By Scott Pearson

Here we are already: the third installment of the ReDeus anthology whirlwind, Native Lands. To complete my trilogy of stories featuring Étienne Joubert, a fourteenth-century Templar Knight miraculously returned to the twenty-first century, I wanted to follow up on elements introduced in the two previous stories. “The Tale of the Nouveau Templar,” from Divine Tales, had introduced the world-weary Joubert as he walked a beat in Manhattan for his updated version of the Templar. In the second ReDeus anthology, Beyond Borders, “A Medieval Knight in Vatican City” went back to the moment of Joubert’s return to the world of the living and chronicled the challenges and losses he faced in Rome, revealing the full circumstances of his break with the Knights Templar and his often adversarial relationship with the church—as well as the surprising way he met his trusted valet, Stephen.

Having substantially developed Joubert in those two stories, I wanted to give more attention to his two sidekicks in the new story, as illustrated by the story’s title, “The Squire and the Valet.” The squire of the title, Tony, was introduced in “The Tale of the Nouveau Templar” as a wise guy for the Greco-Roman pantheon. His circumstances changed during the course of that story, however, and as my new story begins, Tony has become a trusted assistant of Joubert.

When a demon of the Christian pantheon appears in Manhattan and begins a killing spree, primarily targeting members of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape tribes, Joubert, Stephen, and Tony take a road trip into the wilds of New Jersey to maintain peace between the pantheons. Soon, Stephen and Tony find themselves in a much more dangerous position than they ever imagined, while Joubert crosses paths with a mysterious character introduced in Dayton Ward’s story “Conscript” from Divine Tales. Thanks, Dayton!

Once again Google Maps and other internet resources came to the rescue as I hurtled toward the deadline while trying to get my facts straight. On a related note, a special thanks to the inimitable Alan Kistler, who provided emergency advice on the relative coolness of various Robins. You’ll just have to read the story to learn how that turns out out.

ReDeus: Native Lands will be available in print and digital editions tomorrow.

What a crazy year this has been.

I’m selling my apartment in Queens, buying a house in New Jersey, and by the time Shore Leave comes about—just two weeks away, yikes!—I will have launched not one, but two wild science fiction novels with my pals at Crazy 8 Press.

Aaaand … this will not only be my first trip to Shore Leave, but it will also be the first time that the entire Crazy 8 Press team will be gathered in one place at the same time, all while Captain Kirk himself William Shatner plays guest speaker at the event. (Now, I know Shatner’s PR team is saying that he was ‘invited’, but between us he really came to check out Crazy 8 Press).

But let’s get back to the books.

For those of you new to my work, earlier this year I debuted my mysterious, action-packed sci-fi romp Crossline, my first project with Crazy 8 Press. If you want to get a better idea of the scope of the adventure, here’s a pretty awesome trailer I think you’ll enjoy.

And now in typical sci-fi style, let’s time travel to the past so we can return to the future.

A few years ago my first novel Finders Keepers debuted to terrific reviews—including Publishers Weekly—but it recently became time to part ways with my distributor. And with Shore Leave on the horizon, we all agreed that the best way to bring Finders Keepers to a larger audience was to re-release the title through Crazy 8 Press, and then make a big splash at Shore Leave.

For the uninitiated, Finders Keepers is a raunchy, sci-fi backpacking comedy—think American Pie/Superbad/Hot Tub Time Machine meets Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. So if you like raunchy humor and you like tales of cosmic lunacy, then Finders Keepers is definitely for you. And as with Crossline, Finders Keepers will be available in both print and e-book.

The Finders Keepers re-release also has a new layout from Cray 8 Press designer guru Aaron Rosenberg, to compliment the amazing cover from comic book artist Rich Koslowski.

So here I am, trying to figure out where I’m going to live, how I’m going to pack and move, and do all this with my little kids in tow, all while planning a big hoopla at Shore Leave with my fellow Crazy8iatics.

Am I looking forward to the festivities? Oh, yes. Yes I am.

It’s been a crazy year so far. I expect Shore Leave to be more of the same.

See you there!

I was stoked when I was offered the chance to contribute to Native Lands. Despite currently living in Australia, I’m an ex-pat Mexican-American and my immediate instinct was to write a story somehow involving the Mesoamerican pantheon.

