Stephen Hunt's Blog

There’s a Kickstarter for the new Crown & Dragon skirmish wargame rules extension, an add-on to the original Savage Worlds Crown & Dragon RPG – the role-playing game based on Stephen Hunt’s Triple Realm duology.

That is to say, the fantasy/steampunk novels For the Crown and the Dragon, and The Fortress in the Frost.

Think Sharpe’s Company, but with dollops of extra magic, steam tanks, airships, and the like – the original ‘flintlock fantasy’ novels, accept no substitutes.

The game has now broken its funding cap, so if you want a copy, get yourself over to https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2036759092/crown-and-dragon-skirmish/description

For the Crown and the Dragon, the wargame?

Well, my new science fiction adventure, ‘Voyage of the Void Lost‘ has launched a month earlier than it’s pre-order date – so you can order it, like, today!

It’s available in e-book, paperback, and hardback around the world, including the UK, USA, Canada, and Australia.

It looks like those sneaky rascals at Amazon have jumped the gun again, as they are wont to do – but don’t worry, I’m told the Green Nebula publishing types are scurrying around to bring forward the date, now, at all the other bookstores as well – so should be available everywhere early next week.

Well, Jeff has to pay for his space program, somehow.

Here’s the blurb for the book:

When Captain Lana Fiveworlds seizes on a lucrative contract to fly a rough-and-ready bunch of grave robbers between the worlds of long-extinct civilisations, she’s expecting a nice easy ride for her misfit crew on board the starship Gravity Rose.

After all, those unlucky perished alien species died of climate change, atomic wars, comet strikes, plagues, and mass solar flare ejections thousands, if not millions of years ago.

So, what can go wrong? Plunder a few failed planets for priceless abandoned antiques and lost technologies and make out like an interstellar bandit!

Sadly, the karma of the universe has other ideas – and easy, it surely ain’t. When their troubles slowly mount, Lana, Calder, Zeno, and the other crew members battle for far more than their lives. The ultimate cost could be more than the captain – or her dear friends and family – can bear.

Voyage of the Void Lost launches – universal joy and peace to greet new novel?

Imagine the scene in the AlienWare/Dell UK boardroom. You’ve got a pretty slick gaming computer setup, over-priced as F%&*^, but slick, nevertheless.

The pandemic-fuelled run on computers has helped you deliver strong financial results, so how to further boost the bottom line and justify those big-buck salaries?

Bob from Finance pipes up. “Hey, I know, let’s shave a few pennies on deliveries. Rather than use FedEx, UPS or some relatively expensive competent Titan-sized logistics giant, let’s outsource in the UK to some cheap-as-chips minnows with a reputation for delivery quality that leaves a hot-mess of complaints in their wake.”

Best 90 cents you ever saved on those £3000/$6000 high-end gaming rigs you make?

Well, not really. I stuck in a couple of orders with AlienWare, Dell’s gaming computer brand recently.

One for a monitor, one for a crazy-expensive new PC rig. It’s the kind of money I would normally only justifying splashing on a second-hand car (yeah, I’m cheap – and an author – and there’s a reason ‘starving’ and ‘artist’ go together like Salt and Pepper).

I certainly wouldn’t spend such dosh on myself for a PC.

But my autistic son recently graduated college top of his course, straight distinctions. That didn’t come naturally to him. He bust a gut working every hour God sends to achieve this. I’m as proud as ^%%&* punch, and I wanted to show him this with more than just words. I wanted to drop his dream set-up in front of him, and watch his face light up.

The main rig was going to take between six weeks to two months to turn up (a fact only highlighted by AlienWare after you have made the order, I should point out).

But what about the expensive monitor from AlienWare, made as a separate order and an afterthought?

Seconds after hitting the ‘buy’ button, I noticed Dell’s auto-address lookup function had stuck the wrong letter at the end of my postcode.

I immediately contacted AlienWare/Dell and pointed this out, only to be told “I sincerely regret that we are unable to change the address as the order is currently in the production stage.”

