The Lost: A Charity Fiction Anthology

I don't often push crowdfunding campaigns, mostly because I think they get enough momentum on their own. This one is a bit different, and it is kind of close to my heart. This is about The Lost: A Charity Fiction Anthology. And, eighteen days out from the finish, it is still a few hundred dollars away from its goal. From the campaign page:

The Lost is stories of hope, tragedy, and the people the world turns away from. From a young woman struggling with addiction to a streetwise Santa looking out for his friends, these stories range from literary to magical realism. The Lost is an anthology of stories that confront issues of homelessness and the people our society ignores.

The Lost features a great group of writers who have created daring, elegant stories of loss, redemption, and love.

and (most importantly):

The Lost is a fiction anthology with nine stories about the lives of the people society has forgotten. The proceeds from The Lost will benefit City Harvest, a charity that feeds the hungry. 

Now serving New York City for 30 years, City Harvest (www.cityharvest.org) is the world's first food rescue organization, dedicated to feeding the city’s hungry men, women, and children. This year, City Harvest will collect more than 42 million pounds of excess food from all segments of the food industry, including restaurants, grocers, corporate cafeterias, manufacturers, and farms. This food is then delivered free of charge to some 600 community food programs throughout New York City by a fleet of trucks and bikes. City Harvest helps feed the more than one million New Yorkers that face hunger each year.

Part of the reason that this charity is near and dear to me is because I've been homeless, and I know how you can feel close to that edge again (having been underemployed for a while now) , so I know that the time comes when you need to get help. I've never been one to easily ask for money, unlike some who seem to think it is OK to ask others to pay for things in life like moving expenses or car repairs. Homelessness are people who are in genuine need and who need genuine help, and people like +J.R. Blackwell and +Brennan Taylor of Galileo Games wanting to help warms my heart.

I've seen an ARC of the book, and there's some great fiction to be found in these pages. I'm sure you'll recognize some of the writers:

• Kathryn Watterson: Bumble Bee Brown
• C.J. Malarsky: Burning Ember
• Sarah Newton: Circles and Stars
• K. H. Vaughan: Hell on Wheels
• Megan Engelhardt: Jimmy Got-It Gets It
• Stephen D. Rogers: Magpie
• Meg Jayanth: The Beasts By Their Names
• Peter Woodworth: The End of Hungry Santa
• Shoshana Kessock: The Case of George the Curious

For  $5 you can receive one of the short stories in electronic form. For $10 you can receive the anthology in electronic form. Obviously, you can give more, help more. and that would be a great thing. Never ever give because someone says that you need to, or because you feel that you have to...give because it is the right thing to do.

New From Pagan Publishing - Delta Green: Strange Authorities

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

COSMIC HORROR MEETS TECHNO-THRILLER ESPIONAGE IN ‘DELTA GREEN: STRANGE AUTHORITIES’

Arc Dream Publishing Presents a Collection of the Award-Winning Cthulhu Mythos Horror Fiction of John Scott Tynes

April 18,  2012 — John Scott Tynes merges Lovecraftian cosmic horror with techno-thriller espionage in “Delta Green: Strange Authorities,” now available from Arc Dream Publishing.  Cvr

“Delta Green: Strange Authorities” is a 388-page collection of award-winning Cthulhu Mythos horror fiction. It includes the short stories “The Corn King,” “Final Report,” “My Father’s Son,” and “The Dark Above,” and the Origins Award-winning novel “The Rules of Engagement.”

“Delta Green: Strange Authorities” is available in trade paperback from Amazon.com, Ingram Book Company, and Arc Dream Publishing, and in ebook for Kindle, Nook, iBooks and other devices.

Shane Ivey, editor and president of Arc Dream Publishing, says: “John Scott Tynes’ stories of ‘Delta Green’ are obsidian splinters of fear and beauty. John brings a sense of humanity, of its love and confusion and despair, to the mind-bending terror of the Cthulhu Mythos. These stories have been too hard to find for far too long and I am thrilled to make them available to new readers.”

The sequel to “Strange Authorities,” Dennis Detwiller’s “Delta Green: Through a Glass, Darkly,” is also available in trade paperback and ebook from Arc Dream Publishing.

