The novel is about Roge Callan, who to escape his father’s despotic claw, changes his name to serve as a sergeant under a banished RangerKnight. They live among former enemies, the Skinweavers, who seek help to find a path out of their barbaric tribal past.

But the benevolent Widow Witches and their sentient Yetis have gone missing, and only someone with Widow Witch blood can find and rescue them. Unbeknownst to Roge, he has the blood and is the League of American Castles’ only option. In a hobbled and sabotaged swiftship called the Drunken Stork, Roge pulls together a small crew of misfits and travels from Mitteleuropa to Russia to the Middle Kingdom. They confront along the way ambushers, pestilence, vicious chimeric predators and titanic storms.

However, Roge is not the only one with problems.

Thousands of dead Han soldiers keep disappearing after battling brutal steppe invaders. Plus, alien-looking outlanders are stalking the Middle Kingdom in powerful skyships no one can match. All the while, court intrigue, well-guarded secrets and backstabbing keep Luminous Emperor Zhong Ren from learning the meaning of his diviner’s mysterious predictions.

The novel includes pictures of the Drunken Stork, maps and a Weir family tree that covers all the generations.

This is what editorial reviewers are saying about THE LAST SKINWEAVER:

The world-building here is intricately done, well thought-out, and believable, with multiple cultures interacting according to their own particular views and needs…The story is full of action, with excitement and danger at every turn, and the main plot unfolds as a series of little events whose relevance and relation to larger events is revealed, bit by bit, as the story goes on. In the end, mysteries that have been hidden since the beginning of the series are revealed, and the epic drama comes full circle and finds a solid and satisfying resolution. — Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader.

Over the course of the novel, Hladky offers prose that’s measured and assured, and his action-packed narrative enhances the story’s enjoyable mix of court intrigue, dirty politics, well-guarded secrets, and backstabbing. Although the story echoes many other dystopian tales (including the almost middle-earth-ish settings), Hladky manages to carve out new territory for himself, constructing a story that is able to stand on its own. His knack for blending the fast-paced lingo of paramilitary thrillers with the intriguing worldbuilding of sci-fi and fantasy keeps the pages flying. Throw in the sharply drawn characters, atmospheric setting, and the roller-coaster pacing, and you’ve got a winner. Readers will be enthralled. – The Prairies Book Review.

The post THE LAST SKINWEAVER — 4th novel in The Book of Ruin series is out first appeared on W.G. Hladky Author.

The reader wrote, “JAYZUS! I wish i were a WOMAN !!!!! THEN I COULD TOO BE THE GREATEST PILOT WHO EVER LIVED IN ALL THE GALAXY!!!!…This book was SO FCKNG BAD, I stopped reading at Page 12 and returned it (sic).”

He was referring to a scene early in the novel where my protagonist, a veteran senior chief, says this about a rookie ranger: “…(She) had shown Weir some of the best piloting he had seen in years. He couldn’t tell her that, for it would fuel her cockiness, but he didn’t want to dampen her spirit…”

While he’s entitled to his opinion, I considered the scene that triggered his bile fairly innocuous. Bewildered, I did some digging. According to his book review platform, he has reviewed 378 books, giving, on average, 1.8 stars. Okay, the guy’s a harsh grader. I’ve had professors like him, but then I looked at his other reviews.

He said this about another novel. “IN MY OPINION, this is just the same old trite bullsht. The wimmins is waaayyyy stronger and smarter than the mens (sic).”

He blasted another book this way. “By reading this I found that the best fighters and scouts in the history of the entire world have always been women. And are women (sic).”

And in another review: “…A WORLD WHERE WOMEN SEEM TO HAVE ALL THE MUSCLES AND BRAINS, and are more soldierly than the crappy Neanderthal men, (sic)…”

And,

“O! M! G! I wish I were a woman!!!! I really need to read more books BY women and ABOUT women!! They hold so many surprises and things I never knew!!! (sic).”

There are more reviews like that.

The reviewer is an older male (like me), and I had two reactions to his words. I disagree with his implied claim that women are incapable of being warriors. In my thirty years policing South Florida streets, I found women cops to be just as tough and smart as men.

I also view his words as evidence of the backlash against women for their progress in filling traditional male roles. The U.S military has opened up combat arms to women. They are fighter pilots, submariners and special ops operators. Females comprise more than sixteen percent of American cops and almost twenty-five percent of Miami-Dade County police officers.

