I recently published two new Alternate History books, both set in my Snapshot universe. The first is called:
The King's Fifth. It puts a sort of modern American teenager into the cut-throat politics of independent conquistador kingdoms set up in the ruins of the Aztec empire, with that already deadly game overlaid by a great power competition between the US and Tsarist Russia, each of them entering the conquistador reality from their own realities. It's a unique and fun setting with a lot of intrigue and some interesting characters. I believe I workshopped a very early version of this in the Writers' Forum on this site under the name The Galveston Run, I don't know if it is still archived here, but the published version is much improved.
https://www.amazon.com/Kings-Fifth-Snapshot-Novel-ebook/dp/B0CJ8FT6XQ/
James T. Smoot's Cross Time Petting Zoo. The name pretty much sums up what the book is about, though it perhaps suggests a bit more whimsy than the book delivers. I take a whimsical concept--a fly-by-night petting zoo that flies by night between realities, but otherwise play it pretty straight--well, other than the POV character in two-thirds of the stories being the guy who shovels crap out of the animal cages. The zoo has adventures in a pirate city in the Great Central Swamp of an Africa still inhabited by dinosaurs and fought over by Nazis in the north and British and Americans in the south, with the center in limbo, almost too hot for humans, in a stretched Madagascar where lemurs have developed into wolf and elephant-like forms, and in a South America which has remained an island continent filled with animals even stranger than Australia's weird creatures. The zoo gets involved in the politics of these weird places and have (in my opinion), some interesting adventures.
https://www.amazon.com/James-Smoots-Cross-Time-Petting-ebook/dp/B0CGWQWCYQ/
Those two books are the first two in what I hope to make a four-book publishing burst, with four books hopefully published between late August and mid-October of this year. Next up will be Through the Wild Gate, which is vaguely like a cross between SM Stirling's Conquistador and Harry Turtledove's A Different Flesh. Twenty-one of the wealthiest, most powerful families in the world secretly control Gates to an alternate reality North America where primitive humans, more different from us than Neandertals, arrived half a million years ago, but modern humans never arrived. The Gate families use the Wild (as they call it) as an unspoiled playground and potential refuge from threats from our reality--nuclear or biological war, pollution, whatever. The primitive humans, called Mangi, can interbreed with modern humans, though unlike Neandertals, those off-spring are sterile.
One of the most powerful of the Gate family leaders raised his half-Mangi daughter as a human child, sending her to the best private schools and then to Harvard where she graduates with a near-perfect GPA. Then she ends up in the Wild, naked and unarmed, but determined to find out who put her there and kill them. This one should be out in maybe a week.
The fourth book is a little further out. I'll post more about it when it gets less tentative.
The King's Fifth. It puts a sort of modern American teenager into the cut-throat politics of independent conquistador kingdoms set up in the ruins of the Aztec empire, with that already deadly game overlaid by a great power competition between the US and Tsarist Russia, each of them entering the conquistador reality from their own realities. It's a unique and fun setting with a lot of intrigue and some interesting characters. I believe I workshopped a very early version of this in the Writers' Forum on this site under the name The Galveston Run, I don't know if it is still archived here, but the published version is much improved.
https://www.amazon.com/Kings-Fifth-Snapshot-Novel-ebook/dp/B0CJ8FT6XQ/
James T. Smoot's Cross Time Petting Zoo. The name pretty much sums up what the book is about, though it perhaps suggests a bit more whimsy than the book delivers. I take a whimsical concept--a fly-by-night petting zoo that flies by night between realities, but otherwise play it pretty straight--well, other than the POV character in two-thirds of the stories being the guy who shovels crap out of the animal cages. The zoo has adventures in a pirate city in the Great Central Swamp of an Africa still inhabited by dinosaurs and fought over by Nazis in the north and British and Americans in the south, with the center in limbo, almost too hot for humans, in a stretched Madagascar where lemurs have developed into wolf and elephant-like forms, and in a South America which has remained an island continent filled with animals even stranger than Australia's weird creatures. The zoo gets involved in the politics of these weird places and have (in my opinion), some interesting adventures.
https://www.amazon.com/James-Smoots-Cross-Time-Petting-ebook/dp/B0CGWQWCYQ/
Those two books are the first two in what I hope to make a four-book publishing burst, with four books hopefully published between late August and mid-October of this year. Next up will be Through the Wild Gate, which is vaguely like a cross between SM Stirling's Conquistador and Harry Turtledove's A Different Flesh. Twenty-one of the wealthiest, most powerful families in the world secretly control Gates to an alternate reality North America where primitive humans, more different from us than Neandertals, arrived half a million years ago, but modern humans never arrived. The Gate families use the Wild (as they call it) as an unspoiled playground and potential refuge from threats from our reality--nuclear or biological war, pollution, whatever. The primitive humans, called Mangi, can interbreed with modern humans, though unlike Neandertals, those off-spring are sterile.
One of the most powerful of the Gate family leaders raised his half-Mangi daughter as a human child, sending her to the best private schools and then to Harvard where she graduates with a near-perfect GPA. Then she ends up in the Wild, naked and unarmed, but determined to find out who put her there and kill them. This one should be out in maybe a week.
The fourth book is a little further out. I'll post more about it when it gets less tentative.