Just in case you missed the Tor.com July 11, 2016, announcement introducing their eBook Club, take note, my friends. The monthly giveaways are fantastic. At the beginning of every month, the gods at Tor offer up some truly outstanding literature. To kick off the program Cixin Liu’s sci-fi epic “The Three Body Problem” was the first free download. The August pick was Jo Walton’s novel “The Just City.” December’s selection was “The Towers of the Sunset” by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.

Have you spotted a pattern yet? Exactly, the eBooks given away by Tor are top notch novels written by highly successful authors. This free eBook club is the real deal. This month’s free eBook is “Off Armageddon Reef” by David Weber.

You have to act quick as each download is offered for a limited time only. This month’s pick is only available for download from January 4th through January 11th.

Interested? You can signup here: Tor.com’s eBook of the Month Club.

(Only people living in the United States and Canada can join due to legal reasons)

Play the Same Games Parzival Conquered to Find Halliday’s Easter Egg

 I recently posted a review of Ernest Cline’s famous novel “Ready Player One” here on Offworlders.  My review focused more on the dark undercurrent ever present in the book. My review purposely glossed over Cline’s celebration of eighties geek culture. The work was such a joy to read that it was easy to forget that the world the characters existed in was a dying world. Real social interaction only happened anonymously online. Existence In Real Life (IRL) sucked, and the only chance the heroes of the tale had to escape this drudgery was to find Halliday’s Easter Egg (see my review here for details on the characters and the plot of the story).

Needless to say, there be spoilers ahead Matey!

Unlike my previous “Ready Player One” post, this time I want to focus on super fun parts of the novel. Specifically, the quests that Percival and the gunters faced in their search for the three gates and the hidden easter egg.

OK, here we go – The Copper Key:

In the invitation to the game Halliday tells players how to win the multi-billion dollar prize:

Three hidden keys open three secret gates
Wherein the errant will be tested for worthy traits
And those with the skill to survive these straits
Will reach The End where the prize awaits

Then there is a Limerick that players need to find the copper key that will open the first gate:

The Copper Key awaits explorers
In a tomb filled with horrors
But you have much to learn
If you hope to earn
A place among the high scorers

To get your hands on the Copper Key, you must beat Acererak the Demi-Lich in two out of three games of Joust. Could you beat the Lich King? Click the image below to try your skill in the online remake of the game hosted at Classic Arcade Games.

Excellent work. You beat the Lich King! When you have the Copper Key you get this single line of text:

What you seek lies hidden in the trash on the deepest level of Daggorath.

Dungeons of Daggorath

This clue leads the gunters to a recreation of James Halliday’s hometown and his RadioShack computer a TRS-80, which we affectionately called a Trash Eighty back in the day. The gunters in the book also knew the slang term for the TS-80. This early system was Halliday’s first computer.  To complete the first gate, you must make it through the game Dungeons of Daggorath, the game that excited Halliday in his youth and got him interested in programming. I did not find an online version of Daggorath, but I did find a mod that you can download and play from Mod DB. I took a stab at it, and I must tell you that this game is impossible if you are accustomed to today’s mainstream gaming titles.

Breezed right through Dungeons of Daggorath despite my cries of woe? Far out! After you complete the dungeon you are given this to chew on:

The captain conceals the Jade Key
in a dwelling long neglected
But you can only blow the whistle
once the trophies are all collected

Ready to blast through the first gate and go after the Jade Key? Whoa, there pardner! You must first complete a Flicksync of the eighties movie Wargames.

 

Only after completing the Flicksync do you get the next key. Easily done, right? After you Complete the Flicksync and have a blast playing the part of Matthew Broderick in the film and delivering all his lines right on queue, you insert the copper key into the gate that appears in a movie poster for “Wargames.” The gate opened you bravely step forward and fall into a star filled abyss.

The Jade Key – A Building Long Neglected – Zork

The building long neglected clue leads you to the text based game Zork I. God, I loved that game and still do to this day. When you play this entirely text based game, you use your imagination in hyper drive.  This quest involves collecting nineteen specific trophies hidden in the Zork landscape. After you complete this endeavor, you can then blow the Captain Crunch whistle that you find in a box of cereal in the neglected white house. Blowing the whistle turns the cereal box prize into the Jade Key.

Never played Zork? Give it a go here online at text adventures by clicking the image below.

