A new page has been published in the story The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
A new page has been published in the story The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
After a long hiatus, the serial stories at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual begin again this Wednesday.
Welcome to the Retropolis Registry of Patents: a bureau of hard-working Officers and Investigators who file patent registrations for countless mad scientists – at no small risk to themselves – and who discreetly keep track of which deranged inventor is about to create an innovation so hazardous that it needs to be stopped.
Their work may be as insane as their clients are. But like any other person, whether human or mechanical, what’s really important to them is office politics.
This is a series of short stories – illustrated in glorious black and white! – which will run from six to ten weeks each.
We begin on Wednesday with The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett, in which we meet several people we’ll come to know in the series while we get our first look at the inner workings of this important, undervalued department of Retropolis’ City Government.
The serials will update just once a week; but because each update is around 1000 words you’ll get bigger weekly chunks of story than you saw in The Lair of the Clockwork Book, which updated twice each week.
Here’s the complete schedule for the year:
- The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett (June 15)
- Doctor Petaja’s Parlor of Peril (July 27)
- Fenwick’s Improved Venomous Worms (Sept. 7)
- Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory (October 19)
- Ben Bowman in the Vault of Terror (November 30)
And after that? This schedule carries us into February 2017, so forgive me if I haven’t figured that part out yet.
I will be a little bit mean to you: the Registry of Patents stories are meant to conclude with a final story that will appear only in print, probably late next year. Still, after Vault of Terror there may be another story lined up. It just won’t be a Registry of Patents story.
I’ll probably have figured that out before the end of the year. In the meantime, enjoy what’s coming this Wednesday… and every other Wednesday for the rest of the year.
Yeah, I’m just building the World of Tomorrow, the way you do.
I know it’s been quiet on the blog front; as always that means I’m working really hard on something you can’t see yet. It’s nice. But why believe me?
We’re getting ever closer to June 15th, that happy day when The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett will begin its serial run over at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, and that’s just the beginning of a series of illustrated short stories that will continue through early next year. Most of those are in the can already, so you can tell they’re not what I’m working on right now.
What I am working on right now is related to the World of Tomorrow as you see it up above. That’s as much as you get, for the moment.
One thing I’ve been enjoying recently when I’m not building Retropolis is a long-running series of medical science fiction stories by James White. I don’t know how I missed them before, but that’s just made it more fun to find them now.
The stories takes place in and around Sector Twelve General, a massive multi-species hospital that hangs in space. The staff and their patients come from a bewildering number of species – so much so that they’ve adopted a four-letter mnemonic system for identifying themselves – and each story centers on a medical mystery. There are uncooperative patients as big as continents, and frightened patients who’ve never seen the members of another intelligent species before, and sightless beings who communicate telepathically, and a gazillion more.
The first stories date from the late 1950’s, but they continued to appear for decades. One interesting thing about reading them now is that you can watch the cultural shifts in our own world while the author evolves and grows. It’s great stuff; you should try it.
I just ran across this curated collection of pulp magazines and reprints over at AbeBooks… a web site that’s like all my childhood’s used bookstores lumped together, but without the dust.
I kind of miss the dust.
But apart from that, there are all sorts of old pulps and paperback reprints over there. As you may imagine, I’m most interested in what we see here (Pulp-O-Mizer fodder!) but there are a great many Westerns and thrillers along with more reprints of Doc Savage and The Shadow than most of us really want to look at.
It may not be Something For Everyone, but it’s a Lot of Things For a Lot of People. You may be one of them.
Downshift 
Over at his Archonate blog, Matthew Hughes has posted an announcement for the eBook and audiobook editions of his late-90’s mystery novel Downshift. There’s a comedy of errors about its first publication and the circumstances under which he wrote its sequel, Old Growth, which will also soon be republished under his own brand.
Then, three months before Downshift came out, my editor departed for another publisher– a nonfiction house, so she couldn’t take me with her. Immediately my print run was cut, my tiny promotional budget went to another book, and the marketing effort, except for library sales, was a few mouse-sized squeaks. Months later, when I asked if there were remaindered copies I could buy, I was told, “Nope, as the returns came in we sent them straight to the pulper.”
Not so comedic, maybe. But then again, I think I remember one definition of comedy as a story that relates events to their human sufferer, while tragedy connects events to their hidden cause.
A paperback edition is forthcoming, which I know because (as usual) I laid out the book in mobi, ePub, PDF and print formats. This time I also did the cover, a nice match to the Old Growth cover that will also be coming along soon.
You won’t see the first page of The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett until June 15 – that’s a little over a month from now – but I defy the tyrannical strictures of the calendar. And, possibly, rationality itself. So I’ve add some Doctor Brackett T-Shirts over at Retropolis.
I mean, do we serve the calendar? Or does the calendar serve us?
Join me in my little uprising against uncompromising time, won’t you? You can stick it to our oppressors here.
As an added incentive, there’s a stealth sale going on there too. Through May 18 you can save $5 on a t-shirt order of $30 or more by using the coupon code TAKE5NOW during checkout. That code works at Retropolis and the Celtic Art Works, and also on t-shirts you make with my Pulp-O-Mizer.
Defy time and save money!
In other news, I just discovered that there’s an actual pre-order page at Amazon (and only there, I think) for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. No cover image (which is pretty reasonable, since I haven’t done a final one yet) and no real information: just a lonely, blank image in an expanse of pretty much nothing. Still, hey! A pre-order page! It’s neat.
I guess things must be warming up outside the Secret Laboratory because through May 1st you can get free standard shipping on orders of two T-shirts or more from Retropolis and The Celtic Art Works. That usually doesn’t happen before the lawn needs to be mowed… hence my conclusion about the temperature. Maybe I’ll poke my head out the window and find out.