Some have claimed that the collapse of masculine roles in our culture has led to a “hyperbolic male reaction to minuscule improvements to women’s rights.”

I agree with Susan Faludi, who wrote, “(T)he once-valued male attributes of craft, loyalty, and social utility are no longer honored, much less rewarded.”

William Goode, a sociologist, has argued many men view “even small losses of deference, advantages or opportunities (to women) as large threats.”

Many men compensate for their insecurity with toxic masculinity, which emboldens domination, devaluation of women, homophobia and wanton violence.

I got lucky. I found a career that served the greater good through a mutual effort, a beneficial role most men want. However, too few such jobs now exist in our culture, leaving men frustrated and apprehensive. Susan Faludi posed the question our society currently faces in an essay. Will American manhood come down on the side of nurturance or the curled lip and exaggerated snarl of aggrieved aggression?

The post “I wish i were a WOMAN THEN I COULD TOO BE THE GREATEST PILOT WHO EVER LIVED IN ALL THE GALAXY” first appeared on W.G. Hladky Author.

In the Book of Ruin novels, I portray a post-apocalyptic world that emerges from our modernity. I enjoyed speculating about what would be different and familiar, forgotten and remembered. I am surprised, however, about what depictions upset readers. Some have objected to my claim that those living during dystopian times would forget how to make smokeless gunpowder and magazine-loading guns. I laid out my arguments for why I believe this in a past blog. (In my latest novel, RangerKnights, a Teutonic gunsmith, several hundred years after the Flash, finally rediscovers smokeless gunpowder and carbine manufacturing).

A reader recently took issue with another aspect of my worldbuilding – that the English that NATO Americans spoke in Germania evolved into a separate language called American. In my first novel, The Book of Ruin, the break between English and American was not complete but had begun. I slipped in a twisted Easter egg when I wrote that a university and boarding school were nestled inside the English Quarter, so named because the classical language of learning was English. The English Quarter is based on the Latin Quarter. During the Middle Ages, European universities were said to exist in Latin Quarters since professors and students spoke and studied in Latin.

The reader who took issue with me wrote, “Any event originating from the sun that disrupts life on Earth is not likely to alter language sufficiently to be considered a new language.” Although he did not say so, he probably was upset that in the novel RangerKnights, Americans in the United States also no longer spoke English. Instead, they spoke a creole, as different from English as the Haitian tongue is from French. I understand why many living during our relatively stable, modern age see society as resilient. But I see culture, which includes language, as fragile.

All languages evolve. They are never static. We probably would have a hard time understanding the English spoken in Shakespearean England. As a white rookie police officer from the Midwest, I did not always understand the African-American English spoken in Miami-Dade’s innercity. Although all Germans learn in school what is called High German and hear it on TV and radio, regional dialects persist. A German from the northern part of the country traveled to Bavaria. When he checked in at a pension, the clerk talked to him in Bavarian. He said he did not understand her. She replied, “You are in Bavaria now… and people speak Bavarian here! Get used to it!”

An empire’s language can become a lingua franca, a common second tongue that different peoples speak to communicate. Alexander the Great’s conquests made Greek a lingua franca. Roman legions and straight roads pushed Latin to the top of the language heap. Arabic spread far and wide during the Islamic Golden Age. The British and American empires made English the modern lingua franca.

But what happens to a lingua franca when an empire falls, roads crumble, fleets and planes no longer sail and fly, Internet, TV and phone networks permanently crash, and another great power does not fill the vacuum? The lingua franca splinters and mutates in all sorts of ways. This is what happened to Latin after the Roman Empire fell. Latin became French in Gaul, Italian on the Apennine Peninsula, Spanish and Portuguese in Iberia, and Romanian in Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia.

Worldwide empires fell in my novels. A continual series of solar storms destroyed power grids and electronics. Holes in the ozone layer created cancer zones. The world was reduced to city-states and regional startups.

***

I must add a postscript. Two women book reviewers from the United Kingdom took issue with a scene in RangerKnights where a female warrior protagonist wearing a full-body burqa sneaked into an enemy town. After reaching a safe house, the character removed the burqa. She discovered that blood had stained her pants from the pelvis to the knees. “I guess my period started a little early,” the character said, doubling over with laughter.

