I crossed another milestone today, and I’m tickled pink about it. As most of you know, I’ve been producing the Penny Dread Tales series for four years now. As a result, Kevin J. Anderson of WordFire Press published The Best of Penny Dread Tales, which did really well at PensaCon and should continue to delight readers as we work the convention circuit throughout the year.
This morning, because of all the work I’ve poured into Penny Dread Tales, the fourth volume Perfidious & Paranormal Punkery of Steam was included in the WeBundle.It offering entitled Tales of Future Past. Penny Dread IV has a fantastic list of steampunk tales from around the world, written by a great list of writers including: Aaron Michael Ritchey, Gerry Huntman, Mike Chinakos, Mark Everett Stone, A.L. Kessler, David Boop, Sam Knight, David Riley, Jezebel Harleth, Jason Henry Evans, Peter J. Wacks, J.R. Boyett, J.A. Campbell, Mike Cervantes, Kara Seal, L.H. Parker, Vivian Caethe, Quincy Allen, and Ming Drake, with cover art by Kathryn Renta.
The Tales of Future Past bundle includes:
- Dawn of Steam: First Light by Jeffrey Cook
Gregory Conan Watts has been hired to prove the impossible. To do so, he’s expected to assemble a crew that includes war heroes, carnies, respectable women, and one wilderness scout who may or may not be entirely insane. They’ll have the best of 1815 technology: a state-of-the-art airship and the steam-powered battle suit that almost single-handedly brought down Napoleon’s alliance. Finding vast uncharted wonders Gregory’s not even sure are there sounded complicated enough; he wasn’t expecting natural disasters, outright sabotage … or another war. Dawn of Steam: First Light, an alternate-history/emergent Steampunk epistolary novel, follows these adventurers as they open up the world. In the process, their journey helps lay the foundations for an age of enlightenment and technology to come. - Avogadro Corp by William Hertling
A late-night programming mistake at the world’s largest Internet company accidentally creates a runaway artificial intelligence. Is it conscious? What does it want? Is it helping humans or harming them? Nobody knows, but they race to contain the AI as it spins out of control, firing employees, transferring corporate funds, and arming itself. The award-winning technothriller Avogadro Corp shows us what artificial intelligence might really look like. - The Non Zombie Apocalypse by Sechin Tower
Sophia “Soap” Lazarchek is starting to realize that not all of life’s problems can be solved with robots. At only sixteen, she’s been shipped off to a special school for the “college experience,” which evidently includes eating cold pizza for breakfast, trying not to make a fool of herself on a date, and occasionally defending the world from doomsday machines. Soap attends the Mechanical Science Institute—better known as the Mad Science Institute—where she and her fellow students are accustomed to being feared and misunderstood. The world simply isn’t ready to know about their antimatter reactors, dangerous devices, or even their pet videogame-playing lizard-monster. When an old enemy steals a prehistoric bioweapon capable of enslaving the planet, the Institute students must find a way to put aside their differences to combat an international terrorist organization. All their hopes rest with Soap, but she must search for the courage to face down her own, personal nightmare before it infects everyone she’s ever loved. - Aetna Adrift by Eric Wecks
What do you do when every aspect of life is regulated by a soul-sucking bureaucracy and constant surveillance is the norm? You run. You find the out-of-the-way places no one watches. You make sure no one depends upon you, and you beat the system. That’s what Jack did, and it worked…until now. It starts to go wrong when Jack breaks his rule and takes Anna home more than once. Then, Administrator Timothy Randall arrives and turns Jack’s backwater moon upside down. On a mission from the central government which no one understands, Randall and his staff do whatever it takes to accomplish their goals. When the killing starts, Jack finds himself blackmailed, tortured, and enslaved to a ruthless political faction. Now he must figure out who to trust, how to escape, and decide between Anna and his freedom. Aetna Adrift is a full length high octane thriller in Erik Wecks’ PAX Imperium universe. - Penny Dread Tales Volume IV: Perfidious & Paranormal Punkery of Steam from Quincy J. Allen
PDT IV explores the darker side of steampunk, where demons reign and the human spirit can be as unwholesome and unholy as your worst nightmare. Immerse yourself in this tome of light and darkness. Revel in the triumphs of adventurous heroes and despair in the maleficence of heartless villains, human and inhuman alike. These short stories will take you across the globe and across dimensions. You will find yourself soaring through the skies over America and Europe. You will visit the seedy underside of Seattle, the dusty plains of the southwest, and the great savannahs of darkest Africa. Within these pages are ghosts, demons, and the undead seeking to take your very soul. Necromancers feed upon the blood of the innocent. Murderers and thieves abound, and the line between good and evil blurs to nonexistence. Limitless worlds and landscapes lay within in this latest installment of Penny Dread Tales … for it is truly Perfidious and Paranormal Punkery of Steam. - Hammerhead by Jason Andrew Bond
Jeffrey Holt tears apart decommissioned ships that have been crash-landed in the Nevada desert. He’s a shipbreaker, no one of consequence—just as he wants it. However, decades after his role in the world mattered, someone is trying to kill him. Searching for a reason, he tears into the bridge of a derelict Kappa-Class freighter and finds corpses. As he stands on the bridge considering how to stay alive, a hand grips his leg… - Futurity by Michael Bunker
Everyone wants to travel to the past. Not Malcolm. He wants to go to the future… and he’s just found out that Dr. Paulsen, Professor of Optics at Rochester-Finney University has figured out how to do it. Malcolm is a third year physics student and an avid gamer. But what he stumbles into is not a game, and he’s about to get more than he ever bargained for and, depending on where he ends up, the whole world could be at stake. - Alternitech by Kevin J. Anderson
“Alternitech” sends prospectors into alternate but similar timelines where tiny differences yield significant changes: a world where the Beatles never broke up, or where Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t gunned down after the Kennedy assassination, where an accidental medical breakthrough offers the cure to a certain disease, where a struggling author really did write the great American novel, or where a freak accident reveals the existence of a serial killer. Alternitech finds those differences—and profits from them.
If you were looking to discover a new favorite author, I can’t imagine a better way than this bundle. For one amazingly low price, you’ll be getting great fiction from TWENTY-SIX different authors.
So, there’s my milestone. One of my projects is in a bundle and in the fantastic company of seven tremendously talented authors. 2015 promises to be the best year of my career to date, and I can’t express how much I’m grateful for the growing number of fans I have. You are all the ones who make this sometimes bumpy road worth all the hard work I put into it. I’ll do my best to keep grinding out the words, and I can only hope you find things like this bundle a great way to flesh out your libraries.
Cheers!
Q
