two serpents rise

TWO SERPENTS RISE Cover Reveal and Details!

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It’s been an insane week, so why not make it a little madder?  Yesterday I received the final cover for Two Serpents Rise from Tor, and now it’s time to share!

 

2SR Cover

 

Once again, Chris McGrath’s cover does not disappoint.  Pyramids and stone carvings and a city in the background, cards and snappy suits, and Caleb.

Two Serpents Rise is set in the same corporate fantasy world as Three Parts Dead, but it features a new cadre of characters, in a new city.  Alt Coulumb was a city living with its god, and shocked by His death.  By contrast, the citizens of Dresediel Lex rebelled against their pantheon sixty years ago in the God Wars, and killed most of them—only to find that after you depose the gods, you have to take their place.

I’m excited about Two Serpents Rise for a lot of reasons.  It fleshes out the consequences of the God Wars, and shows people living with their scars.  We see the world the Craftsmen built and struggle to maintain, and discover how it feels to live there.  More politics, more necromancy, more demons, more intergenerational strife, more magic, more revolution, more class dynamics, more love (or something like it).  Late millennial capitalism never looked so much like human sacrifice.

Initial buzz is really positive.  Publishers Weekly gave Two Serpents Rise a starred review:

“Gladstone outdoes himself in this exciting and imaginative return to the brilliantly realized world of Three Parts Dead.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

And Locus devoted a whole quarter-page to their review, which puts me in some elevated company.

“The advantage that the best science fiction can give you as a reader is to teach you how to fall into an unfamiliar world.  You learn how to give your trust over to the author … [and] the author will reward that trust.

Heinlein was great at this… Banks’ Culture books did this, as did Tolkein.  Either the reader could accept the ambiguity, or not.  Those that could were richly rewarded.

Max Gladstone excels at this.  Two Serpents Rise drops us in Dresediel Lex, a city where the residents act like we do—the main character isn’t a mighty warrior but a risk manager for a corporation—but the ground rules are changed… Then stuff gets weird in the best ways. …

[Cutting some plot info]

For those who can hand Gladstone the reins, a rich, compelling ride is in store.  No, it’s not a typical transparent fantasy quest story, but is, instead, a satisfying story that muses about environmental catastrophes, troubling father-son relationships, and corporate mergers.” – Locus

Here’s the back-cover copy:

Shadow demons plague the city reservoir, and Red King Consolidated has sent in Caleb Altemoc — casual gambler and professional risk manager — to cleanse the water for the sixteen million people of Dresediel Lex. At the scene of the crime, Caleb finds an alluring and clever cliff runner, crazy Mal, who easily outpaces him.

But Caleb has more than the demon infestation, Mal, or job security to worry about when he discovers that his father — the last priest of the old gods and leader of the True Quechal terrorists — has broken into his home and is wanted in connection to the attacks on the water supply.

From the beginning, Caleb and Mal are bound by lust, Craft, and chance, as both play a dangerous game where gods and people are pawns. They sleep on water, they dance in fire… and all the while the Twin Serpents slumbering beneath the earth are stirring, and they are hungry.

I am excited, folks.  Less than two months to go!  Mark your calendars for October 29!  And get your preorders in gear at Amazon, Powell’s, BN, or some other retailer of your preference.

And in the meantime, looks like we’re giving away a few copies at Goodreads—so get on that if you want free books!

ReaderCon this Weekend! Also, Books!

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Brief post today as I run around trying to GTD before the world eats me.  For one thing, I’ll be at ReaderCon this weekend, not participating in programming, ut mos est mea—it’s all my fault really, I would love to be on convention programming but something had to give this fall and applying for programming was it.  Next year, in Jerusalem.  Well.  Probably not in Jerusalem, unless sales of Two Serpents Rise really spike in the Holy Land.

Speaking of which, Ofir Touche Gafla’s The World of the End launched a little while back.  If you’re looking for a book that’s weird and surprising without abandoning a strong emotional through-line, this might be what you’re looking for.  Writer husband seeks wife through an afterlife that’s somehow Kafkaesque but not in a bad way, and if you’re wondering what that means, well, just read through chapter two and you’ll see.

S.M. Wheeler’s Sea Change also came out recently; it’s a powerful and weird fractured fairy tale about gender, memory, familial cruelty, and the various ways love and ambition screw us all up, among other things.  A decent chunk of the early action is set on a beach, but I wouldn’t call this a beach read exactly—get it now, and read it in autumn or spring when the world’s shifting around you.

Oh, yes, and I’m writing this via the new Laptop of Heavenly Perfection (to steal Chaz Benchley’s term)—a 2013 MacBook Air.  Just for the sake of experiment, I’ve run all day on battery power, and those commercials talking about the battery’s twelve hour life aren’t fooling around.  Exciting upgrade, especially with travel to come and a book to edit.  I had an excellent run with my 2009 MacBook Pro, but when I put this one in my backpack I don’t even notice it’s there.  And as a one-bag traveler, that’s nothing to sneer at.