Just use the super-secret coupon code TWOWOO when you check out. And you know what’s even more super-secret? You can do the same thing on T-shirt orders from the Pulp-O-Mizer.
I got this recipe from my mother-in-law that was, and its origins are shrouded in mystery and intrigue. For example, it probably doesn’t have a lot to do with Mrs. Judkins, and it may not have come from Czechoslovakia, which doesn’t even exist any more. The whole thing was probably a plot of 1950’s spies, if you ask me. But it’s a really great cake. So, by request:
Mrs. Judkins’ Czechoslovakian Sour Cream Cake
- 1 cup butter
- 2 cups sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1 cup sour cream
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 2 cups sifted cake flour
Topping:
- 1/2 cup finely chopped nuts
- 2 tablespoons brown sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon cinammon
- (I recommend a handful of raisins, too.)
Preheat your cold war era oven to 350 degrees.
Do yourself a favor by making the topping first. It’s easy: just chop the nuts and mix all the ingredients together. I always make more topping than this; you may find that you will, too.
Cream the butter, sugar, and eggs. Add the baking powder and salt; cream it for a few more strokes.
Fold in the sour cream and vanilla very carefully. (Why so carefully? Here’s where the spies must have been adding their explosives. But just follow the instructions because who knows what might happen.)
Add flour, folding in carefully too. (ibid)
Spoon half the batter into a greased and floured bundt pan, about 10″ in size. Cover with half the topping. Add the rest of the batter, then the rest of the topping.
Bake at 350 for 50 to 55 minutes. This cake is deceptive, as you’d expect from the product of espionage; because of the sour cream it will not seem to be baked through when you poke it with a toothpick. Some experimentation is required (and recommended).
Cool the cake almost completely before removing it from the pan. Then sift powdered sugar on top. It’s all over but the eating.
If you’ve been wondering what’s going on with Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, well… so was I, for awhile. I thought I had reasonable expectations for how speedily the publishing industry moves. In this I was mistaken.
But March and April have seen a sudden burst of activity, a new release date, and the slow transition from my recent no expectations to my current cautious reserve.
The book’s new publication date – which I still consider a pleasant daydream – is March of 2017.
That date is looking more likely these days because the sales department has taken an interest. At some point their interest will turn into intent, penetrating looks directed at any part of the book that isn’t moving toward the release date, and once those intent, penetrating looks start darting around I think we can be pretty confident about the date. Nobody wants to get looks like those.
I’ve finished a couple of rough layouts for the book jacket and I expect I might start getting some looks of my own once everybody’s had a chance to see them. The dust jacket designs were a genuine blast to work on: they’re wraparound designs, so each one is a big picture that’s made up of five smaller rectangles that also need to work on their own. I really enjoyed working on them.
No, you can’t see them.
But I am looking at them while I’m typing – which is actually pretty difficult – and I can tell you that we’re probably going to have a pretty nice cover.
In the meantime we can look forward to The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett, the serial that should start up in June at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. Purloined Patents will kick off a series of short serials that’ll run into February of next year. So there’s a lot to look forward to, in just a little while.
Back in 1979-80 I spent a winter in Greece. It was colder than you’d expect, but it was the cold of Sophocles. So not so bad.
I was there on a grant from a Canadian foundation. The idea was that I would broaden my artistic horizons and paint, which was exactly what I wanted to do, and so it was a good deal for me. I’m not sure how they felt about it.
So The Best Girlfriend In The World Except For That One Thing and I settled into a little house, which everybody called a villa, in a village called Pallini outside of Athens. Pallini had been there for a long time; in Roman times it was the site of a marble quarry, and there were odd bits of marble sculptures all over our house’s long, narrow, steeply sloping yard. An old marble cornice was our doorstop.
We’d been warned to keep the yard’s gate locked “or the Gypsies will get in” so of course we never locked the gate, but the Gypsies never showed up. I’ve always wondered where they were.
We made this house our base of operations. We’d explore Athens, and we’d take off for short trips to Delphi and the North, but we’d always have the villa when we were done. And it was a nice place. We’d spend an afternoon visiting the son of the local vineyard, or we’d take off into the hills outside the village, or we’d mock the village goats, who were asking for it.
I’m pretty sure those trees up above were Pallini trees. So you can see it was a nice place to wander in.
There came a day when The Best Girlfriend In The World Except For That One Thing and I headed up the road out of the village and into the hills, and we went in a direction we’d never taken before. I don’t know why. But there are a lot of directions, when you think about it, and for whatever reason we’d just never used this one. It led us through a little valley.
There was a farm on one side of the valley, and somewhere on that farm there was a dog. We never saw it. We heard it, though: it was barking. The dog would bark, and a moment later the echo of its bark would bounce back from the other side of the valley. So the dog would bark again.
And the The Best Girlfriend In The World Except For That One Thing and I just stood there and listened for awhile. Bark; pause; echo; bark; pause; echo. Again and again.
We were witnesses to the ultimate straw man argument, in the ultimate echo chamber. Because that dog just couldn’t let Echo Dog have the last word. In a way I can’t quite explain, this was one of the most profound moments of my life. I had the sense that the Universe was explaining a mystery to us. And I think I was right.
A few hours later, The Best Girlfriend In The World Except For That One Thing and I came back through the valley. The dog was still barking. And although I know that this dog lost his argument with Echo Dog many years ago, I hope that his descendants have taken up the feud and are still out there barking, refusing to let Echo Dog have the last word even though – inevitably – he will.
Because that’s what we do.
