Deborah's Journal

My latest anthology, from Book View Cafe!
From the age of steam and the heirs of Dr. Frankenstein to the asteroid belt to the halls of Miskatonic University, the writers at Book View Café have concocted a beakerful of quaint, dangerous, sexy, clueless, genius, insane scientists, their assistants (sometimes equally if not even more deranged, not to mention bizarre), friends, test subjects, and adversaries.



You can download a sample from the http://bookviewcafe.com/bookstore/book/mad-science-cafe/BVC  bookstore, too. This anthology includes both original and reprint stories and is available as mobi and epub formats, so you can download the version that's right for your ereader. Best of all, because BVC is an author's publishing cooperative, 95% of the price goes to the authors themselves.

I find much of steampunk dreary and uninspiring. I guess I'm not into gadgetry. But I do like math and music. This one, with its fiddle-playing airship pilot, definitely has me intrigued.

Dirigibles. Glass cutlasses. Automatons. Mad scientists. A world ravaged by plague and zombies. And behind it all, a single, impossible, irrational number.

Book View Cafe member Steven Harper is pleased to announce that THE DOOMSDAY VAULT: A NOVEL OF THE CLOCKWORK EMPIRE has arrived in brick-and-mortar stores everywhere, and is also available for the Kindle at Amazon.

Steven says, "It started with the THX noise. It's that weird swoopy noise they used to play at the beginning of movies. My son Aran is autistic, and the noise causes him active pain. (Autists often process physical sensations differently than neuro-typical people do.) As a result, I looked into the science of sound, and I learned how the square root of two rules music with an iron and irrational fist.

"And then characters started forming. A teenaged boy with perfect pitch who lives on an airship which is attacked by pirates. A young woman who owns a mechanical cat and desperately wants to re-enter a society that snubbed her."

Here's the skinny: In a clockwork Brittania, Alice's prospects are slim. At 21, her age and her unladylike interest in automatons have sealed her fate as an undesirable marriage prospect. But a devastating plague sends Alice off in a direction beyond the pale-towards a clandestine organization, mad inventors, life-altering secrets, and into the arms of an intrepid fiddle-playing airship pilot.

Steven's first foray into this genre was writing a novella for BVC's original steampunk anthology THE SHADOW CONSPIRACY (still available at http://www.bookviewcafe.com). He had so much fun with the genre, he couldn't stop and decided to write an entire series. He titled it The Clockwork Empire, and Roc (a division of Penguin/Putnam/NAL) is publishing it. THE DOOMSDAY VAULT is the first book in the series.


THE DOOMSDAY VAULT goes on sale November 1.