Speaking of editing, it’s funny—I’ve written a first draft of another Craft Sequence book since I finished Five Eyes Break (which I think we might be calling Full Fathom Five now, for reasons), and going back & adding scenes, I can tell the difference in my prose.  A little more immediacy, a little more comfort with diving into the abyss.  Which is funny, considering the subject matter of this book.

That joke will be funny in about a year, I swear.

Anyway, all of that’s to say that if you’re at Readercon this weekend, drop me a line!  I’ll be around Saturday and Sunday.  If you’re lucky enough to be there Friday, definitely go to the linguistics panel—John Chu is there, along with other cool folks, and whatever they come up with is sure to be interesting.

San Diego Comic Con Update with TWO SERPENTS RISE giveaway!

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Hi everyone!  Last couple weeks have been a bit busy for me—combination of editing Book 3 and hosting family from out of town—but some of those responsibilities have eased and I have news about San Diego Comic Con!  The previously-seekret details are now no longer quite so seekret.  Here’s my schedule!

Saturday, July 20 10:00am – 11:00am
Room 7AB

Urban Fantasy: Myth and Magic in the City
Paris, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Tucson, and cities of our own imagination come to life when tales of myth and magic are blended with the urban landscape. These stories are collectively known as Urban Fantasy, and many of today’s popular authors are adding their otherworldly ingredients to the melting pots of modern (and not-so-modern) society. Authors Jim Butcher (Cold Days), Max Gladstone (Three Parts Dead), Kevin Hearne (The Iron Druid Chronicles), Richard Kadrey (Kill City Blues), Marlene Perez (Strange Fates), Kevin J. Anderson (Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.), and Liesel Schwarz (A Conspiracy of Alchemists) discuss the art of writing Urban Fantasy with Diana Gill of Harper Voyager US.

This looks set to be an amazing panel.  I was on a panel with Richard Kadrey at New York Comic Con last year, which was a ton of fun; drop by and listen for the rock!  The other authors need no introduction, really.  Genre giants here.  I’ll just try not to embarrass myself.  And, well.  If Thirteen-Year-Old-Max is still wondering when he’ll become a Real Writer[tm], being on a panel with Kevin J Frikkin Anderson is a nice clue.  I may, may, have spent an embarrassing amount of my pizza-cook moneys on Star Wars novels as a kid.

Urban fantasy is an interesting term for the Craft Sequence—it fits in some ways, doesn’t in others.  Maybe it’ll come up at the panel.  If not, I should write something about that here!

After, we’ll have:

11:30 – 12:30am Signing to follow in the autographing area, Table AA09

So come over and get your books Signed!  Then, right before dinner—

5pm Tor Booth (#2707) MAX GLADSTONE will sign advanced copies of Two Serpents Rise

Oh yeah, boom goes the dynamite.  2SR ARCs available for signing and general insanity!  As far as I know, this is the first time ARCs of Two Serpents Rise will be available to the general public.  Best Comic-Con Exclusive Ever?  Or best Comic-Con Exclusives Ever?
(Okay, I know I’m competing with the Locke and Key keys and Black-on-black Planeswalkers here, but a guy can dream, can’t he?)
So that’s SDCC.  Look forward to seeing y’all there.  And now, Stupendous Man away!

About the Craft Sequence and the Sequel to Three Parts Dead

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In the eight months since Three Parts Dead hit stores, I’ve seen a lot of people wonder if the book was part of a series.  I’ve answered this question in readings and in person, but as I was reading through some material about Two Serpents Rise, and contemplating the Three Parts Dead paperback launch this next month, I realized I’d never discussed the issue on the blog before.  So!  Here we are.

Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise (and Five Eyes Break for that matter, plus the other book of which I just finished a first draft) all take place in the same universe, on the same planet, in the same timeline.  Characters, organizations, and universal properties (like the way the Craft works, or the soulstuff economy) in one book exist in every book.  Sometimes books will have a lot to do with one another, or have a direct causal connection.  Sometimes books will share very few characters, or be connected only by more-or-less continuous spacetime.

If I do my job right, a new reader should be able to read each book on its own, but readers who have read more books will understand more about the world and the context for the actions they describe.

Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise, for example, take place in different cities at different points in time.  Two Serpents Rise (which Publishers Weekly really likes by the way, starred review, “Gladstone has outdone himself,” so that’s cool!) is set a short time before Three Parts Dead, in a city called Dresediel Lex, across the continent from Alt Coulumb.  There aren’t any characters obviously in common between the two books (though the King in Red, who killed Seril in the God Wars, is a central character in this story), but their plots are relevant to one another for reasons that will become clear in the third book and beyond.

