1540s as I could make it. None of the characters hold 21st-century ideas; that would be absurd. However, Thomas and especially Frieda see beyond their time.

Links, reviews, and shares will help to get the word out. You can link to the Smashwords page or to my page on this site.

Researching fantasy fiction

This entry was posted in My writing and tagged fiction magic battery on by

While I make my money writing about tech, I have a fiction project going as well. It’s called The Magic Battery. The starting point was some questions about how magic worked in a friend’s story. Magic always has to be limited in some way, or anything becomes possible with a wave of the wand. But if there are limitations, there will be ways of overcoming them. My comment was “Whoever invents the magic battery will make a fortune!” That was my starting point.

The story is set in 16th century Saxony, and I’m striving to make it as realistic as possible except for the existence of magic. Sorcerers are tradesmen with special skills. They make a nice living because they can do things no one else can, but they aren’t super-powerful. As one of the characters puts it, “Magic isn’t magic.” It has serious limits, one of the most important being the sorcerer’s capacity to draw on the “World Behind.” But what if they could draw on this power and save it for later use? What if they could sell their stored spells to people with no magical talent? That would change the world.
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Seanan McGuire on writing

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged books fiction on by

Seanan McGuire has a good article on Tor.com on how she wrote her new novel Middlegame and on writing in general. It’s a reminder of how much of writing is just working steadily. “Every book is sit down, write, keep writing, edit, edit again, try to sell, hopefully succeed, buy some groceries, nap.”

Middlegame sounds interesting to me because of its philosophical tie to Mary Crowell’s song, “Doctrine of Ethos.”

Mysteries in Manatas

This entry was posted in Reviews and tagged books fiction on by

Madness in Manatas coverWhat if the Reconquista hadn’t happened and the Iberian peninsula remained primarily in Muslim hands? What if Al-Andalus, rather than Christian Spain, had sent explorers and colonists into the New World? What if its people had colonized what we call Manhattan, mixing heavily with people from other cultures? This alternate history forms the basis of a series of mystery novels by Roberta Rogow. I’ve read the six that have come out so far and enjoyed them. The island is called “Manatas” in this version of history. Each book is presents one or more murders whose investigation falls to Halvar, a North European employed by the Sultan. The books so far are:

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