The scene jarred the reviewers and colored their entire view of the novel. One said the scene was “not at all realistic.” Both reviewers said the book could have benefited from a female editor and beta reader.

My editor is female, and several of my beta readers are women. The scene is based on an actual event described in Ashley’s War, a non-fiction book about the first American women who went through Special Forces training and deployment. Author Gayle Tzemach Lemmon described the incident this way:

“And then she looked down and saw that her pants were soaked in blood from her waist to her knees…And then she burst out in laughter. She had been out there in the field for well over twelve hours and had somehow missed the fact that her period had started hours before.”

 I partnered up with several women during my thirty-year career policing Miami-Dade County. Several told me it was not uncommon for a female cop to approach another to ask if she had any protection because a stressful event, such as a physical confrontation or foot chase, had triggered an early period. One particular partner also said that such incidents, for her, could start a second cycle in the same month on occasion.

The post Like Viruses, Languages Are Forever Evolving first appeared on W.G. Hladky Author.

THE BOOK OF RUIN was the winner in the SCIENCE FICTION category of the 2020 IndieReader Discovery Awards, where undiscovered talent meets people with the power to make a difference. Following find an interview with author W.G. Hladky.

What is the name of the book and when was it published?

THE BOOK OF RUIN, published in 2018.

What’s the book’s first line?

“The skies flashed cosmic white.”

What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch”.

After solar storms plunged the world into a Second Dark Age, descendants of American soldiers trapped in Germania defend the last NATO outpost. Mysterious people called the Vucari emerge from the Asiatic Steppes. NATO sends Senior Chief Loveboy Weir and a team of rangers to investigate.

Traveling in anti-gravity “skimmers,” they visit the beautiful city-state of New Reykjavik, mountains where giant eagles are used to hunt enemies, and a floating monastery where monks protect the Book of Ruin. They also encounter Vladimir the Resurrected, the Vucari’s warrior prince, who claims to want peace but leaves devastation wherever he goes. Weir struggles to convince NATO not to trust Vladimir. While politicians and clerics make backroom deals to appease Vladimir, Weir and his friends prepare for war they fear is coming.

What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event?

While living in Germany many years ago, I constantly drove by medieval castles, ruins of Middle Age fortresses, and well-preserved medieval towns that feudal knights time-warped to the present would feel comfortable visiting. And occasionally, I would pass a Fernsehturm, a German TV tower. They are different from those in America. The most famous one is the twelve-hundred-foot tall Fernsehturm in Berlin. However, not all are located in the cities; many dot the countryside. They are reinforced concrete spires that support spherical or cylinder-shaped structures just below upward thrusting antennas. These structures have multiple floors and elevators, and many contain restaurants.

Conditioned to seeing so many medieval ruins, I at times saw the Fernsehturms not as modern structures but as just more medieval edifices. When I found myself in that alternative mindset, I rattled the marbles around my head to get back to reality. However, the experience got me to wonder; what would become of Fernsehturms if modernity collapses, sending the world into a Dark Age? Would the locals tear them down and quarry their material to build shelters, much like what happened to many Roman structures after the fall of the empire? Would their ground-level foyers become stables for farm animals?  Or would the new nobility and clerics use them as castles, palaces or churches? My novel grew out of those thoughts.

What’s the most distinctive thing about the main character? Who-real or fictional-would you say the character reminds you of?

The main character is a paladin, but not “the lone hero on horseback.” He leads a tight-knit team of warriors, where loyalty and honor bind them tightly together. Sebastian Junger wrote that a soldier’s willingness to die for another “is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire.” That is true in life and in my novel. Such love also is my protagonist’s weakness. Death of loved ones cuts deeply into his soul. Who does my protagonist remind me of? Of every honest cop who I worked with during the cocaine-cowboy days. Policing Miami back then was similar to urban combat.*  And those who stayed by your side while responding to shootings, riots, and fights, and who rushed you to the hospital when injured, forever became your brother or sister. I tried to capture those bonds in my novel.

What’s the main reason someone should really read this book?

To enjoy an adventure story that takes the reader to exotic places filled with interesting characters.

If they made your book into a movie, who would you like to see play the main character(s)?

