The judging was just completed, and Soulless by Gail Carriger & Tempest Rising by Nicole Peeler both won in the mass market paperback cover design category. Thanks to everyone who was involved in the cover designs, especially Donna Ricci, our model for Alexia Tarabotti & mistress of all things Steampunk Fashion, and Sharon Tancredi, the illustrator for Tempest Rising. Go Team!

But here is the most recent and the giant floating covers crack me up. Enjoy!

Now Jeff, when are you getting your tattoo?

I can’t wait to have all 4 of them lined up on my shelf.

But leave room, Nicole! Sharon is designing a special heart for each book. Next you’ll have to get the fire-and-dagger heart from Tracking the Tempest!

So go to Nicole’s blog and let her know what you think.

Meanwhile, anyone else have or want to have an Orbit tattoo? I particularly think Gail Carriger needs to get the Octopus symbol from the spine of Soulless tattooed on her. And Jesse Bullington, you at least need to get the skull, if not the whole illustration from The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart.

Of course, this from the girl with the Elvish tattoo and a Mike Mignola illustration from Hellboy.

Any more suggestions of great potential tattoos from Orbit books?

The next book in the series is lucky number 7, tentatively titled Bitten in Two. Jaz and her motley crew of vampire hunting/demon slaying/werewolf shooting misfits are in Morocco this time, hunting for a way to evict the evil spirit locked in the back of Jaz’s skull. If you haven’t read this series, it’s all action, ass-kicking, and one hot vampire. No swooning maidens here.

Anyway, back to the shoot. Cast of characters: Tim Hsu, series designer. Michael Turek, fabulous photographer. Renee Kille, patient and hard-working model. Italo Vasquez-Velasquez, stylist of vampire-hunters, assasins, and other bad-ass ladies. And me, art directing everyone (which pretty much entails sticking your nose into everyone’s business). Scene: Some Studios on 28th street, NYC. Props: army issue military knife, thigh holster, revolver, arm gauntlets, hot red dress, lots of gaffers tape.

What’s fun about a series is everyone knows their roles and the tone, and you just get to play. I don’t have the shots back from Michael yet, but we got some great shots. The last few books have been focused very much on Jaz Parks, ass-kicker, but we wanted to refer back to the earlier installments, which were more on the sexy side. So we did a lot of sexy-but-deadly, which is totally Jaz.

Enjoy some behind the scenes shots taken on the trusty iphone:

Reference material – you don’t want to accidentaly take too similar a pose.

Italo & Michael equipping and arming our model.

Tim demonstrating how to hold the knife and look mean.

Michael working his magic.

Checking the shots on the computer.

Tim playing with the props. As opposed to me, who never plays with the weaponry…

(actually from the Bite Marks shoot)

And you think I’m going to tell you?

Well okay I will.  This is the edited version of course.  I have thousands of pages of rough workings but this is the short version.  The meaning of life is this: 42. 

Yes, I appreciate that you already knew that.  As a card-carrying science fiction fan (actually, are there cards you can carry to say you’re a science fiction fan? and where do I get one?) you will have known for many years that the meaning of life, according to the great guru Douglas Adams, is 42. 

The question to the answer, however, is; why?

Why 42? Why not 41? 12? 7?

In order to answer the question to the answer (stay with me guys!) we have to go back in time to the days when the gods walked the Earth, and miscegenated like nobody’s business.  Thus it was, that the Greek god Hermes merged with the Egyptian god Thoth, in a somewhat inexplicable fashion, to become the deity Hermes Trismegistus.  And this divine being (according to various authorities) left behind a library of divine texts, based around a core of forty-two (42!) essential texts.

The forty-two texts of Hermes Trismegistus are one of history’s great legends; and the devotees of the Hermetic sect (who survived into the 20th and possibly the 21st centuries) have long believed that all the answers to all the secrets of existence are to be found there.  Douglas Adams may, possibly, not have known this – but what are the odds on that? He knew; hence 42. 