ABOUT JOHN SCOTT TYNES: John Scott Tynes is a game designer and writer in Seattle. He currently designs Xbox 360 videogames for Microsoft Studios. He was the founder and editor-in-chief of Pagan Publishing and Armitage House and his best-known projects include “Unknown Armies,” “Puppetland,” “Delta Green,” “The Unspeakable Oath,” and “Call of Cthulhu D20.” His film “The Yellow Sign” is available on DVD from Lurker Films.

ABOUT ARC DREAM PUBLISHING: Arc Dream Publishing produces novels and tabletop roleplaying games that have won awards and wide acclaim. Its product lines include “Delta Green,” “The Unspeakable Oath,” “Monsters and Other Childish Things,” “Wild Talents,” and “Godlike.” In 2011 Arc Dream Publishing released the novel “Delta Green: Through a Glass, Darkly,” which continues the tale that began with the stories in “Delta Green: Strange Authorities.”

ABOUT DELTA GREEN: “Delta Green” is a modern setting for H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Delta Green itself is a conspiracy of federal agents, soldiers, intelligence officers, and “friendlies” who secretly and without sanction use the resources of the U.S. government to thwart supernatural horrors that no legitimate agency could face. Delta Green agents slip through the system, manipulating the federal bureaucracy while pushing the darkness back for another day — but often at a shattering personal cost.

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WEB: deltagreen.com
TWITTER: twitter.com/#!/shaneivey
FACEBOOK: facebook.com/deltagreenrpg
DELTA GREEN MAILING LIST: http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/dglist/

Matt Forbeck's Amortals

Last week, after I finally started reading this book, I tweeted that it read like a cross between Robert Heinlein and Rudy Rucker. Now that I have finished the book, I think that I am going to stick to that analogy and broaden it a bit.

This book represents why I like to read Science Fiction. It had a wild energy that drew me into it's world of the future, and the way that Forbeck breathed life into the personalities of his characters kept me interested in the world and the actions of the plot. If Matt Forbeck's Amortals had come out in 1986, I would have been grouping it along side of some of the greats of the cyberpunk movement. I think this is a book that can stand beside Gibson's Neuromancer, Sterling's Islands in the Net, Rucker's Ware novels, or Williams' Hardwired. Anyone who knows me, and knows my tastes, knows that those are some of my favorite science fiction novels and not names that I toss around lightly.

Amortals takes place within a couple of hundred years from now. The central concept of the novel, and the world, is that the rich and powerful of the world have managed to take advantage of a form of serial immortality where, after death, they are brought back through a form of cloning technology called the Amortal Project. I don't think that the similarity of the name to amoral is unintentional. The ultra-rich, popular celebrities and powerful politicians have all become amortal, meaning that when they die (from some reason or another) they come back in a cloned body that is younger and stronger than they were when they died. Because of the ultra-rich and ultra-powerful having an end run around death and illness, healthcare has lagged behind...because even if an amortal catches a terminal illness they will get better when they come back. The earth of Amortals is classic cyberpunk...a great place if you are rich and powerful, but not so great for everyone else in the world.

Forbeck's eyes for the reader into the world of Amortals is a Secret Service agent named Ronan Dooley. Dooley has lived for nearly two-hundred years, and was the first amortal. Dooley is the only amortal who is not a part of rich and powerful, but he was given amortality for giving his life to save a president...and because the Amortal Project needed a heroic poster child to get the funding and governmental approval they wanted.

The action of the book starts with Dooley "waking up" from the dead and given a special murder case to solve...his own. This draws Dooley into a web of crime, political intrigue, and amortality that reveals shadowy goings on behind the scenes, and reveals dark secrets of the amortality process itself.

Now, I don't want to give much more than that because this novel is every much a thriller, and a big part of the driving force of the plot is the slow reveal of what is secretly going on behind the scenes of politics and the Amortal Project. This book was a page turner as I read it and more than a couple of night's worth of sleep were "ruined" because I needed to read "just one more chapter" of the book before bed. I can't, however, recommend this strongly enough. I do admit to knowing the author through professional circles, we have met a few times through role-playing game designer events over the years, but that did not impact my review of this book.

If you like noirish science fiction novels, or really even mystery fiction and you're willing to put up with some science, I suggest tracking down a copy of this novel  (there's a publisher's link at the top of this review as well) for yourself. I enjoyed it thoroughly and want others to do the same.