You can also download the game from the original publisher here: Infocom.

After completing Zork, gunters acquire the Jade Key and a silver wrapper.

“The moment I said the word ‘unicorn,’ aloud, the wrapper began to fold on its own, there in the palm of my hand. The square piece of foil bent itself in half diagonally, creating a silver triangle. It continued to bend and fold itself into smaller triangles and even smaller diamond shapes until at last, it formed a four-legged figure that then sprouted a tail, a head, and finally, a horn.

The wrapper had folded itself into a silver origami unicorn. One of the most iconic images from Blade Runner.”  -Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

Gunters also get this line of text now: Continue your quest by taking the test.

A direct reference to “Blade Runner” and the Voight-Kampff machine that can determine if you are human or a replicant. Gunters must find an exact recreation of the Tyrell building from “Blade Runner,” and insert the jade key into the replicant tester.

 

After you manage to get inside the second gate, you must beat the Capcom game Black Tiger. Can you beat the game? Give it a shot here on Play Roms by clicking on the image below.

After defeating Black Tiger, gunters get to pick from a selection of giant robot toys. Percival picks  Supaidaman. After you put the selected robot toy in your inventory, you get another clue: A star inside a glowing red circle. The Temples of Syrinx of course! Did you guess that? Good for you!

The Crystal Key

 

In The Temples of Syrinx you find a Les Paul guitar jutting into a rock just like the sword in the stone from Arthurian legend. After the guitar gets pulled from the rock, Parzival plays “Discovery,” a Rush song not surprisingly about a hero that finds a guitar behind a waterfall.

 

After playing the song, another hint:

The first was ringed in red metal
The second, in green stone
The third is clearest crystal
And cannot be unlocked alone

From your knowledge of schoolhouse rock, you deduce that it will take the power of three for the Crystal Key to open the third gate.

After placing the guitar on an alter you get the crystal key and another hint: The letter A, the very same one that adorns the gates to Halliday’s Castle Anorak.

Off to Castle Anorak

A lot happens here (read the book to fill yourself in on all the details). After you get inside the castle, you have to get the high score on Tempest. Try your luck by clicking on the image below:

Easy peasy lemon squeezy, right? Now you need to complete another Flicksync. This time you will be a character in one of my favorites, a recreation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

 

After you ace the Monty Python Flicksync, you must find the hidden room in the Atari 2600 game Adventure. To play online at IGN click the image below.

Congratulations, you have found Halliday’s Easter Egg! Now wasn’t that easy! Here is your hundred bazillion trillion dollars.

What are you going to buy with your newly acquired fortune? Need some time to think about it? Here, listen to this as you ponder the question: Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One Playlist.

Free Anthology of 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

When was the last time you downloaded a free science fiction/fantasy eBook containing works from 120 rising stars bulging at the seams with around 1.1 million words? Never? Well, today is your chance. The Good folks at Bad Menagerie have made available this labor of love containing 230 works from authors eligible for the 2016 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. No fluff here, just razor sharp fiction to cut your teeth on what’s new in the Sci-Fi Fantasy Casbah.

The Campbell anthology was originally the idea of  M. David Blake. David spent an inhuman amount of time and effort pulling together previous editions. When it became apparent that David was not going to produce an edition this year, Kurt Hunt and SL Huang stepped up to the plate to compile this year’s anthology (Stop what you are doing. Stand up and clap. Sit down. The Management thanks you).

As a supporter of all things Sci-Fi and Fantasy, Offworlders offered to act as a mirror for this year’s anthology. Our offer was graciously accepted by Kurt Hunt and SL Huang at Bad Menagerie. Mucho thanks indeed! So, without further ado, pick your flavor below and download your copy today. The download link will expire on March 31, 2016, so don’t do today what you can put off until tomorrow. Err . . . Strike that – Reverse it. Mash the download button now – you know you want to! And remember, your Hugo 2016 nominations are due by 11:59 pm Pacific Daylight Time on Thursday, March 31, 2016. Finished my ballot last night. Whew!

EPUB Format: Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors:

 

MOBI Format: Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors:

Queue the Download Music…

Ok, unless you are trapped in a cave somewhere with a 30K baud modem, your file will in all probability download in a blink of an eye. You may need to use some imagination here.

 

Sci-Fi Web Serial “Kulcin’s Law” Now a Novelette.