Various documents allegedly written by Hermes Trismegistus circulated through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and were almost certainly forgeries.  But the myth of ‘thrice-great-Hermes’ burned brightly, and was a great influence on the celebrated Elizabethan scientist John Dee.  Dee was a cartographer, an astronomer, and a magician (what a hyphenate!), and, as well as believing he could talk to angels, he was also a passionate numerologist.  In other words, he believed that numbers contain hidden within them great truths about our existence.

John Dee, I will just mention in a brief aside, is a real historical character much beloved by fantasy writers, including John Crowley and Michael Moorcock; and in Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel 1602 his role in the Elizabethan court is taken over by Dr Stephen Strange.  Along with Aleister Crowley, Dee is one of the most famous occultists of all time.

Enough of the aside; back to numerology. 

Numerology (bear with me,  for this is a rocky  paragraph in turbulent seas) is an ancient discipline which is nowadays regarded as a) bonkers and b) a form of pseudo-mathematics.  Numerologists,  you see,   find patterns in numbers which mean nothing – they are just random patterns, like clouds which look like horses. Whereas mathematicians find patterns in numbers which, erm, do mean something.  The distinction is a fine one; but the trick of modern science and modern mathematics is to favour theories which can predict, and hence can predict rightly or wrongly; and so can be ‘falsified’, in the Karl Popper sense of that word.   With numerology, the pattern is all that matters.

But numerology and mathematics are both driven by the same instinct – a belief, a blind faith – that patterns in numbers are important.  In Pythagorean numerology the name and birth date of an individual are used to divine personality traits about that person. Which is nonsense! (Isn’t it?)  By contrast Paul Dirac discovered a pattern in numbers that amazingly connects gravity and the universe – expressed in an equation that shows that the strength of gravity is inversely proportional to the age of the universe.  And that’s clearly an important discovery! Or is it? Damn, no, it turns out that most scientists regard Dirac’s equation as nonense – as, in fact, numerology. (But are they right, to say he’s wrong? It certainly seems a fishy coincidence to me…)

The fact remains that numerology, hermeticism and magic were the dominant philosophical traditions in the years and centuries when science as we know it was created.  John Dee – magician – was also a pioneer of science.  Nicolaus Copernicus, who revolutionised astronomy by arguing that the Earth goes around the sun and not vice versa, was much influenced by the pagan concept of sun-worship, and invoked Hermes Trismegistus as one of his authorities - since the old Thrice-Great had believed the Sun to be the ‘visible God’, and hence, had  to be at the centre of our universe.   There were, of course, sound scientific reasons for Copernicism to flourish – but in truth, it wasn’t all that much more accurate than the old Ptolemaic hypothesis (Copernicus’s figures were based on the hypothesis that the planets orbit the sun in perfect circles, which in fact they don’t,  they travel in ellipses.) But for many of his contemporaries, the fact that Copernicus was implicitly invoking the great sun god Ra – now that made it a theory worth supporting…

And then there’s Newton. 

I have a great soft spot for the great scientist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, ever since I discovered he was also a celebrated thief-taker and murderer (true!), and then wrote a radio play about him.  But when he wasn’t being a great scientist, or interrogating felons, Newton was engaged in his real passion – alchemy.  His pursuit of the prisca sapienta – the unified theory of the principles of the universe – led him to study all the great occult authorities of the past, including Hermes Trismegistus and all the probably bogus texts attributed to him. This occult exploration was his life’s work; and  Newton’s laws of motion and theory of gravity were, in effect,  just trifling discoveries that occurred to him along the way. 

This side of Newton is usually dismissed by modern commentators – even though his alchemical and quasi-occult writings occupied vastly more of his energy than his purely scientific work.  But the question I would pose is: can you have one, without the other? Would Newton have created a theory of gravity, if he hadn’t been impelled by a passionate, blind belief in the hidden secrets of the universe that were there to be discovered, and which already HAD been discovered?  The 42 books of Hermes Trismegistus are more than just a legend; they are a myth, a dream, an aspiration. 