I based many of my characters on real people I knew, i.e. Dom, BT, and Parker Jones. Maybe Mahershala Ali could play Weir. I view Weir as an everyman doing his duty, much like the Tom Hanks character in Saving Private Ryan. I did base Colonel Eleanor Patterson on how Robin Wright carried herself in the TV series, House of Cards.

When did you first decide to become an author?

I started writing after I found my post-retirement teaching gigs drying up due to the fallout from the Great Recession, leaving me with lots of spare time. Once I started writing science fiction, I found that I enjoyed it.

Is this the first you’ve written?

Fiction, yes. I was a newspaper reporter before I became a police officer, and I wrote reams of reports as a detective. I am also a published poet. [NOTE: The second book in “The Book of Ruin” series is called The Flashfall Sword, published in 2019].

What do you do for work when you’re not writing?

I lectured to police officers around the country how violent encounters change their physiology and psychology, and how these changes help and hinder performance. I have two master’s degrees; one in public administration, where I researched police stress, and another in criminal justice with an emphasis on forensic behavior.

How much time do you generally spend on your writing?

Four hours a day when not interrupted.

What’s the best and the hardest part of being an indie?  

The best part of being an indie is the freedom to experiment with writing styles and plot lines. I also found myself enjoying working with indie editors and publishers. The hardest part is having to publicize the novel myself.

Would you go traditional if a publisher came calling?  If so, why? 

Yes, because a traditional publisher has the tools to promote the book. I enjoy interacting with readers, and the greater the readership, the greater the interactions.

Is there something in particular that motivates you (fame? Fortune?)

Neither fame nor fortune motivates my writing. I am a government retiree receiving what some call an undeserving pension, so I do not need to write to make a living. I enjoyed trawling for ideas while traveling, and have visited most of the places mentioned throughout the novel. By playing around with what-ifs, my writing allows me to alter those places and populate them with interesting characters.

(NOTE: MY EDITOR CURRENTLY IS EDITING “RANGERKNIGHTS,” THE THIRD BOOK IN THE SERIES).

*Those who doubt that claim, read the recently published book, The Year of Dangerous Days: Riots, Refugees, and Cocaine in Miami 1980, by Nicholas Griffin.

The post Indie Reader Author Interview on writing The Book of Ruin first appeared on W.G. Hladky Author.

In my BOOK OF RUIN science-fantasy series, superflares from the sun inundate the world, crashing electronics. Endless solar storms prevent electrical machinery from being repaired. Humans are thrown into a “medieval” dark age.

A magnetic field produced by the Earth’s rotation around its liquid iron core usually protects the planet from solar winds and coronal mass ejections. That is why life on Earth thrived and did not on Mars, which has no magnetic field. However, solar storms at times have broken through this magnetic swaddling, allowing its currents to ravage electrical machinery.

This happened in 1859, 1989 and 2003. In 1859, solar winds tore through the atmosphere to wreak havoc on the world’s telegraph system. “Streams of fire” poured forth from circuits, igniting papers and striking telegraph operators. In addition, telegraph contacts melted, batteries spewed sparks and people living in Havana and Jamaica saw auroras. The disturbance lasted for eleven days. In 1989, a solar storm with the energy of several thousand nuclear explosions jammed radio signals and threw the province of Quebec into a twelve-hour blackout. In 2003, an ejected coronal mass struck Earth, badly damaging South African and Swedish transformers. Radiation alerts redirected aircraft away from the poles. Magnetic and geophysical surveys ceased functioning. The US military canceled a sea mission because communication satellites were disabled.

Scientists believe a powerful superflare could destroy modern electrical and communication grids. “Power plants would go down, substations would go down, transmission lines, cellphone towers, would go down,” Randall Carlson, a cosmological researcher and founder of the Cosmographic Research Institute has said. “There would pretty much be a collapse of the electronic grid system we all depend on…This would mean that large portions of the planet could be plunged into total darkness, with no electricity and no means of communication.”

I knew all this when I wrote my first novel. I wish I knew about Alanna Mitchell’s book THE SPINNING MAGNET. Mitchell points out the Earth’s magnetic poles may be on the verge of flipping, which means the magnetic field will no longer flow north. It will stream south.

