There’s a plague on the loose. It’s the next story in the Perry Helion saga, The Ceres Plague. Ceres is live on Amazon and you can catch it here.
This is one plague you want to catch — well, the book anyway! Perry will lead you on an adventure from the Bering Strait to Washington D.C. to Alaska and Siberia, chasing down Dr. Taylor Crandee and his crew from the deep state and the mysterious Paracelsus as they concoct an airborne bio weapon that can be targeted to kill even the President.
Steve Konkoly (seen menacingly at left), the major domo, the grand poobah of the Perseid Collapse series — now a Kindle World on Amazon — throws me the tough questions in an interview on his web site. Using bright lights and threatening me with a snow shovel (okay, he just brought the snow shovel in and placed it by the door, but it still was a masterful act of psychological pressure), Steve was able to extract maximum amount of actionable intelligence. Like this nugget, for example.
“I actually teach people how to navigate across oceans with just a sextant, a watch and a book of sight reduction tables. No electrons, no satellites, no app store — wild thought, huh? And it’s actually so easy to do. Gives you a great feeling of self-reliance — like the first time you changed a tire or unhooked a girl’s bra. A rush of satisfaction — “I can definitely do this!”
Just remember, Konkoly always garners the primo stuff. You can’t hold out, he’ll get it out of you. He’s that good.
You can read the whole interview here.
You can get The Borealis Incident, my contribution to the Perseid Collapse Kindle World here.
I’m happy to report that my novella, The Borealis Incident has joined Steve Konkoly’s The Perseid Collapse Kindle World today as Steve’s Kindle World (KW) launched on Amazon. Check out all the titles here.
How did this master inveigle me into his world?
The recruitment began innocuously enough. We were outside a parking garage in Portland, Maine. A mild December night, clear sky, quarter moon. My pal Steve and I had just met with some writing friends and were headed for our respective cars when he let slip that he was about to launch a KW for his Perseid Collapse series. I had read his Perseid Collapse books and I knew about Kindle Worlds. Steve had offhandedly dropped a few morsels of intel about his experience writing two contributions to Blake Crouch’s Wayward Pines KW.
I pressed him for details. He stepped deeper into the shadows, dropping his voice to nearly a whisper. Step right in or I would miss it. That’s how I knew I was probably already in his grip.
And so we stood in the shadows of the garage entrance. Two figures partially shrouded, in conspiratorial tones. A passing police car slowly patrolled. A woman approaching the concrete slabs of the garage favored the far side of the entrance, staying clear of us. Some probably avoided the garage entirely at the sight of a skulking pair.
“I have an idea that fits your Perseid Collapse scenario,” I said.
“Oh, really?” Steve said, his voice flat. “Can you write it in a 20,000- to 25,000-word story?”
With the outline of The Borealis Incident sparking and zapping in my head, I said “Yeah. I think I can.”
The Holidays intervened. I wondered if the conversation had ever really taken place.
Then Steve got back to me in a terse email (so telegraphic I almost suspected it was a code). “I’ve given your name to Sean, the acquisitions guy at Kindle Worlds. Expect contact.”
An email arrived from the Amazon mothership on the west coast (there was no one-time pad or numbers station, in fact, the email was in plain text — curious). When would be good to talk? Sean and I worked out the three-hour difference and spoke on the phone (no voice scrambling, no frequency hopping — what was their game?). The date was Jan. 5.
“Steve said you were ready to start, that’s good,” Sean said with no preamble. “Your novella needs to be 25,000 words and we need it by Jan. 30.”
Static crackled across the continental phone line. I considered my next move.
“Steve said it could be 20,000 words,” I said, testing him.
“Nope. 25,000 minimum.”
Everyone has a number. They may deny it, but deep down, they know. This was Sean’s. I sensed he wouldn’t budge.
“Okay. You’ll get your words,” I said.
The line went dead. I was committed.
What if I didn’t deliver on time? Or didn’t meet Sean’s number? An image hit me of a flash mob — Amazon drones, cocky half-smiles, descending on my house like a radio-controlled 82nd Airborne.
So I set to work.
Then I realized: It’s Steve’s world, I just write in it.
Order The Borealis Incident at Amazon.
Here’s Steve’s blog post highlighting The Borealis Incident.
And like The Perseid Collapse Facebook page for more info and for comments from other readers.
Scientists from the UK, USA and Australia are using a sonar equipped robot sub to measure Antarctic ice shelves from the underside. Will this little robot swim under the Ross ice shelf and find the Atlas Fracture zone? – that thinned area of localized stress that is the perfect place for terrorists to attack to collapse the entire France-sized ice shelf? Probably not, since the Atlas Fracture zone was cooked up primarily for my novel of the same name. But if they do find a major thin ice fracture zone in Antarctica with this thing, I’ll be psyched to read about it!
In the final scenes of my upcoming thriller, The Ceres Plague, Perry Helion has to crash a private party driving a Belaz 7555 mining dump truck (also called a “haul truck”). Not your usual James Bond-type Aston Martin spy sports car. These Belarussian-built trucks are made to work in tough industrial conditions. Though their designers probably never imagined quite what Perry asks one Belaz monster to do.
The Belaz 7555 has a payload capacity of 55 metric tons, or about 3 and a half city buses (if they’d stay in the cargo hopper). And that’s just the cargo, adding in the weight of the truck itself, and we’re tipping the scales at 95 metric tons.
Bond can keep his BMWs and Benz’s. Perry favors the downhill kinetic “oomph” of a fully-loaded Belaz making tracks toward the bad guys.