Or to put it another way: without faith in magic, there might have been no science.

Of course, that was then, and this is now.  Modern science is sane and rational, and there’s no mumbo-jumbo whatsoever going on. 

But is that really true? 

Science is after all getting crazier and crazier.  Like many SF nerds, I was alarmed to read that two scientists have theorised that the failure of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland to create Higgs Bosons is because the boson is abhorrent to Nature, and so at the moment of its creation ripples travel back in time to prevent it becoming created.  (Whilst driving a De Lorean, we might surmise).  This theory is so lunatic that it makes even MY books looks sensible; but it’s not a gag. The two scientists involved have even devised an experiment to test the hypothesis.

Quantum physics is also, of course, an affront to common sense.  Einstein mocked it, and refused to believe God would play dice with the Universe.  It is a theory with such devastating implications that it challenges our every assumption about what reality is, and how it works. 

So there comes at a point at which we have to wonder: bearing in mind that science is stranger than magic, and more fantastic than magic, and was to a very large degree in its early stages created by magicians (or hermeticists, or sun-worshippers) is science merely a more effective and experimentally-confirmed form of magic?

Or to put it another way; the fact that most magic is bunk, doesn’t mean it’s all bunk.  The history of occult philosophy is littered with false hopes and lies and forged documents and self-delusion; but the underlying principles do seem to work. There is a hidden order in things; patterns found in numbers actually do mean something, and can reveal huge truths; and, (according to the formulations of quantum physics)  the impossible can happen, and should happen more often than it does.

All this, I would surmise, Douglas Adams knew, because he was one smart fellow.  Admittedly, when quizzed about his reasons for chosing the  number  42 as the answer to everything, he claimed it was ‘a joke’, a number chosen at random, which he happened to feel was the funniest of the two digit numbers.  This may all  be true; or it may  be a cunning lie he told to conceal his deep reading in Hermetic literature.  We shall never know (though apparently Stephen Fry does know, but is hugging his old friend’s secret to his bosom.)

But I am 100% confident that Adams did intend to obliquely refer to Hermes Trismegistus when he wrote those hallowed numbers ‘42′; for, in the spirit of the great occultists, I am only too happy to believe what I want to believe.   

And the heart of my argument is this:  the  meaning of life (in this particular context) is that, in pursuit of 42 texts that almost certainly didn’t exist, written by a god who didn’t exist, many very obsessive individuals have fumbled their way through lots of wrong and crazy ideas until, through trial and error, some less crazy and more useful  ideas coalesced and evolved.  And thus was created the entire scientific-intellectual fabric of our 21st century society. 

None of this would have happened without the dream, the blind faith, the conviction that everything that could be discovered had been discovered – the myth of the 42 texts.  Practically minded engineers do not seek the truth about the meaning of life; it takes a wild dreamer to do that.  And many of these wild dreamers, I would argue, were inspired by the Myth of 42.

There, that’s the meaning of life done and dusted. 

In my next blog, I shall explain how to build an FTL spaceship and travel through the space to a fertile Earth-like planet populated by sexy aliens who will worship you. 

So keep watching this space….

It didn’t matter.  Godzilla speaks the universal language of butt-kicking, city-stomping action.  I’d seen the movie before, of course.  Several times.  Even if I hadn’t though it would’ve been easy to follow.

That’s something I love about Godzilla flicks.  They don’t need complicated plots to be exciting.  They just need Monster A to fight Monster B until one of them is defeated.  The why is largely unimportant.

This isn’t just true of kaiju films though.  This is true of many stories, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.  I’ll admit that every time I hear someone complain about an action film’s “lack of story” I get a little cheesed off.  It’s an action movie.  Too much story just gets in the way.

