Rose-Owls and Pumpkin Girls

The random number generator has spoken, and the winner of a copy of The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination is...

loree!

Instructions for the winner: Please comment on this post letting me know that you're claiming your prize and send me an email via my website (www.seananmcguire.com) with your mailing information. Both comment and email must be received by Friday, December 18th to be considered valid.

Five more days to go!

...a copy of The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination!

Welcome to the third of the Twelve Days of Hogswatch. I will be starting a new giveaway every day between now and December 25th (some other winter holiday). Each giveaway will have different rules, and a different deadline, although all prizes will be mailed on December 29th, because I am bad at going to the post office (and also, still mailing shirts).

The first giveaway is for a copy of The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination. This is going to be a random number drawing, because that's working well so far. Because this is a hardcover, this giveaway is open only to US residents and those with US shipping addresses. Mailing it internationally would cost more than the value of the book. I'm sorry, I just can't do it.

1. To enter, comment on this post.
2. Indicate that you are in the US/have a US shipping address.
3. That's it.

I will choose the winner at 1PM PST on Wednesday, December 17th.

Game on!

Greetings, people of Earth.

I will be appearing today at Borderlands Books in San Francisco at three p.m., where I, along with John Joseph Adams, will be explaining the world domination plans as described in The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination. (We do not believe in confusing titles here in the lab. Confusing titles mean melted minions, and that's a waste of resources.)

I understand that you may have other things to do, but I implore you to attend the event, or to contact the bookstore to order signed books, as we will look kindly upon those who support the anthology, and given the size of my vegetable hybrid army, "looking kindly" may save your city from being used as an incubation hive.

From my heart and from my hands, why don't people understand that I just need to subjugate them all to my will?

Still waiting for her shiny new Australia,
Seanan.

I have received my author's copies of When Will You Rise, and they are gorgeous. So it's time for one more giveaway. (Not saying this is definitely the last, just that it might be.) To enter...

1. Leave a comment on this entry.
2. Identify your country.
3. If you are international, state that you are willing to pay postage.

...and that's it! I'll select a winner Friday morning at 9am PST.

PLEASE NOTE: Because these are author's copies, they are signed, but are not numbered. So you will not be receiving one of the 1,000 "real" copies of the book.

Game on!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, there's some news about When Will You Rise?. Most specifically, Publishers Weekly has given When Will You Rise? a starred review!

Here's a link to the actual review.

Here's a quote from the actual review:

"Grant excels in humanizing her characters and surrounding them with believable science and circumstances. The surefooted storytelling is mesmerizing as all-too-plausible dilemmas snowball into desperation and catastrophe."

I AM THE DESTROYER OF ALL HAPPINESS AND JOY! TREMBLE BEFORE ME! I mean...ahem. Isn't that a nice review? Isn't it nice to get a starred review for a nice book like that one? If you haven't ordered your copy yet, you totally should.

I am happy.

Hey, look! I'm in an anthology! River, from Dark Quest Books, edited by Alma Alexander. It's a book of stories about, well. A river. My story, "Lady of the Waters," is about a ship called The Jackdaw, her centaur captain (no, really), her faintly annoyed crew, and some giant catfish. I quite like it.

Oh, and hey, the audio books of all the Toby Daye adventures are still available at Audible.com, including Late Eclipses and One Salt Sea, which periodically appear as customer favorites. I find this awesome, and you should totally check it out if you haven't already listed to the fabulous audio narration. Or even if you have. I'm not picky.

SCIENCE CHEERLEADERS. It's like a beautiful dream. With pom-poms. There was no earthly way not to share.

...and because that last link may have restored your faith in humanity, here are some insanely depressing "rules for girls" collected from Twitter. The next time someone asks you why I keep threatening to ignite the biosphere, this is why. We can't have nice things until we've burned out all the stupid.

The title of this article right here is "How Amazon Kills Books and Makes Us Stupid." Again, destroying faith in humanity through the aid of my link file. You're welcome.

So it's a mixed bag today, but it includes SCIENCE CHEERLEADERS and CENTAUR SHIP CAPTAINS, so I'm going to call it overall a positive. Your mileage may vary.

Somewhere in North America, July 7th, 2014.

