Author of sci-fi/fantasy, horror and adventure/thriller fiction

THE ALCHEMISTS eBook Version Now Available for Pre-Order

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THE ALCHEMISTS by Craig DiLouie-002Happy to announce that at long last, THE ALCHEMISTS is available for pre-order for Amazon Kindle and Kindle Unlimited eBook!

THE ALCHEMISTS was a joy to write and, I hope, will be just as fun for you to read. Set in a heavily researched world of the Renaissance, it tells the story of two alchemists–one a wizard and the other a scientist–whose feud takes them across Europe to the gates of Vienna, under siege by the Ottomans. The book mixes exciting action with heavy doses of humor, history, mythology and a bit of romance.

Reading this book, you’ll try to make gold using medieval alchemy, meet the Holy Roman Emperor and the Sultan, fight in exciting battles with the Landsknecht, play chess against the Grand Vizier of the Ottomans, combat monsters of myth, and fall in love.

THE ALCHEMISTS is now available for pre-order at Amazon for 50% off the standard price until March 31–just $1.99!

Get THE ALCHEMISTS for your Kindle today by clicking here. (If you’d like the paperback instead, you can get it here.)

1529. Spain wars with France over Italy, Turkish armies march against Christendom, and two alchemists resume an ancient duel to prove which is superior, science or magic.

Myrddin is a powerful wizard served by a beautiful young woman who is the greatest fighter of the age. Prospero is a brilliant scientist apprenticed by a painfully shy young man who can build anything, from hot air balloons to steam-powered battle tanks.

At Vienna, they will have to put aside their differences to survive the greatest threat of all: the unbeatable Ottoman Army and all the magic and monsters of Asia, unleashed to conquer Europe.

THE HANDMAID’S TALE by Margaret Atwood

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handmaidI read Margaret Atwood’s THE HANDMAID’S TALE in the early ’90s and connected with the dystopian but not the human aspect of it, and found it somewhat light fare compared to giants in the genre. I didn’t enjoy the movie, which I felt only emphasized the things about it I didn’t like, notably how this oppressive world keeps giving breaks to an entirely passive main character. Rereading it again over the past few weeks, I connected with it in a much deeper way. In my view, it’s an ingenious book, and far more prescient than Orwell’s 1984, which has been selling like hotcakes in the Age of Trump. I’m now curious to watch the new Hulu series coming out.

THE HANDMAID’S TALE tells the story of “Offred,” a young woman living in an America that has become a theocracy more brutal than Iran’s at its worst. The President and Congress have been assassinated, nuclear accidents have spoiled parts of the country, and pollution has put fertility in decline. The military takes over and promises to restore law and order, and boy do they, instituting the Republic of Gilead, a nation of laws based on the Old Testament, and with order enforced by fanatical paramilitaries and secret police.

Women are deprived of all rights and most privileges, unable to own property or work. Instead, they must serve their husbands and bear children. Gays, doctors who once performed abortions, college professors and outlawed sects like Quakers are shot and hung on meat hooks on walls in towns as a warning to obey. (Even the Baptists are being suppressed and in revolt.) Money is outlawed, books are burned, passes are needed to go anywhere, there are curfews, and women aren’t even allowed to read. Feminists are hunted down and put in work camps. Even religious women who had their own TV ministries and spoke out against women’s rights must now tow the line and live the life they prescribed for everyone else. Women who are arrested but are fertile are trained to become Handmaidens, forced to ritually copulate with rich men who have barren wives, so they can have more children.

Offred (a ritual name based on the name of the family that owns her) struggles to survive with the memories of losing her husband and daughter and getting through each day by behaving properly. She is, self-admittedly, a passive character, a bit emotionally distant despite what has happened to her and her country. We want her to fight back, but she doesn’t know how without ending up dead almost immediately, and she intends to survive. Things happen to her, and she exerts little influence on them, which can be frustrating for the reader but is simply the result of the life she is forced to live within a heavily policed and stifling society. (The movie is even worse, a stunned woman tossed around by events and other people.) In fact, everything good or bad that happens to Offred is initiated by men, even the Commander who runs her household. She is a very good observer, though, and that is where the character and the book shines.