Too often a complicated plot is mistaken for a sophisticated plot, but I’ve always believed a story should only have as much plot as is necessary to keep it going.  If an alien spacecraft comes to Earth and decides it needs to absorb Godzilla’s life force to take over the world, I’m cool with that.  I don’t need a complicated explanation why this is true.  I can just play along.  As long as I get to watch Godzilla blast the alien to cosmic dust along the way.

Sometimes, we overthink.  Probably because we’ve been convinced that if you’re not overthinking, you’re underthinking.  But there is a middle ground, I feel.  Something can be thrilling and fun with a very simple story without automatically being stupid.

And then there’s movies like Up and Kung Fu Panda that are incredibly intelligent and superbly crafted.  The characters and their motivations in this films are absolutely essential to the story.  There are subtleties here that pay off in fantastic ways.

Godzilla isn’t subtle.  Nor should he be.  He’s a giant, radioactive lizard who destroys all opponents that get in his way.  That’s what I love about the big lug.  You can call him stupid if you want.  Godzilla cares not for your insults.  He’s too busy saving and / or destroying Tokyo.  Because that’s what he does.

And damned if he isn’t great at it.

The first two parts of Jesse Bullington’s History of the History;

A. Lee Martinez pointing out the ugly truth about fictional protagonists;

Forthcoming covers of the mass market edition of Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold and Tom Holt’s Blonde Bombshell;

And, Nicole Peeler’s blood-curdling rundown of the Shreveport Smackdown between herself and fellow Orbit author Jaye Wells. Including, photos of the chair.

This advice seemed at odds with the example they set, Ardanuy and Dunn both leaping from their seats with canes brandished as soon as Tanzer issued her proclamation. Before I could, as Ardanuy had instructed, follow their lead, both men were swarmed by members of the audience packing truncheons of their own. I stood, resolute in that moment to save my mentors, when something bit my hand and I dropped the pistol Dunn had given me. Staring down in horror, I saw a fat weasel dangling from my palm, blood running down the beast’s greedy throat, and when I moved to tear it away with my free hand I felt tiny, sharp claws settle on my shoulder. I froze.

“Not so fast, Tonkatsu,” A woman’s voice breathed in my left ear, my right snuffled by the wet nose of a second polecat. “I’ve got two more where they came from. Now sit down and enjoy the panel. I think an apologist like you will find it…enlightening.”

I did as I was told, and as soon as I sat I heard a squeaking noise, like a dog’s toy, and the weasel hanging from my hand released me and scuttled away under the chair, pushing the dropped pistol in front of it. The ferret maiden had dragged a chair behind mine, and with her second weasel balanced on my shoulder it was all I could do to keep my scotch-inflated bladder in check. She had the drop on me, and as I watched both Ardanuy and Dunn fall under the onslaught I knew I had failed Grossbart Studies.

Soon Dunn and Ardanuy were tied to chairs and dragged to the front of the room, their faces bloodied, their mouths gagged with fake beards. They did not cry, so I cried for them. Of the thirty or forty revisionists it had taken to bring the two professors down only a dozen were able to walk, and these dragged out their fallen comrades so the moans of the injured and the dying would not disrupt the panel. Then we were reminded to turn off our cell phones, and Rahimi addressed the greatly diminished audience as Tanzer peeled off her false beard.

“Now that the absent members of our panel have joined us we may begin,” said Rahimi, leering at Ardanuy and Dunn. “I will open the discussion with an examination of the Brothers Grossbart’s occasional companion, Al-Gassur Abu-Yateem Thanni ibn Farees. It is, of course, impossible to address Al-Gassur without addressing the emperor Timur the Lame, and it is, of course, impossible to address Timur the Lame without addressing Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine the Great—”

Even through his gag Dunn’s shriek of agony made me dry-heave, the sound one of a wife who has lost her husband, a photographer who has lost his sight, a dog who has lost his genitals, a sound, in short, of absolute suffering. Rahimi did not even flinch as he continued his assault. The pain it brought me paled beside the obvious agony Dunn and Ardanuy suffered, the latter periodically passing out in an attempt to end the misery only to have Rahimi’s revisionist theories slap him awake with their blasphemous stench.