From Europa With Love started as a one-page entry for a WattPad writing contest. After the competition, the story gained new life as a serialized story on Offworlders.com under the name Kulcin’s Law. The serial is still popular on the site with currently over thirteen thousand views. People wanted more so Dave rewrote the short serialized fiction and beefed it up into the novelette form now available for download here on Offworlders.com.

Dave is a fantastic Sci-Fi author known for his great characters and insightful stories. In addition to “From Europa With Love,” and the novella “November Seed,” Dave is working on the highly anticipated novel “Silversides.” In the upcoming book an advance guard of six cryogenetic modified humans, known as Silversides, will be sent to Gliese 581 g to scout the planet before an Earth invasion of Gliese 581 g begins.

The novella “From Europa With Love” is a great alien contact story wherein Kulcin, a spaceship pilot for a deep-space mining operation, crash lands on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, attempting to rescue a team of exoBiologists. After the rough landing on Europa, Kulcin makes contact with an entity like none ever seen before. Enter Captain Belle Power, the female pilot in charge of rescuing Kulcin from Europa after his rescue mission goes south. Together with the stubborn and gruff AI Otto, Kulcin and Belle tackle the situation head-on.

To download your free copy in EPUB (Nook, etc.) and Kindle format go here: From Europa With Love.

Later, If you want to read the web serial go here: Kulcin’s Law: Part I.

After finishing “From Europa With Love,” I re-read the web serial. It’s a great opportunity to do a compare and contrast between the two story mediums to see how the “Kulcin’s Law” evolved from a short web serial into a fully fleshed out novelette. A fascinating window into the creative mind of the author.

Photo Credit: “Water vapour plumes on Jupiter’s moon Europa (artist’s impression)”
by Hubble Space Telescope / ESA is licensed under CC 2.0.
Image resized and cropped to fit required size. Image is an artist recreation
of Jupiter and its moon Europa using actual Hubble images.

 

Fiat Homo Free Online Audio

BBC Radio is currently running an audio version of the “Fiat Homo” section of Walter M. Miller, Jr’s hugely popular post-apocalyptic novel “A Canticle for Leibowitz.” The novel won the Hugo award in 1961 and is still in print to this day. Nigel Lindsay of BBC Radio is the narrator. Click the image above for BBC links to episodes 1 through 5. “Fiat Homo” is the first part of the novel. The story takes place in the Southwestern United States after a nuclear war devastates the planet. A thousand years after the destruction of the planet, a fictional Order of Leibowitz is preserving tattered remnants of scientific knowledge and plans to hold onto the kernels of knowledge until humanity is ready for it once again. Enjoy!

Photo Credit: “Walter M. Miller – A Canticle for Leibowitz”
by RA.AZ is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Image resized and cropped and placed as an object on top of background.

Photo Credit: “Secrets revealed of the Abode of Chaos”
by Thierry Ehrmann is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Image used as background, resized and cropped to fit required size.

Produce a Video Trailer for Your Novel

A helpful tool for marketing your book is a video trailer, and you don’t need a professional videographer to do it. I used iMovie to produce my video trailer. They have several trailer formats. All you have to do is select the stills or video’s you want to use and plug them into the template and add the appropriate text. Then proof the final product and upload it to YouTube or other online video hosting site. It’s as simple as that.

I found it extremely difficult to write a synopsis I was satisfied with for my novel, “The Transplants,” as many authors do, because it has a complex story line with many sci-fi and non-sci-fi aspects. Every time I tried to include them in a text synopsis it ended up too long. I was afraid I would lose the reader’s interest after the third sentence. The truism that a picture is worth a thousand words enables the author to compress a complex story line into a short and concise video presentation. The viewer’s mind fills in the blanks.

One of the great things about the Offworlders.com site is that it allows you to embed your video trailer on the book page along with the description.

If you have the creativity to write a novel, you have the creativity to produce your video trailer.

By Ed Ross

Ed Ross is President of EWRoss International. His previous positions include Principal Director, Security Cooperation Operations in the Defense Security Cooperation Agency; Acting Deputy Assistant Sec-retary of Defense for POW/ MIA Affairs; and Senior Director for China and Taiwan, in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Ed’s novel “The Transplants” is a sci-fi adventure novel and romance. Two refugees from another planet get separated by a hurricane on earth. The pair are then hunted by a host of characters to include several foreign intelligence services, a NASA scientist, and an FBI agent. A first contact story. To read more about the novel follow this link: The Transplants by Ed Ross

Download Free on Offworlders:

We now have the complete Rifters Trilogy available on Offworlders.com in both Kindle and Epub format.