The final scenes of the next Perry Helion thriller, The Ceres Plague, take place in the struggling Russian Bering Sea settlement, Provideniya. Like some other cities in Russia — and America — Provideniya has seen better days. The end of the Cold War resulted in Provideniya losing a sizeable chunk of its population. Vistas of Providenyia are dominated by the herd of outsized apartment buildings that graze across the city’s hillside. Many of the drab apartment blocks, built during the Soviet era, stand empty and crumbling, giving the town an air of dissolution and fall. Sad for the people who still live there and have to suffer through the brutal winters, but a great locale for the final action sequence of The Ceres Plague.
By the way, the first draft of Ceres is now complete. A few weeks of re-writing, beta reading and editing and The Ceres Plague will be winging its way to readers.
I wonder if any of The Ceres Plague’s future readers will live in Provideniya?
Writers often do research for their books. And while most of that digging is routine — street names, bullet calibers and wine chateaus — it can delve into some wonky, specialized corners. Sometimes this stuff is so arcane that the NY Times hails the science as an exciting new development.
In my upcoming book The Ceres Plague, the next book in the Perry Helion thriller series, the brilliant and twisted microbiologist Dr. Taylor Crandee has fashioned a deadly yet highly targetable superbug called Crandium Donatellus (yes, he named it after himself!). Part of the genius of Crandium stems from Crandee’s ability to manipulate a bacteriological process called CRISPR. The CRISPR defense mechanism allows bacteria to fight off attacking viruses by cutting into and even editing viral DNA. Crandee discovers how to use this technique to target Crandium to attack human DNA in a fiendish variety of ways.
Naturally, CRISPR sounds like a writer’s fantasy. Bacteria would never have so sophisticated a defense, right? In fact, this devious microbial technique actually exists. The NY Times writes about CRISPR in a recent Science News section (“A Powerful New Way toEdit DNA”), hailing it as a possible major tool in microbiology research.
The Times makes no mention of Dr. Crandee or Crandium Donatellus. But I’m sure they’ll catch up soon enough.
Image courtesy National Institutes of Health
Their odd, parabolic shapes loom strange in the treeless tundra of the Arctic. Like alien eyes or movie screens where there are people. Even the name is enigmatic: White Alice. A name that suggests Lewis Carroll and fantastical realms. In the 1950s and 1960s before communications satellites became plentiful, the U.S. military needed a method for keeping the far flung bases in Alaska in touch with the command center at NORAD headquarters and with the Pentagon.
White Alice was the answer. It was a system for scattering radio over the horizon using bizarre curved antennas. The White Alice parabolic antennas rising up from the empty tundra testified to Alaska’s importance as one of the front lines in the Cold War struggle with the Soviets.
The enigmatic White Alice shapes make an appearance in my next Perry Helion thriller, The Ceres Plague. They’re just one of the mysterious remnants of the Cold War that crazed humanity-transforming Dr. Taylor Crandee gets his mitts on in The Ceres Plague.
top photo by TVJ
After reading an excerpt from my upcoming Perry Helion novel The Ceres Plague, Steve Konkoly, a writer friend who also pens thrillers, had a question. “What kind of guns were they?” In the excerpt, the bad guys confronted Perry with just “guns.” No further details given.
For Steve, however, this wasn’t enough. The firearms in Steve’s books almost always carry detailed descriptions: make, model, rate of fire, operational quirks, etc. For example, in a passage from his upcoming novel, Black Flagged Vektor, Steve might have just called a particular weapon a “submachine gun.” But for Steve’s type of thriller, gun specs matter — his readers want to know the details. So Steve made it a Skorpion vz 61, a 7.65 mm, 850-round-per-minute Czech-made submachine gun (video of full auto operation here). The high rate of fire of this compact gun actually becomes a plot point in the passage from Vektor.
I liked Steve’s interest in the details and thought he had the right idea. After all, Perry Helion has been around weapons and military technology for years. Why wouldn’t he know a thing or two about the guns the bad guys had trained on him? So, as a tribute to Steve, I equipped them with Skorpions. Here’s the excerpt:
“Lying astride their path was a submarine. The same sub that had skulked around during the salvage effort. Standing on its glistening hull were three men with Skorpion vz 61 submachine guns trained on the inflatable. A fourth man looked down on them from the conning tower, a semi-automatic pistol clearly visible.
“Perry released the inflatable’s throttles and raised his hands. He looked back and saw Lucy had already followed his lead.”
Right off the bat, The Atlas Fracture is a different thriller. A novel set in Antarctica is a rare creature. And for good reason: Antarctica is a land of extremes. The frozen continent is the coldest, driest, windiest and highest of Earth’s continents. Cold: Even in the Antarctic summer the temperature at the South Pole averages a chilly -15° F. (The action in the Atlas Fracture takes place along the Antarctic coast where the temps are a balmy 30° or 40°F in summer!). Dry: Antarctica is so dry, it is technically a desert. Due to the cold what little snow falls, never melts. Windy: Katabatic winds blowing down the high ice sheets regularly reach hurricane force. High: the continent’s massive ice sheet is an average of one mile thick and sits atop the Antarctic land mass like frosting on a cake.
It is in this distant, dangerous land that DARPA agent Perry Helion must battle a gang of terrorists intent on making use of a unique feature of Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf. If the terrorists succeed, their diabolically ingenious plan will wreak havoc with world weather, freezing Europe and releasing much of Antarctica’s ice sheets into the world’s oceans. In the empty reaches of the frozen continent, Perry can expect no help other than scientist Ellen Kaminev, a tough and lovely young microbiologist who has been tricked into participating in the deceptive Antarctic expedition. Together, Perry and Ellen must outwit the terrorists and derail their twisted plan.
Amazon link: http://viewBook.at/B00BX7FTUU