And then one thing struck me: there was all this talk about the Mayan calendar marking the end of one world and the beginning of the next, but it was the Aztec (Mexica, the pedant in me demands I call them) gods that were getting all the glory. And that got me thinking.

Archeologically speaking, and this is a very, very loose comparison dependent on theories that are constantly changing and are not necessarily consensus, the Mayans are to the Mexica what the Greeks are to the Romans. Some of the Mexica gods existed long before them and the Mayans (going back to the Toltecs, who can more or less be equated to the Etruscans, sort of). So, would all the Mayan gods exist separately from the Mexica gods? Or only some of them? Or would it be the same gods wearing different team colors, as it were?

I didn’t tackle that directly, because that’s an enormous idea to take on, but I did push it around and make hints and intimations. Another reason I didn’t deal directly with gods to any great degree was because I liked the notion of seeing how regular people were coping with a very new world order.

And that’s the other thing I’m really pleased about. It was so nice to play in a sandbox where the tables have turned — the lands under Mexica control are now more than a match for the fragmented lands that are still, sort of, the US and Canada. It was a really beautiful thing, for me, to give these partly remembered figures and histories and traditions a new life on the page. It was a glorious game of what-if.

And because these things are a part of my history and background, I take them seriously. I’ve been to Mérida, and I’ve been to Uxmal and Chichén Itzá — I’ve seen a cenote in person and I have no difficulty understanding how people might think it was an otherworldly place. I did quite a bit of research for this story, trying to get the right words, use pre-Columbian geographical references, invoke traditions and ideas that were squelched once the Spanish arrived. I did my best to stick to the spirit of history, because hard fact is thin on the ground. I wince when authors take the easy route with Mesoamerican gods and beliefs, playing the warmongering and blood thirst for all its sensationalism. Yes, human sacrifice was central to many Mesomaerican belief systems. But that’s because human beings owed their very existence to the gods offering their own blood to give people the spark of life and autonomous thought. It only made sense that the gods might need some of it back from time to time to keep the world moving.

It’s also very easy to look at Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca as opposing forces of good and evil, but the Nahua, the Mexica, didn’t ascribe evil to death and good to life; these processes simply were. They were oppositional, certainly, but in interacting, they conveyed a cyclical balance. I’m not sure if I managed to convey that in the story, but it was definitely something bubbling in the back of my head when I considered just what the jaguar knight was doing, and why.

At any rate, I enjoyed the heck out of writing this story, as much as I agonized over it, and I’m still delighted and honored to be a part of Native Lands. I hope you enjoy the story even a fraction as much.

ReDeus: Native Lands will be available in print and digital editions in August.

Jim Frenkel is gone from Tor Books.

When this news broke through the science fiction community, all I could think about was how he contributed to my joining up with Crazy 8.

I’m not entirely sure if I would have if it hadn’t been for Frenkel.  But you see, he was the editor on a trilogy of mine (two books so far) called the Hidden Earth trilogy.  It was designed to be a blend of science fiction and fantasy, and consequently was of no interest to potential publishers who asserted that such combos never sold.  The only publisher interested was Tor, and they bought it for a relative song.

The first book was put out with exactly zero promotion.  Bookstores in my own neighborhood carried no copies.  It was the worst distributed novel of my career and the low numbers helped tank sales on every subsequent book of mine.  Meanwhile the second novel was sitting on Frenkel’s desk, and it sat and it sat, unread, untouched, for nearly two years.  And when I pointed out to Frenkel that contractually the book had to come out within three months, and was that going to happen, he laughed at me.

I don’t do well with editors laughing at me.

In the meantime Mike Friedman was coming to me with a demented notion for self-publishing.  He made a convincing case for it.  I was in the midst of trying to sell a vampire satire called Pulling Up Stakes and was being given all sorts of reasons why it couldn’t be published:  Satire didn’t sell.  Vampire novels had to be written by women.  The protagonist had to be a young girl who was hopelessly in love with a vampire, not an unconfident vampire who was actually a vampire hunter.

At some point one gets tired of being told why he can’t succeed.  At some point publishers get tiresome with their reasons.

And so here we are several years later.  The Hidden Earth trilogy had been published.  Pulling Up Stakes had been published.  Within a short time Fearless, a sequel to my novel Tigerheart, will be published.

And Jim Frenkel, who reportedly has a reputation for sexually harassing women, is gone.

Life is good.

By William Leisner

I honestly never expected I’d be returning to Minnesota for another ReDeus story.

