A Slew of Pyr Covers (New covers for Sykes, Hodder, and the Griffiths)

Information on Pyr's Fall/Winter 2012 is starting to trickle out and it looks to be a great season ahead with a couple series being wrapped up that I've been following since the beginning.

The Skybound Sea will finish off Sam Sykes' first trilogy The Aeons' Gate, which started so well with Tome of the Undergates [reviewed here]. Pyr has done a much better job with the cover than the UK version, which is all kinds of blah. I was still hoping to finally get my Dragonman cover though. I'll shut up about that now since that ship has clear sunk and how could I not like a cover that put me a quote from me on the front? That's a first for me though I've been on quite a few back covers and inside pages at this point. It still never gets old.

After two volumes of odd, bloody introspection and diversions Sykes has left himself a lot of story to wrap-up, but he's more than equipped to handle it. The Skybound Sea will be out in early September. I haven't found an official blurb that says much , but here is the brief UK description:

After the misadventures of the first two books Lenk and his companions must finally turn away from fighting each other and for their own survival and look to saving the entire human race. A terrible demon has risen from beneath the sea and where it came from thousands could follow. And all the while an alien race is planning the extinction of humanity. The third volume in the Aeon's Gate trilogy widens the action out dramatically. TOME OF THE UNDERGATES was based mainly on a ship, BLACK HALO moved the action to an island of bones, THE SKYBOUND SEA takes us out into a world threatened with a uniquely imagined and terrifying apocalypse.

A Red Sun Also Rises is Mark Hodder's first non-Burton & Swinburne novel, but it does involved Steampunk is some fashion. The alien on the cover is so creepy I'll have to check it out. Bottom line is it sounds like a Sword & Planet novel influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs and given Hodder's style he's apt to make it a fun take. Little has been released about this story yet except this interesting post from Hodder, but here's the blurb:

When Reverend Aiden Fleischer, vicar of the sleepy town of Theaston Vale, finds a hunchbacked, light-sensitive and crippled vagabond named Clarissa Stark begging at his door, little does he suspect it's the start of an adventure that's literally out of this world!

Bribed by an unscrupulous family, Fleischer and his companion flee to London's missionary college, but in wicked Whitechapel, the faithless priest stumbles upon one of Jack the Ripper's victims and becomes convinced that he himself is the notorious killer. With her friend's mind shattered, Miss Stark is relieved when they are both posted to the far away Melanesian island of Koluwai, but here they encounter an even darker evil, one that transports them to another planet.

Beneath the twin suns of the planet Ptallaya, Fleischer and Stark encounter an alien species, the Yatsill, master mimics who, after gaining access to Miss Stark's mind, create their own bizarre version of Victorian London.

But Fleischer and Stark's new home from home is not safe, for the Blood Gods will soon invade, and if he is to defeat them and rescue the woman he's come to love, Fleischer must first face his own inner demons!

A Red Sun Also Rises will be released in early December. Also, of note is the fact that Hodder recently signed with Pyr for 3 more Burton & Swinburne novels.

The Kingmakers by Clay and Susan Griffith is also the final book in the Vampire Empire trilogy, although I think there is plenty more to this world to explore. Even though I haven't done full reviews of the first two books they've quickly become one of my favorite Vampire series as they blend action pulp sensibilities with Steampunk, Colonialism, Romance and  Post-Apocalyptic fiction so well. The Kingmakers will be out in September as well. No blurb has been released.

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Cover Unveiled for The Rift Walker (Vampire Empire) by Clay & Susan Griffith

In a word: beautiful.

 Last year I was pleasantly surprised by Clay and Susan Griffith's novel debut The Greyfriar. It was the perfect mix of pulpy goodness, Steampunk ascetics, and bloody vampires. I thought so highly of it I named it as the runner-up best vampire read of 2010 after the epic that was The Passage. So the sequel The Rift Walker is high on my comfort to-read list this year. Here is the synopsis, but skip ahead if you haven't read The Greyfriar:

Princess Adele struggles with a life of marriage and obligation as her Equatorian Empire and their American Republic allies stand on the brink of war against the vampire clans of the north. However, the alliance's horrific strategy for total victory drives Adele to abandon her duty and embark on a desperate quest to keep her nation from staining its hands with genocide. Reunited with her great love, the mysterious adventurer known to the world as the Greyfriar, Adele is pursued by her own people as well as her vengeful husband, senator Clark. With the human alliance in disarrray, Prince Cesare, lord of the British vampire clan, seizes the initiative and strikes at the very heart of Equatoria.

