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.

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.

https://www.successinsightpodcast.com/2019/10/wg-hladky.html

Enjoy

The post My Interview on Success Insight Podcast first appeared on W.G. Hladky Author.