Wow, what a flexible system, that doesn’t allow AlienWare to change their error a few seconds after you submit an order.

What, are Dell’s orders carved in granite tablets by calligraphic-trained Zen monks in a temple high in the Himalayas. Or, you know, put into a computer system’s database, and able to be modified using a piece of 21st century high-technology called a ‘keyboard’?

Of course – you know what’s coming next – the AlienWare monitor immediately went missing during delivery – claimed delivered to somewhere (just not my son).

I never even saw a delivery van, despite waiting in all day and working by the front window, nervously tracking the supposed process via an online BPO tracking system that looks like it was designed to run on an Amstrad green-screen terminal.

Oddly, BPO’s awful screen never showed a ‘delivered’ status at the end of the day, just a line that read something like ‘delivery not made, delivery reschedule not possible’.

Dell’s own control panel, meanwhile shows the total lie: ‘delivered.’

Well, perhaps that’s my money delivered into Dell’s bank account for an imaginary product. I don’t know if this is legally fraud, but if it isn’t, it should be.

Checking the web, I see there are hundreds of stories like mine, complaining about sub-sub-sub-sub contracting via a firm called BPO, Dell orders missing, Alienware orders stolen, Dell orders delivered months late after day’s worth of painful, stressful effort by frustrated customers.

AlienWare/Dell isn’t a PC firm anymore, they are a clown-car manufacturer.

But the one good thing about that £3000 order for the gaming rig taking two months to wind its way to me?

When you see AlienWare spitting in the soup for the starter, you just cancel the main course. Hey, when someone shows you who they really are, believe them!

My son’s still going to get a dream set-up gaming PC. It just won’t be from AlienWare, anymore.

Buying premium from AlienWare is like dropping £5000 on a Rolex, and having the salesperson stamp on the time-piece, drag it through some dog-do-do on the floor, wrap it in some used fish-and-chips-paper, then throw it over your fence into your garden and hope it somehow re-unites with you through the force of hope and will, alone.

Avoid Dell.

Avoid AlienWare like the plague.

Irony by Dell: showing a lady in a wheelchair in your promo images, while treating your real disabled customers like %$%&^

[Trigger warning: Mild Loki TV series spoilers, ahead]

When I was younger I possessed a very strong mischievous streak. Like the time I dug a man-trap in the garden and ended up breaking my father’s ankle when he fell through the homemade camo cover. Or creating a bath filled with perfume from dozens of very expensive French bottles – then wondering why my mother went wiggy. Or convincing the kids in the street that it would be a fine idea to hide chuckling in the coal cellar for the best part of a day until all of our parents called the police and started a man-hunt. 

But life, particularly the poker-faced greyness of corporate work, rather knocked that particular stuffing out of me. It wasn’t long until I discovered that out-there humour and practical jokes in the 9-to-6 existence is digging up more snakes than you can kill, as far as the future shine of your career is concerned.

Thus it was when Disney Plus launched their new Loki TV series, I was quite interested to see how the god of mischief made out in his first MCU television spectacular – a small touch of self-identification. Although I like to think my murderous, psychopathic tendencies are fairly well-held in check (although it has to be said, for those with my Viking heritage, you can never be too sure).

The new TV series with Thomas Hiddleston is obviously seeking to temper the God of Bad Boys, as well. The version of Loki ripped out of the multiverse is the early one prior to the vague redemptive arc of having to fight alongside Thor against Thanos, etc. And to raise the stakes still further, it looks like there’s a full-out Dark Side version of Loki at loose in the multiverse, doing some real evil – and there’s some Stainless Steel Rat-style set-a-thief-to-catch-a-thief action coming up.

I expect a fresh redemptive arc in this season, as we ask what it means to be good, bad, or in-between, and how we choose to arrive there.

Poor Loki. I expect his mischievous streak will be well-tamed by the end of this journey.

He’ll never again know the joy of using a lost key to get into a particularly toxic company director boss’s office, then shifting a few folders and books around the shelves, to convince the paranoid %$%%^&er that their corporate rivals really are spying on them.