The location doesn't matter: what happened, when it happened, happened all over North America at the same time. There was no single index case. It all began, and ended, too fast for that sort of record-keeping to endure. Listen:

On migratory bird and weather balloon, on drifting debris and anchored in tiny gusts of wind, Alpha-RC007 made its way from the stratosphere down to the world below. When it encountered a suitable mammalian host, it would latch on with its tiny man-made protein hooks, holding fast while it found a way to invade, colonize, and spread. The newborn infections were invisible to the naked eye, and their only symptom was a total lack of symptoms. Their hosts enjoyed a level of health that was remarkable mostly because none of them noticed, or realized how lucky they were. It was a viral golden age.

It lasted less than a month. Say July 7th, for lack of a precise date; say Columbus, Ohio, for lack of a precise location. July 7th, 2014, Columbus: the end of the world begins.

The only carrier of Marburg Amberlee in Columbus was Sharon Morris, a thirty-eight year old woman celebrating her second lease on life by taking a road trip across the United States. She had begun her Marburg Amberlee treatments almost exactly a year before, and had seen a terminal diagnosis dwindle into nothing. If you'd asked her, she would have called it a miracle of science. She would have been correct.

Susan's first encounter with Alpha-RC007 occurred at an open air farmer's market. She picked up a jar of homemade jam, examining the label with a curious eye before deciding, finally, not to make the purchase. The jam remained behind, but the virus which had collected on her fingers did not. It clung, waiting for an opportunity—an opportunity it got less than five minutes later, when Susan wiped the sweat from her eyes with the back of her hand. Alpha-RC007 transferred from her fingers to the surface of her eye, and from there made its entrance to the body.

The initial stages of the Alpha-RC007 infection followed the now-familiar pattern, invading the body's cells like a common virus, only to slip quietly out again, leaving copies of itself behind. The only cells to be actually destroyed in the process were the other infections Alpha-RC007 encountered in the host body. These were turned into tiny virus-factories, farming on a microscopic scale. Several minor ailments Susan was not even aware of were found brewing in her body, and summarily destroyed in Alpha-RC007's quest for sole dominion.

Then, deep in the tissue of Susan's lungs, Alpha-RC007 encountered something new; something which was confusing to the virus, in as much as anything can ever confuse a virus. This strange new thing had a structure as alien to the world as Alpha-RC007's own, half-natural, half-reconfigured and transformed to suit a new purpose.

Behaving according to the protocols that were the whole of its existence, Alpha-RC007 approached the stranger, using its delicate protein hooks to attempt infiltration. The stranger responded in kind, their protein hooks tangling together until they were like so much viral thread, too intertwined to tell where one ended and the next began. This happened a thousand times in the body of Susan Morris. Many of those joinings ended with the destruction of one or both viral bodies, their structures unable to correctly lock together.

The rest found an unexpected kinship in the locks and controls their human creators had installed, and began, without releasing one another, to exchange genetic material in a beautiful dance that had begun when life on this world was born, and would last until that life was completely gone. Oblivious to the second miracle of science that was now happening inside her, Susan Morris went about her day. She had never been a mother before. Before the sun went down, she would be one of the many mothers to give birth to Kellis-Amberlee.

***

It's a beautiful summer here in Ohio, and we have a great many events planned for these sweet summer nights. Visit the downtown Columbus Farmer's Market, where you can sample new delights from our local farms. Who knows what you might discover? Meanwhile, the summer concert series kicks off...

When will you Rise?

[NOTE: I am a day behind, due to the convention I attended this past weekend. This should have gone up yesterday; after the next one, I'm all caught up.]

Atlanta, Georgia. June 18th, 2014.

The atmosphere at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia was best described as "tense." Everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop, and had been waiting since reports first came in describing the so-called "Mayday Army's" release of an experimental pathogen into the atmosphere. The tension only intensified when Dr. Alexander Kellis responded to requests for more information on the pathogen by supplying his research, which detailed, at length, the infectious nature of his hybridized creation.

One of the administrative assistants had probably put it best when she looked at the infection maps in horror and said, "If he'd been working with rabies or something, he would have just killed us all."