Peter Watts Rifters trilogy, which started with the publication of “Starfish,” was aptly described by Tor Books as “Psychopaths at the Bottom of the Sea.” For the most part, the three novels take place at the crushing depths of a rift located at the lowest point of the Pacific Ocean. The crew chosen to live in this undersea environment are severe abuse and trauma survivors cybernetically and biologically adapted to survive and thrive in a deep sea habitat. This magnificent specimen of speculative science fiction includes inhabitants adapted to underwater living to such an extent that they have one lung replaced with a gill and gain the ability to breathe using nothing more than water. The trilogy wraps up with “Behemoth” and a frightening apocalyptic scenario. Download all three today!

All 6 Cory Doctorow Stories Available for Free:

Stories of the Future Present contains the following tech related science fiction stories: “Printcrime,” “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth,” “Anda’s Game,” “I, Robot,” “I, Row-Boat,” and “After the Siege.” Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, all six have been added to Offworlders for free download. Download them all and share them with your friends! This is a superb collection of stories that explore various aspects of technology from in-game third world sweatshop “gold farmers” to the heroic deeds of systems administrators  that save the planet! Download links for each story is in this paragraph.

One of my favorite stories was “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” since I spent ten years as one of those network pukes myself. I never did save the Earth, but I am confident that my gallant actions saved a few zeros and ones. I remember one particular woeful day when myself and the lead programmer took a hard drive out of a crashed database server and stuck it in an ancient computer Moses himself once used as a WINS server, turned it on, and the gods were with us and that thing started up and bought us time to restore the real server. Whew!

Here is a short passage from When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” by Doctorow:

The sysadmins came out of the woodwork. The Googleplex was online, with the stalwart Queen Kong bossing a gang of rollerbladed grunts who wheeled through the gigantic data-center swapping out dead boxes and hitting reboot switches. The Internet Archive was offline in the Presidio, but the mirror in Amsterdam was live and they’d redirected the DNS so that you’d hardly know the difference. Amazon was down. Paypal was up. Blogger, Typepad and Livejournal were all up, and filling with millions of posts from scared survivors huddling together for electronic warmth.”

Ah, tasty stuff! I can hear the array of server fans humming like a hive full of killer bees. Good times.

John Scalzi Announces New Book Underway:

John Scalzi recently announced that work has officially started on book 6 of his critically acclaimed “Old Man’s War” military science fiction series. “Old Man’s War,” released in 2005, was John’s debut novel. The book featured Colonial Defense Force recruit John Perry and was nominated for a Hugo award in 2006. The sequels include “The Ghost Brigades (2006),” “The Last Colony (2007),” “Zoe’s Tale (2008),” and “The Human Division (2013).”

“Now, you may think that this is some sort of generalized hatred that I will carry for the lot of you. Let me assure you that this is not the case. Each of you will fail, but you will fail in your own unique way, and therefore I will dislike each of you on an individual basis.”
~ John Scalzi, Old Man’s War

How good are these books? I am a late convert to the alter of Scalzi. Last year, just before leaving on a vacation to the Gulf of Mexico, I locked and loaded “Old Man’s War” onto my trusty Nook eReader. The book is incredible, and I seriously could not put the book down until it was finished. On that vacation, I used toothpicks to prop my eyes open as I lay in bed till the wee hours of the night reading the Scalzinator’s tale of life in the military protecting planetary colonists. Do you remember when you were a kid and fell head over heels in love with a book? Did you read that book under the covers with the assist of a flashlight? This book rekindled that childhood love of literature in my soul. I proceeded to buy and read all five books back to back.

So what do we know so far about book six?

The book is tentatively set to be released in the first half of 2015. Presently, the working title consists of 5 words. End of announcement.

Is that all? Yup. Not much to report, but the news that more tales from the “Old Man’s War” universe are slowly leaking from the Scalzi brain is enough liquid sunshine to keep this soldier marching towards oblivion.