Like I said, for those with Viking heritage, you can never be too sure.

It looks like the Fox Channel is shutting down in the UK, with most of its content being yanked from Sky and getting dumped instead into Disney Plus.

This is a personal windfall for me – Sky was too expensive for a humble starving author, but I Disney’d up for The Mandalorian. Now, at last, I get to have a look at the Canal+ ‘War of the Worlds’ TV series, shortly about to enter its second season.

This is a contemporary remake of the H. G. Wells novel set in France and the UK. You can tell the French Canal+ input. It’s shot like a duotone and resembles a monochrome film with a blue filter added to it. Also, everyone seems to be married and having an affair with each other before the invasion. Bon feu, bonne mine, c’est la moitié de la vie.

Read the rest of this post at: https://www.patreon.com/posts/feeling-blue-of-51869131

Feeling blue about that alien invasion of Earth?

Just caught up with Jupiter’s Legacy on Netflix, the new TV series based on Mark Millar’s superhero comic book of the same name.

It’s also the first fruit, I understand, of Millarworld (the comic book company Mark set up as his creator-owned line that published Wanted, Chosen, The Unfunnies, Kick-Ass, and War Heroes) after Netflix purchased it outright.

I’ll just put this out there – if Netflix also wants to buy “Huntworld” for £230 million, I’ll happily (a) first create the said entity and then, (b) barter my soul to the company store, so to speak.

I’ve never read the paper series, but the TV series of Jupiter’s Legacy seemed fairly entertaining. It asks the very human question, what would you do if some alien came along and Shazamed! or Greenlanterned you, leaving you with the powers of a Superman or Wonder Woman?

Rule the world? Intervene to stop wars? Improve the economy? Remove all human agency from the equation? Or just run around fighting muggers in your underwear?

It’s the same question asked by Doctor Manhattan and Ozymandias in Watchmen.

One question I do have, is that if all the superheroes in Mark’s world were created by aliens Greenlantern-stylee, where did all the super-villains they face suddenly spring from?

Sadly, I think we are going to have to wait a year or longer until the next season for answers, which will kill much of the momentum of this new series before it even gets going.

While I’m sure Mark cares about this, it is probably notionally caring between sips of a Mai Tai on the beach overlooking his private suite at the Rosewood Bermuda.

Huntworld. Yours for just 96,650 bitcoin.

So, as promised last week, tis time to ponder the next book to be worked on by yours truly.

Here are a few birds that could be popped in the pot and brought to the boil over the next 12-months or so …

A new Sliding Void scifi novel (book #7)… this has the same crew as Hell Fleet, so think a military SF theme.A new Jackelian fantasy/steampunk novel (book #8).The last novel in the Far-called sequence (book #4).A totally new murder-mystery detective novel (a contemporary setting with little in the way of SF elements).The sequel to Empty Beyond the Stars (book #2 in the Songs of Old Sol series).As well as the above five options, there is also finishing Chance Zapman & the Planet of Deadly Doom (my first science fiction comedy book).

I’ve already had a few readers asking for another Jackelian book – I suspect given the weight of numbers in my readership, and where many know me from, this is where my popular vote inhabits … but I’d be interested to hear from you about what you might fancy reading next from me?

You can leave your comments below, thanks.

 

So, it is that time of the year again, when a new Stephen Hunt novel sits in the literary drydock awaiting some minor member of the nobility to come along and crack a bottle of bubbly across her spine, launching said space opera adventure into the crowded market of a million other competitors. None of whom are quite as good, of course.

Yes, Voyage of the Void-Lost is now with my crack team of early readers awaiting the discovery of many horrific typos, continuity errors, and other author nightmares. What do you mean she had green eyes on page 22, and blue eyes on page 323?

This is the sixth book set in the Sliding Void universe, which was my attempt to fill the hole left by the cancellation of all my favourite science fiction TV series, seemingly all at once. You know, Star Trek, Stargate, Firefly, Battlestar et cetera et cetera.