Dewsack, returning from the bar, saw the empty seats beside me and came over. For once I was glad for the distraction of his company. As he sat down he nodded at the ferret maiden keeping me pinned in place with her trained hell-weasels.

“Hello, Dumas. Didn’t know you knew Jamie. He was the semester after you, wrote a wonderful little bit of erotic flash about the future of space, or space in the future, or something. Robots banging refrigerators, that sort of thing. Quite vivid.”

I had written nothing of the sort, but was desperate enough to play along.

“Dumas, is it?” I swallowed, the ferret on my shoulder digging its claws in deeper, teeth that could, given enough time, eviscerate a sofa cushion mere inches from my throat. “Well met. What say you take your marmot off me now? You’ve got the gun…”

“Yes, yes, let the poor boy go,” agreed Dewsack, wrinkling his nose at the creature. “We’re all here for a laugh, what?”

“A laugh,” Dumas said in a tone that was anything but affable, but then the weight of the ferret on my shoulder was lifted. “I’m watching you, Tonkatsu. You mess with Rahimi and Tanzer you mess with me and my carpet sharks.”

“Tonkatsu?” Dewsack licked his lips in a manner that only certain fat men can perfect, a silent prayer to the food gods. “That’s a Japanese pork cutlet, isn’t it?”

Without the deadly weasel at my neck I was able to focus on Rahimi’s lecture, and despite my convictions I found my Judas chin nodding at much of what he was saying. Orientalism was unavoidable in a field such as ours, and should be guarded against. Could we talk about the Brothers Grossbart and not talk about the East? I was no longer sure. When Rahimi concluded with a brilliant series of comparisons to Charlie Chan, Jackie Chan, and Cowboy Curtis from The Pee-Wee Herman Show I found myself on my feet and clapping as loudly as the rest of the revisionists.

Then Tanzer took the podium, her chin still pink from the adhesive she had used to keep her beard in place. I was eager to hear her thoughts but those shameful bare cheeks chafed me, and I found myself wondering if I was an inside beard, and if so, whose? Was I an apologist or a revisionist? Why must I choose?

“The Brothers Grossbart,” Tanzer began, “were sadistic, racist, xenophobic, sexist degenerates.”

A round of applause. I twitched. I could hear Dumas clapping behind me, which meant her hands weren’t on the gun. I twitched again.

“That said, they were products of their time and place, and in the chronicles we often find them voicing interesting views on any number of topics,” Tanzer looked from Ardanuy to Dunn, who had both gone still in their bonds, looking up at her with unabashed interest. “This is why my discussion tonight will focus solely on women in the Grossbart texts, and how gender studies—”

Ardanuy vomited, a foul scotch stew bubbling through the colander of fake beard blocking his mouth, and Dunn tipped his chair in a desperate attempt to headbutt Tanzer. As Rahimi and Tanzer tried to restore order, I twisted around in my seat to address Dewsack and Dumas. The ferret maiden held a weasel in each hand like some deranged zookeeper-turned-gunslinger and my former professor burped.

“Listen,” I said, more to Dumas than the ineffectual Dewsack. “Your camp makes a lot of good points. Really. But they’re killing Ardanuy and Dunn! One’s going to choke on his own puke and the other’s going to have embolism if we don’t get them out of here!”

“You want me to call them a wah-mbulance?” Dumas sneered. “You came here to assassinate Rahimi and Tanzer, plain and simple, and we got the upper hand. That’s how academia works, Tonkatsu—if the scholarship is outdated it gets dumped.”

“They never said anything about assassinating anyone,” I protested, leaving aside what they might have clearly implied. “They told me they wanted to debate, that’s all!”

“With canes and guns?” But Dumas hadn’t put her furs on me again, which was a good sign.