Not everyone is a huge fan of Scalzi. Many feel he has an ego the size of Texas. In all fairness, John is remarkably open about where he stands on a wide gamut of issues. I must admit that when I first started reading his blog some of what he wrote rubbed me the wrong way. Then I realized that Scalzi is as Scalzi does. I hope he becomes even more successful, and his ego swells to planetary size. I love it that he slays the dude bros of the world, supports feminist causes, and fundamentally stands up for what he thinks is right. John is a man with a strong sense of self and he backs up the checks he writes with a proven literary track record.

Would you want Hemingway to be a wimp? Absolutely not! Hemingway hunted Nazi U-boats in his beloved fishing boat Pilar armed with nothing more than whiskey, a submachine gun and a cache of grenades. In John Scalzi’s character, I see shades of Hemingway and Heinlein in his no holes barred quest for the truth, a man with a desire to get to the bottom of it all, to explore the different shades of grey, a man not afraid to make a stand.

This is important to me because as I get older I realize that I still need heroes.

Hemingway said it best: “As you get older, it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.”

As I age, I have become more cynical and tend to take a harder view of life. At the same time, I still am in touch with the little boy I once was, and that inner child still needs a hero to make things right in a world where thick necks and fat wallets push people around with impunity. I started with Sergeant Rock in the comics, cast my lot with Robert A Heinlein and Hemingway during college, and even rode through the literary desert in a red Cadillac with Hunter S. Thompson. Heroes are needed. Yes, perhaps now more than ever. John Scalzi is my hero. Who is yours?

 

Photo Credit: “John Scalzi – Old Man’s War”
by RA.AZ is licensed  under CC BY 2.0
Image resized and combined with another image.

Photo Credit: “Steve Hudson and John Scalzi”
by Jeff is licensed  under CC BY 2.0
Image cropped, resized and combined with another image
(Steve Hudson cropped out – Sorry Steve).

Ann Leckie Takes Arthur C Clarke award with Ancillary Justice:

Great news for fans of Ann Leckie! Her debut science fiction novel “Ancillary Justice” was awarded the coveted Arthur C Clarke award! No small feat when you consider her book trumped works from experienced authors Phillip Mann and Christopher Priest.

The novel was narrated by Justice of Toren, a former sentient consciousness that was at one time a military spaceship of monumental proportions. In the novel, Justice of Toren now exists only in the body of a single corpse soldier. Ship AIs can simultaneously occupy multiple corpse troops to provide physical interaction with cadre of the empire. Difficult narration, to say the least, but carried out with style by Leckie.

I won’t go into a review of the novel because many other bloggers have already written fantastic reviews. Take, for example, the review of “Ancillary Justice” by a Dribble of Ink’s Foz Meadows. You will fall in love with the writing used to describe “Ancillary Justice” in this review.

When the Hugo Awards arrive “Ancillary Justice” will be going head to head with “Neptune’s Brood” by Charles Stross; “Parasite” by Mira Grant; “Warbound, Book III of the Grimnoir Chronicles” by Larry Correia; and “The Wheel of Time” by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. Yes – that’s all 15 WOT books weighing in at around 4.4 million words.

According to John Scalzi on his blog Whatever, it’s by no means a “slam dunk” for the Wheel of Time as many fans and pundits postulate. As Scalzi notes, “Ancillary Justice” is racking up awards and “has been nominated for just about every major science fiction award this year — Hugo, Nebula, Clarke, BSFA, PKD —  and is arguably the most talked and praised science fiction novel of 2013.”

Any way you slice it, “Ancillary Justice” is an excellent read. Offworlders wishes Ann the best of luck at the Hugo Awards. Will a bevy of loyal Annonites carry her to victory one more time? Time only knows. . . .

What are your thoughts on the novel?

“Childfinder” and “A Necessary Being” to be Published in June:

The internets are buzzing with the news that two new Octavia Butler stories will be released in June. The exciting news is highlighted in a press release today from Open Road Integrated Media. The press release joyously announces that two short stories: “Childfinder” and “A Necessary Being,” will be published together and sold under the title “Unexpected Stories.” The book will include an introduction by Walter Mosley and is set for a June 24, 2014 release date. The two tales will be published together as an eBook.

The stories were discovered by Butler’s literary agent Merrilee Heifetz among a collection of Butler’s works now housed in San Marino, California’s Huntington Library. According to staff at Open Road Integrated Media, the stories were penned in the early 1970’s (Open Road, 2014).