In this new novel, the brave but hapless free-trader crew of the starship Gravity Rose takes on a bunch of failed filter world scavengers as clients and watch in horror as things go from bad to worst. Well, it wouldn’t be any fun if everything went swimmingly, would it?

If you’re one of my Patreons, you have already enjoyed this book as it was being written, and if you are one of the many readers currently sitting out there with preorders booked, then you might be pleased to know that it’s highly likely I’ll be able to launch this bad boy a few months early on the official release date of August this year.

I suspect there won’t be any members of the royalty willing to crack a bottle of Dom Pérignon across Voyage of the Void-Lost. It would probably end up as a rather soggy mess of papier mâché (or sparking Kindle) if they did!

Now, the real question is, which book should I tackle next? So many ideas, so little time.

More on this thorny issue next week.

Voyage of the Void-Lost

Some interesting converging research trends …

First, the more research that is done into the Neanderthals and their level of technology and society, the clearer it becomes that they were the bright, quiet, creative, and more advanced species compared to Homo Sapiens. Neanderthals had art and comparatively advanced artifacts long before we humans. They were out-competed by vanilla humanity when we turned up on the scene – we didn’t directly wipe them out.

Neanderthal’s lived in small family groupings, whereas the more social-minded Homo sapiens would travel mob-handed in aggressive tribes of up to 250-strong. Not only that, early humanity turned their social skills to domesticating wolves and used their critters’ superior tracking abilities to become hyper-successful hunters.

Neanderthal’s primarily lived in Northeastern Europe, which is why many European descended people now have 1-4% of the genomes contributed by Neanderthals – while it is zero to low in the rest of the world.

There’s a second trend in research that now suggests that autism might be an expression of the interplay of our Neanderthal genes – basically a byproduct of integrating two operating systems in the same mind.

It is interesting to speculate that some characteristics of us folks on the autistic spectrum – which may include but are not limited to shyness, less sociability, inability to read social cues, aversion to large groups, gentle less-competitive natures, enhanced creativity, inventiveness – seen in the extreme with individuals like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Bill Gates – are the same characteristics which scientists now believe that the previously much-maligned Neanderthal peoples possessed.

I wonder what a parallel reality looks like where people were 96 per cent Neanderthal and four per cent Homo Sapien. Where Apple Macs won, and PCs lost the race to mass market dominance?

Would it be a kinder, solarpunk world of peace and high-technology, with comparatively little warfare, crime, and high social equality – not to mention mostly dog-free? Maybe Neanderthals would have been cat-people, instead – given felines would have turned up around the grain silos, regardless of genomic vectors?

Fascinating to speculate. And if Bill Gates’ plans to get to net zero through safe fourth-generation nuclear energy end up saving Earth from turning into Hothouse Venus, it might be thanks to the Neanderthal slice of our soul that Homo Sapiens were saved from the worst excesses of their own nature.

PS – you can read more on this topic over at http://franklludwig.com/neanderthal.html.

Mission to Mightadore

Now that I have scored both jabs for my C-word vaccination, I thought I would share some top tips on getting through this process.

Step one. Ignore any Spanish members of your family who believe that Bill Gates has (a) engineered advanced alien-level nanotech technology (b) developed a serious interest in tracking you with it (c) hasn’t realised there’s a pre-existing device carried around with you 24 X 7 which already does a fairly good job of this, anyway.

Step two. Don your best blue Captain America shield T-shirt.

Step three. Visit local vaccination centre, and when the nurse questions why you are wearing a blue Captain America shield T-shirt aged in your mid-fifties – tell her that is never too late to volunteer to take the serum to become a super soldier and fight for world freedom, and American freedom in particular.

Step four. When the nurse questions your sanity and patiently tries to explain that this is the C-word vaccination, and not an experimental Stark Corporation serum developed by Dr. Abraham Erskine, wink at her, and say “sure it is” in your best sarcastic voice.

Step five. Don’t try the patience of the medical staff any further by asking how soon it will be after the jab before you can lift cars and toss them at supervillains.

Step six. Retire gracefully.

I thank you.

Top tips for pain-free vaccination without developing superpowers.