In the ReDeus universe, New York City has been established as the center of the action. This is where no one god or pantheon holds dominion, and where all the newly-returned deities are able to freely interact with each other. But “The Year Without a Santa Claus,” my story for Divine Tales (available now from Crazy 8 Press!) wasn’t a New York story, though; my account of David Anderson, an Everyman caught in the middle of the Olympian gods’ war to claim and seize American territory properly belonged in Middle America. I did have David, at the story’s end, send his teenage daughter Abby to safety in New York, and in the back of my mind, I hoped she might have been picked up for a future ReDeus tale in a cameo role. But as for David’s story, I figured it was just a one-off, and he and his little Olympian ministry on the prairie were too far separated from the heart of the action to be touched on again.

Flash forward a few months. Divine Tales was released to positive response, and Bob and Aaron invited me to contribute to the next two ReDeus projects — one a collection of stories with an international focus, and the other set in the U.S. Shortly after completing “Sestercentennial Day” for ReDeus: Beyond Borders (also available now from Crazy 8 Press!), I pitched an idea featuring an adult Abby Anderson, living in 2032 Manhattan. Bob responded to my email with the clarification that the stories in Native Lands were to be set in and around North America… exclusive of New York City.

Oops.

At Bob’s suggestion, I tried to rework my story so that Abby would have reason to leave New York and have her adventures beyond the city. But after a number of false starts, I decided that, rather than trying to force this story to fit the anthology, I’d be better off starting from scratch.

Though not entirely from scratch. In “Revival,” I indeed return to Minnesota, to find David Anderson still growing into his role as a High Priest of Zeus on American soil, navigating the landscape left in the aftermath of the Divinity War, seeking out new adherents for the Olympians, and facing off against the gods of the Ojibwe, who still hold sway over much of the upper midwest.

Hopefully the ReDeus audience will enjoy this follow-up. And if so, who knows? We may not have seen the last of the Andersons of Minneapolis, after all…

ReDeus: Native Lands will be available in print and digital editions in August.

By David McDonald

When mulling over ideas for Native Lands, there were a few themes that I wanted to explore. The first was the idea that the coming of the gods would make little difference to essential human nature. There would be those who would seek to follow the moral precepts of their gods and behave in a virtuous manner. And, then there would be those who see the Return as an opportunity for power, and be willing to follow whatever god promised the most, paying whatever price was demanded.

I also had the image in my mind of a man catapulted into this world, returning to homeland after the gods had returned with no time to adjust to a completely changed world and trying to work out whom he could trust.  How would a soldier, already reeling from the trauma of the battlefield, deal with this crazy new state of affairs? But, before I could address these themes, I had to decide what gods I wanted to use, and where I was going to set it.

I came to the realization my knowledge of Native American mythology was limited at best. I guess that is understandable given that I live almost as far away from North America as is possible while still being on the same planet and that my only real exposure to Native American culture had been via old Westerns and the occasional Hollywood movie – hardly the most reliable of sources! But, whatever the reason I knew that this was a state of affairs that I had to remedy, so I got to work doing some research.

Fortunately, we live in an age where a wealth of information lies at our fingertips so it didn’t require me to make a trip to the States (though perhaps I should have tried to convince Crazy 8 Press to sponsor me? Haha). I soon realized that there was no homogenous mythology, but instead a rich and diverse set of beliefs, spread across the tribes and regions of the entire continent. To treat them as if they were interchangeable would be deeply disrespectful so I knew that I had to ensure that I used elements that were related to the region I had chosen as my setting.

As I read, I settled on the Navajo who are truly an amazing group of people. I learnt about everything from skin-walkers and the Changing Woman to the Code Talkers of WWII and onwards. It was obvious that I had found a mythos that I would love to write about. This set my story firmly in the South West, and helped me find a villain for my piece. The Navajo were not the only tribe who called the South West their home, and in the mythology of the Acoma I discovered a being that bore more than a passing resemblance to the evil entity of a religion more familiar to me. I won’t spoil the story for you, but I am sure you will agree that some creatures are universally disliked!

Writing this story has been an educational experience for me, as I have learnt about some wonderful cultures. Hopefully I have been able to them justice, and you will not only get a lot of enjoyment from this tale, but also a new appreciation of the rich tapestry of Native American spirituality.

ReDeus: Native Lands will be available in print and digital editions in August.