For a brief plot description of “Childfinder” and “A Necessary Being,” visit the Unexpected Stories Preorder page. The title will be available from Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble, and Indiebound. The best price I currently see listed is $3.19 from Amazon. Open Road notes “Childfinder . . . was commissioned by Harlan Ellison for his legendary (and never-published) anthology The Last Dangerous VisionsTM.”  It is my understanding that “Childfinder” was the second story ever sold by Octavia (Unexpected Stories, 2014). How cool is that? Reading “Unexpected Stories” will be like taking a trip back in time to drink from Octavia’s early wellspring of inspiration.

Octavia worked extremely hard to achieve her status as a celebrated science fiction author. She was born on June 22, 1947 in Pasadena, California. Octavia died on February 26, 2006 at the age of 58. One of my favorite Octavia stories concerns a memory she relayed to the journal “Black Scholar” regarding a Sci-Fi movie she watched titled “Devil Girl from Mars.” Octavia thought the movie was absolutely horrible. In her words: “I decided that I could write a better story than that. And I turned off the TV and proceeded to try, and I’ve been writing science fiction ever since (Beal, 1986).”

After attending The Open Door Workshop of the Screenwriters’ Guild of America; and The Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop (1969-1970); Octavia sold two stories but was then not published again for 5 long years. Octavia worked through that difficult five years of rejection slip after rejection slip. It was a tough time for Octavia, but she believed in herself and persevered through the long dry spell. Octavia is known for her “Patternist” series of novels, “Kindred,” “Lilith’s Brood,” the “Parable series,” and the novel “Fledgling (Wikipedia, 21 April 2014 ).”

I have placed my pre-order and I am really looking forward to reading the new stories that are scheduled to be released in June. In addition to being a very talented writer, Octavia had a great personality. In parting, I leave you with a quote from a “brief conversation” the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America had with Octavia in 2004:

SFWA: Who is Octavia E. Butler? Where is she headed? Where has she been?
Octavia: Who am I? I’m a 56-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I’m comfortably asocial — a hermit living in a large city — a pessimist if I’m not careful; a student, endlessly curious; a feminist; an African American; a former Baptist; and an oil and water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive (A Brief Conversation, 2004).

 

Text Sources:

A brief conversation with Octavia E. Butler, (2004). Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers
of America. Retrieved from here.

Beal, Frances M., (Mar.-Apr. 1986). Black Scholar Interview with Octavia Butler:
Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre, Black Scholar 17.2, 14–18.

Octavia E. Butler, (Last Updated 21 April 2014 at 17:28). Wikipedia. Retrieved from here.

Open Road Media to Publish Uncovered Stories from Award-Winning Fiction Author
Octavia E. Butler, (2014). Open Road Media. Retrieved from here.

Unexpected Stories by Octavia E. Butler, (2014). Open Road Media. Retrieved from here.

Photo Credit:

“Wild Seed”
by Chris Drumm is licensed  under CC BY 2.0
Image cropped, added to background,
and colors optimized.

Unlocked Set as Primer For Lock In:

John Scalzi is releasing a new novella titled “Unlocked” on May 7, 2014 in eBook format (print to be released later in limited quanity). This new work is a precursor to “Lock In,” another new Scalzi book set for an August 26, 2014 release date. “Lock In” is billed as a sci-fi thriller set in the near future, dominated by a condition known as Haden’s syndrome,” a disease characterized by patients that suffer from complete paralysis of just about everything but eye muscles. Patients are literally trapped in their bodies because they are awake and conscious, but unable to communicate with the exception of eye movement. As a primer to “Lock In,” the novella “Unlocked” will use an oral history format to discuss the development of Haden’s syndrome, how the disease spread throughout the world, and how health professionals struggled to prevent the further spread of the disease. John decided to write the novella because of a strong desire of his to create something in the oral history genre, and as a way to introduce readers to the well established world they will encounter in “Lock In” where Haden’s syndrome has existed for decades.

Scalzi, John; Upcoming Titles:

Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome – Release Date May 7, 2014

Lock In – Release Date August 26, 2014

Distribution Info for Unlocked:

Subterranean Press is offering for sale 1500 Signed Print editions of Unlocked.

Information on Pre-Ordering the eBook version of Unlocked is located on Tor.

Distribution Info for Lock In:

Order information for Lock In is listed on Macmillian Publishers.