Atwood doesn’t moralize with any big conclusions, in fact the ending is (for many readers) disappointingly out of left field. What she does is ask us to imagine a world in which every aspect of a woman’s life is regulated by the government in accordance with religious law. And a world dominated by an authority that not only suppresses women, but enforces all aspects of society to conform with a single religious truth and law (even for Christians, one cannot have a Christian republic without the laws being based on a single Christian sect’s interpretation of the Bible and God’s will.) For that alone, it is a remarkable work, and one worth reading for anyone, not just fans of dystopian fiction.

Highly recommended.

PARABLE OF THE SOWER by Octavia Butler

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ParableOfTheSowerI love Octavia Butler’s fiction and finally picked up PARABLE OF THE SOWER, which tells the story of a young woman laying the foundation for a new religion in the ruins of a dying America.

The premise is intriguing. America is suffering economic collapse, resulting in armies of unemployed roaming the country and pillaging what’s left of the middle class. The police are more apt to arrest than help you, and only try to help you if you pay for their service, as with the fire department and other government services. Indentured servitude is legal, resulting in company towns where skilled workers are dependent on their employers and outright slavery for unskilled workers.

In Los Angeles, Lauren Olamania, a young woman who lives in a middle class walled community, works with her neighbors to defend their way of life while exploring a new belief system called Earthseed, which recognizes God as change, that everything you change changes you, that life means rolling with change, and that mankind’s destiny is in the stars. When her community is overrun, she ends up on the road with other survivors, building a tribe of Earthseed followers as they go.

It’s an interesting story, though in my opinion–and I say this as a big fan–it’s not Butler’s finest. If you disagree with me, you’re not alone. It’s a beloved novel, has a big following, and was nominated in 1994 for Nebula Award for Best Novel. Butler followed up to it with PARABLE OF THE TALENTS, and had planned a third novel, PARABLE OF THE TRICKSTER, though it went unfinished before her death in 2006.

The novel is written as a journal, which is a great deal of the problem for me. Every big dramatic thing that happens is prefaced with, “Last night, something big happened,” which destroys the tension. There’s a lot of lazy writing such as, “He looked at me.” Despite America being a brutal place, Lauren and her tribe don’t really suffer much, they always seem to have money and weapons, and get by. The action sequences are weak, the Earthseed religion isn’t that compelling, and overall the novel, despite its great ideas, falls flat.

I really wanted to like this one as it brought together Butler and a fantastic dystopian premise, and I did enjoy it, but it just didn’t hit the nail on the head for me.

YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY by Christopher J. Koch

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year of living dangerouslyTHE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY by Christopher J. Koch (1978) is a sophisticated story about post-colonial Indonesia, journalism and the driving force of identity, particularly the destructive force of conflicting identities.

Guy Hamilton is an Australian correspondent new to the country, which is ruled by the charismatic President Sukarno. Guy’s predecessor left the country without passing on contacts, which leaves him struggling to get stories. Billy Kwan, a Chinese-Australian dwarf cameraman, feeds Guy his first big story, which launches his career and establishes their friendship. Guy is extremely practical, obsessed with his career, and romanticizes women and the British Empire. Kwan is very romantic, moral, intellectual and philosophical, and offers an extremely interesting character constantly spouting challenging ideas. Kwan looks up to Guy as a kindred spirit but also what he could have been, but is ultimately disappointed when Guy fails his moral standards. At the crux of this is Jill, a bright but fragile spirit who works as an assistant at the British embassy, a friend of Kwan’s with whom Guy develops a romantic relationship.

The story of their triangle unfolds with passion but without moralizing, which is done by the characters and not by the author and his stand-in narrator, another journalist who recalls the events of 1965. The story of Sukarno and Indonesia is told in a similar way. Sukarno is a fascinating figure in the story, the nationalist leader who fought the Japanese occupation during WW2 and declared independence in its aftermath. An autocrat, he united an archipelago of islands, languages, ethnicities, cultures and religions to create a nation. Nonetheless, the country remained in turmoil, balanced precariously between the left-wing communist organization PKI and the right-wing Muslim military. As the PKI grew stronger and bolder, a confrontation looms that ignites a soft coup and genocide across the country. Kwan’s conflict with Guy, Guy’s conflict with Jill, and Kwan’s internal conflict all mirror the conflicts of identity within Sukarno and his Indonesia.

In short, THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY is a brilliant novel about identity and history. Highly recommended. The film adaptation (1982) by Peter Weir, starring Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hunt, is similarly excellent. It cuts some corners on the novel but is otherwise an excellent adaptation, though it focuses more on the relationship between Guy and Jill. Below is the trailer.