“They’re eccentric! And they know what you revisionists think of their theories, so they came prepared. And look at the result—two against fifty, or however many of you there are. Shouldn’t you let them slit their own throats in a scholarly fashion instead of torturing them to death?”

“Not three against fifty?” Dumas narrowed her eyes at me.

“I’m a research assistant,” I said, straightening my shoulders. “It’s what I do. But I won’t be one forever, and neither will you, if that’s all you are to them.”

She flinched. Dewsack burped again, clearly bored with the resumed lecture and hoping we would spice things up. I hurried on.

“Listen to me, please—if we want to be true scholars we need to hear all sides, we need to examine all the material, not just the scholarship we agree with. When the day comes when you’re doing your own research, writing your own books, don’t you want to look back on the Baton Rouge conference and say I was one of the scholars who heard both sides, who encouraged debate instead of stifling it. Isn’t that what you lot are on about, opening up the debate to include everyone? Please, just look at Dunn and Ardanuy.”

And she did, peering past me at the bound professors—Ardanuy was obviously suffocating, and I think Dunn might have been trying to bite off his own tongue to end it all. Dumas looked back at me and gave the slightest of nods. Then she set the two ferrets at her feet, a second pair emerged from the folds of the coat, and all four began war dancing toward the front of the room. Dewsack nudged me, and I saw he had retrieved Dunn and Ardanuy’s fallen canes. Taking one in each hand, I felt the power of the unbiased scholar course through me.

Dumas’ weasels had reached Dunn and Ardanuy, shimmying up the professors and gnawing at their bonds. I knew that at any moment a revisionist would notice the escape attempt and so it came to pass that I found myself leaping from chair to chair, from row to row, a cane flashing in each hand. I might concede the revisionists a point or two but cracking chins armored only with criminally dishonest fake beards was a rare treat as all eyes turned to me, Tanzer’s lecture trailing off as I bore down on her and Rahimi. The shock of finding an enemy in their midst had initially stayed the audience but now they were rising up to thwart my charge, brass knuckles and blackjacks and clubs falling upon me; at the front of the room Tanzer brandished a glaive and Rahimi a pair of long needles. Before the audience could bring me to earth I saw Ardanuy and Dunn stand, unleashed and spitting out fake beards, and I hurled their canes at them. Neither professor was looking at me yet both snatched their walking sticks out of the air and went to work.

In the ensuing debate I lost four teeth, a fingernail, and the sensation in my legs and left buttock. It was glorious. When Dunn beat the revisionist audience members off me I repaid his previous kindness by delivering a solid kick to the old man’s fruitstand, and when he doubled over I bashed him with a folding chair. Then Ardanuy tackled me, only to have Rahimi leap on his back and bite his ear. Tanzer and Dewsack were locked in mortal combat, Dumas and her hell-weasels were snapping at both sides, and even the rousebirds working the door of the bar entered the fray with bike chains swinging. It was a night of blood, and as the bartender, one John “Cash Money” Gove, hurled bottles of scotch into the melee it became a night of liquor in the ears and broken glass in the feet and few regrets.

The next morning I carpooled back to Tallahassee with Dewsack, my car having been set ablaze after the panel moved the debate outside to the parking lot. Dewsack could not see due to being sprayed in the eyes with ferret urine, and I could not use my legs after Dunn had finally caught up with me and resumed the assault he had begun upon first meeting me in Tallahassee. The result was that Dewsack manned the pedals while I worked the steering wheel and instructed the blinded man on when to brake.

Dunn and Ardanuy have sworn vengeance against me, as have Rahimi and Tanzer, but if we are to strive for objective scholarship we can no more give in to threats than we can to bribes. My detractors may dismiss my approach and methods, they may call me a “popular historian” or, as Rahimi recently put it in a rather tactless article in the Medieval History Journal, a “scholar for dollar,” but the facts speak for themselves, and I stand by my research. In this account, as in my novel, I have striven for accuracy, authenticity, and honesty, which is all a Grossbart could hope for, or, for that matter, a Grossbart scholar.