At last! Something substantive to show for a month’s worth of unremitting labor! Today I finally got the first book in the Fire-Rider series posted on Amazon.
WAHOO!
How d’you like the cover? It was designed by artist Gary Bennett, who was art director at Arizona Highways magazine during its glory days, when I also had the privilege of working there for a short time.
FireRider‘s action takes place 1900 years after the fall of the American republic and its many imitators, allies, and enemies worldwide. A period of global warming flooded coastal cities and island nations, spread havoc and famine, and culminated in a series of global pandemics. The result was a world-wide population collapse that left humanity with too few of the highly educated workers needed to sustain its technological apogee. A swift climatic reversal gave way to a harsh ice age and foreclosed any possibility of reviving the human race’s former technological glory.
The survivors live during a postliterate, post-industrial, post-technological dark age that will come to be known as the Great Lacuna. Rival Espanyo and Hengliss cultures alike survive in agrarian, feudalistic cultures loyal only to local warlords and overlords. Chronic warfare dominates the cultural landscape.
The stories related in the saga of Kaybrel Fire-Rider, Kubna (“warlord”) of Moor Lek, were gathered during his time by the wandering scholar Hapa Cottrite, one of the few literate men of the Great Lacuna. Some 3700 years later, a crew of herders found a cache of crumbling documents hidden in a cave where they had taken shelter from a storm. These were the remains of the Cottrite Codex, a collection of arcana and journal entries penned by Cottrite himself. The Fire-Rider epic is a fragment of that precious trove, translated and narrated by the famed storyteller Estabanya Estabanya Marcanda do Tilár i Robintál do Nomanto Berdo of the Methgoan Academy of Written and Oral Performance.
A Gift for the Kubna joins the allied raiding parties of Okan and A’o before the burning city of Roksan, a major Espanyo stronghold that the Hengliss allies have defeated and sacked. It tells the story of how Kaybrel, the powerful and dangerous governor of an Okan province called Moor Lek, came into possession of the orphaned Tavio Ombertín and why he decided to take the youth under his protection.
This is going to be an awesome saga. Don’t miss the first installment! And please: be sure to tell your friends on Twitter, Facebook, and waypoints. You’ll love it.
That cover is awesome!!
wooHOO! Thanks! Tell your friends on Twitter & FB! 😀