gagglefrak - comic books, science fiction, faux profanity

A very good friend of mine, Craig DiLouie, recently published a book of speculative fiction titled The Thin White Line: A History of the 2012 Avian Flu Pandemic in Canada. As the subtitle pretty much spells it out, this book describes what might happen in Canada if bird flu crossed over to humans and triggered a pandemic.

The book is written so that it reads as if it were a non-fiction history book from the future about a pandemic that has already occurred some years before, complete with realistic photos, tables, and graphs. It combines written history — names, dates, events, etc. — with oral accounts of people who survived the 2012 tragedy, and the “heroes” of the story are average people like you and me, doing the best they can in a terrible situation.

This story-telling technique is similar to that used by one of my favorite novels from 2006, Max Brooks’ World War Z, which assumes the pretense that a zombie epidemic has occurred many years before the writing of the book. So if you liked that one, odds are, you’ll like this one too.

For much more information about the book, about the author, to read some sample chapters, and for ordering information, just visit www.pandemicbook.com.

Would you like a free book? Of course you would. I do.

Well, between now and May 13th, to celebrate the pending release of Invincible, the final chapter in the Star Wars: Legacy of the Force series, Random House and Del Rey are letting the general public download a FREE audio or digital version of Betrayal, the first book in the series.

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Spanning 9 volumes, the Legacy of the Force series deals with events that occur in the Star Wars universe starting roughly 40 years after the original trilogy of movies (Episodes 4-6). Luke, Han, and Leia are back, but much older now, and they all have kids. And one of this new generation has not quite lived up to the standards established by his/her parents. Yes, you guessed it — somebody gets seduced by the Dark Side. And yes there’s a war. And yes … there is a Big Bad Sith Villain behind that war, a student of Darth Vader, who needs to be taken down.

I haven’t read the series myself, but it sounds like great fun, and each of the books have received excellent reviews. So I’ve already downloaded the audio version, and I’ll be adding it to my iPod this weekend. Remember, the offer ends May 13th, so if you’re going to download it, do it soon. Here’s the link again …

http://www.randomhouse.com/delrey/starwars/sw_legacy.html

Missing in Action is the 16th book in the Star Trek: New Frontier series of novels by Peter David. I’ll freely admit that I’m a huge fan of Peter David’s work, whether it’s comics or fiction. So whenever a new installment in this ongoing saga hits paperback, I generally drop whatever else I’m reading to find out what he’s done with/to the characters this time around.

Peter David started this series back in 1997, and at the time, it was a bit of an experiment. There had been plenty of Star Trek novels written over the years, but all of them had been attached to one or more of the various TV shows — The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, or Voyager (and later Enterprise) — and each dealt with the continuing adventures of such established characters as Kirk, Spock, and Picard, each in their own familiar milieu. What David decided to do (with the nudging of then-editor John Ordover) was start an entirely new and original ongoing story, one set in the same universe as but unattached to any of the established shows in the franchise, using everything that had happened in the TV shows and movies as its “history” and moving forward from there. Continue Reading »