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Sunday, February 10, 2019

Why You Should Read My 12 Books:

My books span all genres, points of view, and settings.

Illyria is historical fiction akin to ancient Rome.

The Emperor's Son Books 1 and 2 are historical fiction akin to ancient China.

Sellsword is historical fiction akin to ancient Japan.

These are all 'alternate' worlds so that they don't have to strictly adhere to what actually happened in history, but their plots are things reflected in real history and what you'd generally expect from the settings they represent.

The Earth's past was a cruel and unforgiving place, and thus these stories are likewise cruel and unforgiving to their characters.  Death, famine plague and war all ride about quite freely and trample over everything the protagonists hold dear, including themselves.  Trying to win some meaning, some value out of that chaos is their struggle and perhaps, by the end, their triumph.

Dead Enders, Choice Givers and Followers and Emulators are a trilogy set in the 'present, real world Japan,' where good and evil aliens come down to visit and allow their few chosen contracted champions of both good and evil humans to duke it out for the fate of the world, unbeknownst to most of the world's inhabitants.  This is my favorite and longest story.  It combines mahou shoujo elements with philosophy, morality, and shonen action.  It has all the goods, featuring characters of all types, who talk to each other about all sorts of things.  I guess that's the benefit of having a full trilogy of books to work with.

Changeling is my paean to racism, where all the hard truths of this world are honestly and openly promoted and discussed.  It's set hundreds of years in the future, after the liberals have mostly gotten their way and taken control over the whole world.  There was just one final line they hadn't crossed until the start of the story, and that was 'mandatory marriage by lottery' in the interests of true equality and perfect diversification of the population.  At which point the racist underground, the last remaining intellectual and spiritual defiers of liberalism, rise up, and with the help of superpowered psychics, prevail, liberate themselves, and install the exact antithesis of liberalism in its place.

Perhaps psychic heroes coming to save us is rather unlikely, but the story's true strength runs deeper than how believable or not it is.  It shows the world as the liberals want to make it -- a dystopia, and then counters it with the world the racists have made for themselves, a utopia, and finishes with the triumph of good over evil, utopia over dystopia, in a love song to hope and humanity's possibilities.  What's important isn't the realism but the emotional journey.  If people were simply convinced that the utopia depicted was indeed better than the dystopia depicted, we could achieve the same result without any psychic powers.

Changeling was originally written as a book within a book, as part of Choice Givers, but I liked it so much I went ahead and finished the rest of it and published it independently.  This is why you'll find the same story in both places.

The Greatest Vision is a more traditional science fiction story.  It's set in the future on Mars, which has been colonized by a diverse and vibrant series of city states, all encompassed by their own climate-controlled 'bubble.'  Each time you leave one bubble and enter another, the entire law code, society and culture changes.  Each bubble is independent from the next, and kids upon high school graduation go on journeys to find the right bubble for them, ala Rasselas.  The reader of course gets to journey with them, a fascinating intellectual and emotional journey showing how important people's environments are to their own growth and wellness.  Of course, all of this is suddenly upset by Earth announcing its intention to colonize Mars with overwhelming numbers and swamp all the unique bubble cultures with just more monotonous Earthlings, and excitement ensues thereby.  This story is kind of fun because it's written in 2nd person, of all things.

The Twin Spires is a serious fantasy epic.  There isn't just one world, the world of Man, but many additional worlds both above and below it, with more or less ability to contact and interact with the realm of Man, all the way up to the realm of Heaven where God the Creator and his first Creation the Angels live.  The story is the vortex that occurs when residents of three different worlds collide -- faeries, elves, and men.  And behind the last surviving high elves fleeing their own plane comes a horde of dark elves, goblins, orcs, etc, known collectively as the 'Darkness,' that already destroyed the elven realm and now has reached the home of men. . .  Can anything or anyone turn back their tide?

Wind was my first book, with a style drastically different from the others.  The world is Earth, but post-apocalypse.  And things changed after the apocalypse, including the return to medieval technology levels, the existence of magic and the proliferation of elemental monsters of all types and magnitudes of strength.  The one thing that didn't change was humanity's love of war, and so the weaker kingdoms of Wind and Water, whose magic power is dwarfed by those of Earth and Fire, must somehow find a way to unite their magic into the fabled element Prismi that is strong enough to resist their aggressors.  Prophecy has it that if the Prince of Wind and the Princess of Water marry with true love in the eternal city of Spa, Prismi will be born, but will it really go that way?

In Another World With 100 Waifus is my take on the isekai genre.  Some things stay the same -- death by truck -- God granting a ridiculous cheat wish -- reincarnating in another world.  But other things are changed, much for the better.  The guy actually gets to have sex with the girls who love him.  He doesn't have to fit in to an antiquated and by-now-far-too-often-repeated fantasy world, he builds his own civilization from scratch.  And best of all, the story isn't about fighting monsters or villains or whatever, but solely and only interpersonal relations, because strength is a redundant and outdated concept in the modern world (if we ever went to war we'd all die in nuclear Armageddon so the whole idea is just ridiculous.)

Rather, the drama surrounding our lives is how to build a happy home, and thus the whole point of this story is building the happiest home imaginable.  If the hero of our isekai can do it, why can't we?  That's the sort of hopeful, fun narrative that might actually be of relevant use to readers in the real world living out real lives today.  It's also my only book written in 1st person, thus radically departing from the styles found in my previous novels.

Spending time with your loved ones can be meaningful too.  After so many books written with wars and the fate of the world at stake, not just by me but seemingly by all authors these days, the laid back atmosphere of 100 Waifus is just the trick.  A cure for the weary feet of isekai travelers who don't want to fight any more goblins for at least one story.

All of my stories feature romance because life without romance is pretty dull, but the one story where romance is at the very heart of things is Sellsword.  It only has two characters, a boy and a girl, and the story is the story of their falling in love.

Between the vastly different writing styles, genres, plots, settings, characters and topics on offer, anyone should be able to find at least one book they can like.  Ideally people should just read them all.  They're all on offer at the bottom of my permapost sidebar, now with proper formatting, so just start with whichever sounds most appealing and try them out.

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