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is an obvious inspiration here.  I love the scope of the Disc, and the freedom Pratchett has within it to tell stories that mean something to him and his readers without having to squeeze characters into plots that don’t fit.  There can be more than one interesting event happening on a planet at any given moment, and these events don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another or with the same band of plucky heroes who always happen to be in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time.  I also love the feeling of writing in a shared universe, like Khazan in the old Fantasy Powers League where I used to write fic: stories sparking off in all directions, and occasionally reconnecting.  I guess you might say that I’m sharing the Craft Sequence with myself.  (Nobody ever accused writers of not being solipsists I guess.  I can only hope I’m as cool a solipsist as, Baccano! spoiler warning, Clare Stanfield.)

Currently, I’m using numbers in the titles to indicate where the books fall on the timeline relative to one another.  Two Serpents Rise is a bit before Three Parts Dead, but only a bit; Five Eyes Break (again, tentative title) is a few years after.  I’m planning to write a direct sequel to Three Parts Dead continuing the specific story of Tara and Abelard from the first book; some characters from both the first two books show up in the third.

As for overplot, arch-villains, and so forth, all I have to say is RAFO.

So that’s the major thing.  I still owe you folks detailed information about Two Serpents Rise—it’s coming, don’t worry.  I do have one question: I’ve been thinking about hosting this information, bio details on characters, and some other frequently asked questions, in its own section on the website.  What do you want to know more about?

Superman

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I just spent all afternoon writing a prospectus for edits on the book I’m tentatively calling Five Eyes Break, which is the next book in the Craft Sequence after Two Serpents Rise.  I was going to take some time to discuss the Craft Sequence, my plans for it, Two Serpents Rise, and crazy worldbuilding, but that’s beyond me at this stage of typing-degeneration.  I’ll make it up to you on Monday, Internet, I promise.

Instead, let’s talk about Superman!  I still haven’t seen the movie, but Superman’s in the air.  I’ve never been as much of a Superman reader as I am a Bat-fan, but the character’s grown on me over the years—and outside of his continuity, he remains one of the most versatile and powerful symbols in comics.  Superman can be the standardbearer of undeconstructed Truth, Justice, and the American Way.  He can be an incarnation of Reaganist foreign interventionism.  He can be Jesus, or Jesus, or Jesus.  He can even be Stalin (sort of).

He is the ur-Superhero.  Eric Burns White has used Myth Criticism a couple times to describe Superman as the archetype superhero, the perfect iteration of the myth, from which all other superheroes are a deviation.  Here’s a good summary of the argument, though there are spoilers for Man of Steel near the end.  Superman is the Superhero; Batman is a superhero with a vengeance complex and an unhealthy fascination with terror.  Maybe those faults make Batman a more interesting character, but they don’t detract from the value of Superman.

My friend Dan and I were talking about Herculean labors the other day, and Dan raised the excellent point that Hercules, for all his position as the Strong Man of Greek Myth, solves his trials by being smart.  Each labor is designed to be impossible to accomplish with strength alone—the Augean Stables, for example, would take one man, no matter how strong, his entire life to clean out.  Hercules solves this by redirecting a river.  He couldn’t do that without his immense strength, sure, but immense strength alone wouldn’t solve the problem.

I propose a similar model for Superman stories.  The best of them aren’t “Superman hits Bad Guy faster than the speed of light, bad guy goes away,” they’re “Superman is placed in a position where it seems impossible to act in a Supermanly manner, and must figure out how to act and remain Superman anyway.”  The climax of Richard Donner’s first Superman movie (Lex Luthor’s two-missile dilemma) might be the simplest possible formulation of the Superman challenge.  Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman lives and breathes and is beautiful thanks to this type of challenge.  (And / but this sort of story also runs the risk of making Superman stories a little self-centered in their morality, which Alan Moore points out in his great Superman tale, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?)

Anyway, that’s all.  No outrage here, just some pondering.  And, by god, if you read comics at all, read All Star Superman, and Alan Moore’s Superman stories—Alan Moore’s DC Universe collects many of his tales of the name-brand character, but his Supreme: The Story of the Year and even his Tom Strong books have lots and lots of Superman in them.

 

Two Serpents Rise ARCs!

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In lighter news, I am now the proud owner of two ARCs of Two Serpents Rise, the next book in the Craft Sequence!

Sure, my photography leaves much to be desired, but the book looks nice.  A pleasure to hold in one’s hand, too.

I can’t wait for folks to read this one.  Two Serpents Rise is also set in what I’m loosely terming the Craft Sequence—the same world as Three Parts Dead.  Two Serpents follows a different part of the story than Three Parts Dead, but don’t worry if you’re desperate to see more of Tara and company.  There’s plenty in the works beyond this.  I have a big story to tell here, and I’m excited to show you the first pieces of the world beyond Alt Coulumb.