Pole reversals have occurred numerous times in Earth’s history. The last switch occurred 780,000 years ago. The change does not occur overnight. The transition can last millenniums. During the transition, solar winds will have a greater impact because the Earth’s magnetic shield is weakened. Deadly solar energy particles will reach humans at spots. Mitchell said she could envision “cancer communes springing up like the leper colonies of old. Or refuges for the radioactively poisoned or for teenagers whose brains the rays have pushed to early dementia. Will suits of stiff black crayon be all the rage?” The crayon she refers to is protective cloth that shields a person from radiation.

The planet also might go from having one set of magnetic poles to many, creating competing magnetic fields that flow in dissimilar directions. The location of a compass will determine where it points. Species that relied on geomagnetism for navigation, such as bees, salmon, whales, and pigeons, would have to evolve to survive.

How would people describe such a life? I introduced multi-magnetic poles in my second novel, THE FLASHFALL SWORD, and continue to explore their impact in my third book, RANGERKNIGHTS. My characters talk about thick-sky days, when sunlight is normal, and thin-sky days when the sun’s radiation burns exposed skin. Cancer colonies exist. Protective cloth is an expensive commodity, and navigators know compasses don’t always point north. At some locations, the needle points southwest; other places, east. Messenger pigeons have evolved to recalibrate their magnetic sensibility to keep track of the various magnetic fields.

I consider myself somewhat scientific clumsy, and as a fiction writer, I am aware that I take liberties with the science. What fascinates me, however, is how such a world would affect commerce, politics, and communities, and despite it all, how courage, loyalty, and love would endure.

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The Eurasian Steppes

Foreign affairs expert Robert Kaplan wrote in his book, The Revenge of Geography, “…while geography does not necessarily determine the future, it does set contours on what is achievable and what isn’t.” British journalist Tim Marshall stated the same theme in his book, Prisoners of Geography. He wrote, “…ideas and…leaders…must all operate within the confines of geography.”

Geographic forces shape our behavior whether we toil during enlightened times or during a dark age. The BOOK OF RUIN series primarily takes place in Europe because the “contours” and “confines” of that continent provide a varied and complex playground to explore. Unlike in North America, European rivers do not meet. They become boundaries, and the trading settlements along their banks grew into capital cities that competed with one another. That’s one reason why Europe, unlike the United States, never unified into a single nation.

The Rhine River – that starts in the Alps and empties into the North Sea – stopped the Romans in France from conquering Germany. Hence, the French speak a Latinized language and the Germans do not. The Rhine, called the Rhenish River in my novels, is the border between the Shadowlands (France) and the NATO realms located in Mitteleuropa (Middle Europe).

On the other hand, Europe’s links to other continents invite invasions. The Eurasian Steppes stretch from Manchuria to Ukraine. The Mongols used the steppes as a highway to invade Russia, the Middle East and Europe. The Vucari in my first novel traveled the same route to attack Teutonic-America.

The Bosporus Strait that separates Europe and Asia is less than half-a-mile wide at its narrowest. The Ottomans easily jumped that waterway on their way to invade Europe. For centuries, the Islamic Ottomans and the Christian Austro-Hungarian Empire duked it out in south-central Europe. In my novels, the Jihadists and the refugees fleeing their terror head for Teutonic-America along the same pathways the Ottomans took. The Europeans turned backed the Ottomans at Vienna in the 16th Century. In my first novel, NATO’s Governor General Lovejoy Weir similarly stopped the Jihadists at Molenreich, a fictionalized place I placed in northwest Hungry.

My third novel in the series, which I am writing now, starts in Andatunisia, which is Tunisia. Although it juts out of Africa into the Mediterranean, Tunisia is more closely linked to European than African history. The Sahara separates Tunisia from most of Africa. Mediterranean trade tightly bound Tunisia and Europe together. After Rome conquered Tunisia after it defeated Carthage, Tunisia became a Roman breadbasket.

Europe is called the Old World because for millenniums it has been a cauldron of historical turmoil. The Americas are called the New World because humans got there late in history. And as soon as humans arrived, the oceans rose, swamping the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, isolating them from what was occurring elsewhere. The rest of the world didn’t return to the Americas until the 15th century.

If planet-wide apocalypse occurs, the Americas again will be isolated from the rest of the world, but not so for Europe. The Eurasian Steppes and the Bosporus Straits will still be there. Tunisia will still be a short-boat ride away from Sicily. Invasions and migrations will continue to ebb and flow in and out of Europe.

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