As Adele labors to bring order to her world, she learns more about the strange powers she exhibited in the north. Her teacher, Mamoru, leads a secret cabal of geomancers who believe Adele is the one who can touch the vast power of the Earth that surges through ley lines and wells up at the rifts where the lines meet. These energies are the key to defeating the enemy of mankind, and if Princess Adele could ever bring this power under her command, she could be death to vampires. But such a victory will also cost the life of Adele's beloved Greyfriar.

The artist for the series so far is none other than Chris McGrath, who I felt was looking a bit same-y with his cover art recently, but this piece reminded me again why I was first attracted to his work. He has an ability to capture a scene and execute it perfectly.

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Steampunk as Alternate History by Clay and Susan Griffith

Steampunk as Alternate History

by Clay and Susan Griffith

authors of The Greyfriar: Vampire Empire Book 1

Alternate history is fascinating, whether in fiction or just a parlor game – “What if Napoleon won Waterloo? What if Julius Caesar hadn’t been assassinated? What if the Spanish Armada had won?” Alternate history can be compelling because we all have a tendency to think about history in terms of what historians call determinism, which means we like to think everything HAS to happen the way it does happen. But it isn’t so; history has no rational plan. And alternate history let’s us think about what ELSE could’ve happened.

We’re guesting on this blog to talk about how we approach steampunk as a form of alternate history. And we should say up front that our comments are limited to steampunk fiction, rather than fashion or fabrication, because we’re writers, not designers or engineers. In addition, we don’t claim to be experts on all things steampunk, but we do write alternate history with a steampunk flavor, so we can speak to that.

Just how much writers change history in steampunk fiction depends on the story. Sometimes the imaginary steam world is wildly different from reality, and the author provides a detailed scheme that explains why seemingly outlandish things make sense such as Queen Victoria’s army of steam-powered robots or smoke-belching airships dominating the skies. Other times, steampunk fiction is plain old historical fiction with a dollop of top hats and goggles. Then there’s also steampunk that’s not set in an alternate earth timeline, but in a pure fantasy world while still using the tropes of the genre, such as technology or fashion or language; that isn’t really alternate history.

Our personal preference is for steampunk with its feet planted firmly in the 19th century, because that was the era when the dominant energy source was STEAM. It should come as no surprise then that we write neo-Victorian alternate history. In our book, real history shifts to our fictional timeline in 1870 with a devastating attack by vampires which destroys the industrial world of the northern hemisphere. Refugees from the north descend on the tropics, where vampires are rare, to create a chaos of conquest and consolidation.

We don’t pretend to produce hardcore alternate history that would necessarily please the most critical of the Military History Quarterly crowd (even though we think they’d like our book too), but as with any alternate history, our goal is to create a world that works within its own steampunk boundaries and has logical political and economical rules. Even our vampires have reasonable rules that don’t depend on occult inexplicability.

While the politics and economics in our world vary from the real world, we still believe they are (and should be) familiar to readers. That’s the point of alternate history, at least to us. If you create a world so twisted that it isn’t recognizable or comfortable to readers, then you might as well just move into a fantasy world.

We didn’t set out to write a “steampunk” novel. Our plan was to create an exciting adventure and love story, with vampires, set in a unique neo-Victorian world. We were certainly familiar with steampunk, but we weren’t part of the community, and really had no idea how large and complex it was until we began to realize our book fit nicely into the exploding subgenre. Even so, our steampunk isn’t necessarily your steampunk, but it doesn’t have to be.

Steampunk, like all genres, evolves and provides a constant source of debate over its definition and boundaries. Therefore, alternate history (which includes its little brother – steampunk) will continue to be both surprising and familiar, which is how it should be to maintain an audience.

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Clay & Susan Griffith are the authors of The Greyfriar: Vampire Empire Book 1 (Pyr Books, Nov. 2010) They are a married couple who have written and published together for more than a decade. Their credits not only include several books and numerous short stories published in many anthologies, some featuring noted genre characters like Kolchak the Night Stalker and The Phantom. They've also written scripts for television and published graphic novels featuring characters such as The Tick and Allan Quatermain. You can visit them on their blog.

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