SHAH OF SHAHS by Ryszard Kapuscinski

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shahRyszard Kapuscinski was a legendary Polish journalist who chronicled various wars, coups and revolutions that rocked Latin America and Africa during the ’60s and ’70s. His books transcend traditional journalism into the realm of literature, resulting in him being labeled a “mythographer,” able to capture the zeitgeist of great change.

Years ago, I enjoyed reading THE EMPEROR, in which Kapuscinski talked to former palace officials after the tall of the Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, that country’s last ruler in a dynasty going back 3,000 years–legend has it to King Solomon. These conversations reconstructed life under the Emperor, particularly in the palace. In my view, it provided a remarkable look inside a bloated, decaying and capricious regime incompatible with the modern world.

More recently, I read SHAH OF SHAHS, in which Kapuscinski chronicles the brutality and fall of the Shah of Iran. The result is a compelling document of ordinary Iranians talking about life under the Shah and the hopes of the revolution that toppled him.

Kapuscinski’s books are long on zeitgeist and short on breadth and facts, providing a deep, emotional and literary take on history, and often cutting to the bone about the primary movers in great world events. SHAH OF SHAHS is a fascinating study of tyranny and revolution through the lens of Iranian culture.

Check out Kapuscinski’s work if you’re interested in a different way of looking a history.

THE IRON HEEL By Jack London

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the iron heel by jack londonThis is Jack London like you’ve never read him. In THE IRON HEEL, his sweeping Dystopian novel published in 1908, a young upper class woman meets a socialist firebrand and becomes entwined in his destiny to play a part in a bloody class war fought on the streets of America.

Labor, pushed deep into poverty and fed up with its share of the produce of capital, rebels against the capitalist class and elects socialists to Congress, which dispels with the trappings of democracy and forms a fascist government in order to hold onto its vast wealth and subvert labor to slavery. So the socialists, who believe the answer is to bring ownership of capital to everyone, begin their long revolution … The result is a novel George Orwell called a “truer prophecy of the future than either BRAVE NEW WORLD or THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME,” and according to Orwell’s biographer influenced his writing of 1984.

London was remarkably prescient about some things–the capitalists trump up a war to eliminate their capital surplus (the pretext of which is the Germans launching a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor) to start a world war in 1913, a Great Depression occurs, the press and church attack people who speak out on behalf of social justice, fascism takes root, and so on. He also explains the never ending class struggle in easily understandable terms that are relevant today.

While most Americans value socialism for certain things (Social Security, Medicare, post office, police, firefighters, etc.), they have a cultural distaste for it, and so the modern reader will likely not embrace the socialist solution proposed in the novel, seeing as how it worked out for the Soviet Union. And yet this was written long before the New Deal, progressive taxation, Social Security, the GI Bill, legal unionization/striking, Sherman Antitrust Act and so on helped to build what was once a strong middle class in America–a system that attempted to balance capitalism, which produces innovation, growth and opportunity, and socialism, which reduces cost for certain services, protects labor from capitalism’s excesses, and tries to make the system as a whole serve the needs of the many, not just the few.

Reading THE IRON HEEL, therefore, may feel anachronistic with its stark choices of all capitalism or all socialism, but the basic issues involved–a capitalist builds a factory, workers produce goods in the factory, those goods produce a profit, now who gets what share of the profit?–are just as relevant today. Consider, for example, that since 2000, almost all economic gains in America went to capital, and labor got almost no share of the growth, and one can begin to understand growing anger and social unrest in America. Reading THE IRON HEEL, we also see how the system responds when it’s threatened–with violence, just as today. London’s America portrays a living hell in which capital and labor fight a never ending war for power.

the iron heel by jack london Reading THE IRON HEEL, therefore, may feel anachronistic with its stark choices of all capitalism or all socialism, but the basic issues involved–a capitalist builds a factory, workers produce goods in the factory, those goods produce a profit, now who gets what share of the profit?–are just as relevant today. Consider, for example, that since 2000, almost all economic gains in America went to capital, and labor got almost no share of the growth, and one can begin to understand growing anger and social unrest in America. Reading THE IRON HEEL, we also see how the system responds when it’s threatened–with violence, just as today. London’s America portrays a living hell in which capital and labor fight a never ending war for power.

THE IRON HEEL will make you think. Guaranteed. It will make you think about where America came from, what it might have been, where it might be going. I highly recommend it.