A few more details about this book are floating around out there on the internet, including an early draft cover which we’re in the process of revising.  I’m a little trembly on account of this being the draft the long-lead reviewers will see—of all the silly things, I changed a critical character’s eye color in proofs, and the color change didn’t make the jump.  A small, important shift, but oh well.  For now, I’ll abide in excitement.

Slower

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As prophecied, some days you feel like a nut, some days you don’t.  Or something like that!

Today was a slow day for writing; the morning was action-dense and I spent the entire afternoon ruminating on copy edits.  Editing is funny because while often there’s a linear relationship between time spent and output, sometimes that relationship breaks.  With writing, I have a pretty solid over-under range on the number of words I can produce during an hour’s work.  Editing, sometimes I stare at a paragraph, or even more often a line, pacing back and forth and wondering what’s wrong, why the words clash or the grammar doesn’t quite seem to line up.  Then I look at the clock and feel a little despair.

Of course, ten minutes later I fix whatever was bothering me and skip through three pages of smooth dialogue, good character development, uninterrupted story—before I hit the next mine.  Wonderful!

I’ve been playing Uncharted 2 to unwind recently.  Really fun game, smooth, exciting, but I can’t help but laugh when I compare Nate Drake’s Murder Per Second ratio to, say, Indiana Jones’s.  I don’t think they fall within an order of magnitude of one another.  At one point a little box popped up on my screen saying: “Congratulations!  You have shot 100 bad guys in the head!” which indicates that, since I have horrible aim, I have killed well over 100 people in this game.

I wonder if it’s possible to make a game that feels as engrossing as the Uncharted series, while retaining the Murder-per-second ratio of the Indiana Jones films (which isn’t, you know, the lowest thing in the world—Indy does for a bunch of Nazis & cultists over the course of his career).

In Which Some Books

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Today I split my time between the two next books in the Craft Sequence.  All morning I drafted the third novel, which is taking shaky shape, and in the afternoon, after a brief period of recovery, I dove back into reviewing my publisher’s copy edits for Two Serpents.  I don’t want the copy edit review process to slow down proper writing, and it hasn’t so far.  I wrote as much as usual today, and edited as much as I needed to, and I hope I can keep up that pace.  We Shall See.  One day is hardly a pattern.

I’ve been avoiding reading fiction for the last week or so as I get deeper into the new book, which is an interesting experience, and might not be helpful.  I find myself salivating for new worlds.  I linger over descriptions of books, and run my hands down spines as I pass them.  Sometimes I peek, just a little line from somewhere in the middle.  I already have my Christmas reading list, which I plan to dive into once I put the next book to bed for the holidays.  Shall I share?

Wallace isn’t fiction, sure, but he has such a strong voice I’m wary of reading his essays during the first-drafting process.  That’s what edits are for, I guess—belt-sanding away everyone else’s words from mine.

I noticed that the Wallace book has an essay on David Lynch.  I hope he’ll talk about the Dune movie.  I’m not all that optimistic, but who knows?  The spice may flow!

I’ve Sold Two More Books to Tor!

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One roller-coaster of a year after I sold Three Parts Dead and its companion novel, Two Serpents Rise, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve sold two more books to Tor!

Publishers’ Marketplace has more information on the deal, but it’s behind a paywall, so permit me to repost:

…Max Gladstone’s A WALKER IN THE GYRE, a “science fantasy” in which an indifferent sci-fi writer must employ his gift — the ability to chart a course through the cauldron of the multiverse — to stop a family of necromancers set on remaking time in their image, to David Hartwell and Marco Palmieri at Tor, in a two-book deal, by Weronika Janczuk at Lynn Franklin Associates, in association with D4EO Literary (World English).

WALKER is by far the craziest thing I’ve ever written (except maybe for my current project).  I described it once to a composer friend as a fugue; he asked what I meant by that, and I said, well, the main characters spend a lot of time running away from stuff.  If you’ve ever wanted a book about gods, monsters, fractal war machines, wolves between worlds, Tantric supercomputers, sex, death, parenting, necromancy, time travel, Hamlet, blood magic, Oh Hell, destiny, responsibility, and love–this is it.  If you’ve never wanted a book like that, I’m very confused by your priorities.

The second book will continue to expand  on the universe I’ve built in Three Parts Dead.  I’m still in the tapping-fingers-together-and-cackling phase for this one, so in lieu of details you’ll have to content yourself by imagining my maniacal laughter…. (I’m a tenor 2 if that helps.)

I can’t overstate how thrilled I am to be here, right now.

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Max Gladstone Writing about Reading and Writing and Hopefully Liberation
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