If he was being completely honest with himself, Dr. Ian Matras wasn't entirely sure that Kellis hadn't just killed them all, entirely without intending to, entirely with the best of intentions. The proteins composing the capsid shell on Alpha-RC007 were ingeniously engineered, something that had been a good thing—increased stability, increased predictability in behavior—right up until the moment when the Mayday Army broke the seals keeping the world and the virus apart. Now those same proteins made Alpha-RC007 extremely virulent, extremely contagious, and, worst of all, extremely difficult to detect in a living host. The lab animals they'd requested from Dr. Kellis's lab in Reston were known to be infected, but showed almost no signs of illness; four out of five blood tests would come up negative for the presence of Alpha-RC007, only to have the fifth show a thriving infection. Alpha-RC007 hid. It could be spurred to reveal itself by introducing another infection...and that was when Alpha-RC007 became truly terrifying.

Alpha-RC007 was engineered to cure the common cold, something it accomplished by setting itself up as a competing, and superior, infection. Once it was in the body, it simply never went away. The specific structure of its capsid shell somehow tricked the human immune system into believing that Alpha-RC007 was another form of helper cell—and in a way, it was. Alpha-RC007 wanted to help. Watching it attack and envelop other viruses which entered the body was a chilling demonstration of perfect biological efficiency. Alpha-RC007 saw; Alpha-RC007 killed. Alpha-RC007 tolerated no other infections in the body.

What was going to happen the first time Alpha-RC007 decided the human immune system counted as an infection? No one knew, and the virus had thus far resisted any and all attempts to remove it from a living host. Unless a treatment could be found before Kellis's creation decided to become hostile, Dr. Matras was very afraid that the entire world was going to learn just how vicious Alpha-RC007 could be.

Dr. Ian Matras sat at his desk, watching the infection models as they spread out across North America and the world, and wondered how long they really had before they found out whether or not the Mayday Army had managed to destroy mankind.

"Cheer up, Ian!" called one of his colleagues, passing by on the way to the break room. "A pandemic that makes you healthy isn't exactly the worst thing we've ever had to deal with."

"And what's it going to do in a year, Chris?" Dr. Matras shot back.

Dr. Chris Sinclair grinned. "Raise the dead, of course," he said. "Don't you ever go to the movies?" Then he walked away, leaving Dr. Matras alone to brood. It wouldn't be long before they all had cause to regret those words.

***

The Centers for Disease Control have issued a statement asking that people remain calm in the wake of the release of an unidentified pathogen from the Virginia-based lab of Dr. Alexander Kellis. "We do not, as yet, have any indication that this disease is harmful to humans," said Dr. Chris Sinclair. A seven-year veteran of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, Dr. Sinclair graduated from Princeton...

When will you Rise?

Today is Kaja Foglio's birthday! If you don't know Kaja, she's one-half of the creative team behind Girl Genius, along with her husband, the interminable Phil Foglio. Together, they won the 2010 Hugo for Best Graphic Novel. Also, they fight crime.

I'm just saying.

This month, the Foglios unleashed their unspeakable powers on a new arena: the novel. While Phil has written book-length prose before (most specifically Illegal Aliens, co-written with the awesome Nick Pollotta), this is Kaja's first foray into this particular medium. Agatha Heterodyne and the Airship City [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] is a novelization of the first two volumes of the Girl Genius graphic novel. Meaning what? Meaning that if you already read the comic, this isn't new story, per se, but it's deeper story, more intricate story. It enriches and expands on what you already know. And if you haven't read the comic, well, why not? It's available for free online. Yes, all of it. Yes, the Foglios make a living giving away their product. Why? Because it's that good.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it's Kaja's birthday, and what she asked for this year was, well, that we talk about her book. If you were considering picking up Agatha Heterodyne and the Airship City [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy], why not do it today? Give Kaja a book sale for her birthday, and help the Foglios ring the bells on Amazon (or at your local independent bookseller—I note that Borderlands Books has the book in stock, as, I'm sure, do many others).

The Foglios are great people, and Agatha Heterodyne is a great book. If you like steampunk, gaslamp fantasy, wacky science, mad science, cute blonde girls in corsets, and making my friends happy, give Agatha Heterodyne and the Airship City [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] a look! Statistically speaking, if you're reading my journal, you'll probably be glad that you did.