Guest Post

Jill Wolfson Blog Tour: Guest Post and Giveaway

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Furious

Author Jill Wolfson joins SciFiChick.com today with her latest stop on her Blog Tour to talk about her latest release Furious and bringing the Greek mythology of the Furies into modern day.
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The Furies Go to High School
Jill Wolfson

I got the idea to write Furious when my daughter and her two best friends came home from school one day in late October, all excited about their idea for Halloween costumes. They were going to be The Furies, a.k.a. the sisters of darkness, with wild hair, skimpy clothing, wings and hateful expressions.

I was intrigued that these three very modern high-school girls were so drawn to goddesses of revenge that date back to ancient Greece. But that’s the power of myth. A story that arose in one culture and one time resonates across space and time because it speaks to some very important and very human part of us.

We have all felt that life is unfair. We have all been hurt. And we have all wanted to pay back the person who hurt us or hurt someone we love.

So how to update such an old story? I started by reading The Orestia, which is a bloody, revenge-themed trilogy of Greek tragedies written by Aeschylus, which concerns the end of the curse on the House of Atreus. The storyline has all sorts of twists and turns with members of the royal family murdering each other in gory ways, while assorted gods, including the Furies, take sides.

The final play is actually called The Furies and in it, the goddesses of revenge haunt Prince Orestes for killing his mother. But at the end, they are called off and tamed. Given gifts and flattery, their anger subsides and the Furies turn into a trio of goddess called The Kindly Ones.

Curtain down.

But, what if?

What if someone from that ancient time is still so mad that she nurses a grudge for centuries, waiting for the right time to call the Furies back out of retirement.

What if that time is now and the place is a Northern California beach town?

We definitely live in a time of fury. I see it everywhere – on TV and the Internet, on the streets and roads. People are furious about personal problems and larger social issues –the economy, wars, pollution, bullying, racial and gender discrimination, mistreatment of children and animals. There’s so much pent-up anger, and lots of people feel helpless to do anything about it.

Young people feel injustice the hardest. As Stephanie (The Fury Tisiphone) in Furious complains:

What can someone our age do about it? About anything? Write letters? Hold a fund-raiser bake sale? Make speeches in class that nobody reads? I can’t even vote. I have no power.

Well, let’s do something about it!

So that’s how I gave them ancient powers and brought Greek mythology into high school.

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Thanks so much to SciFiChick for hosting this stop on my blog tour. If you want to see pictures of the Furies depicted in art, check out http://jillwolfson.com/furious.html.

I hope you enjoy Furious, and find the fury in yourself.

Courtesy of Macmillan, I have a copy of Furious for one (1) lucky winner!

Contest is open to US residents only. No PO Boxes, please. To enter, just fill out the form below. Contest ends May 10. I’ll draw a name on May 11, and notify winner via email.

Good luck!

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Wasteland Book Tour: Guest Post

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Authors Laurence Klavan and Susan Kim visit SciFiChick.com today for the first stop on their blog tour, promoting their new release Wasteland!

WASTELAND:
Welcome to the Wasteland. Where all the adults are long gone, and now no one lives past the age of nineteen. Susan Kim and Laurence Klavan’s post-apocalyptic debut is the first of a trilogy in which everyone is forced to live under the looming threat of rampant disease and brutal attacks by the Variants —- hermaphroditic outcasts that live on the outskirts of Prin. Esther thinks there’s more to life than toiling at harvesting, gleaning, and excavating, day after day under the relentless sun, just hoping to make it to the next day. But then Caleb, a mysterious stranger, arrives in town, and Esther begins to question who she can trust. As shady pasts unravel into the present and new romances develop, Caleb and Esther realize that they must team together to fight for their lives and for the freedom of Prin.

Our Visions of the Future:

LAURENCE: The last thing I am is a scientist or sociologist, but I imagine the future will be driven by changes in technology and the disintegration of the environment. Both things will dictate that we spend more time indoors hiding and/or being entertained. This will be bad news for schools, stores, theaters, beaches, sports arenas, restaurants, and dating, and good news for books (or whatever replaces them), television (or whatever replaces it), frozen food and enforced time with your family. I would invest in companies that make entertainment and other content for electronic devices and those that build houses on stilts and reinforced basements.

SUSAN: I just read an article online about predictions made in 1998 about 2013 (which isn’t even that long… I mean, there already was an internet, so big deal, right?) and how they got stuff wrong like assuming we’d all have robot maids by now. But anyway, here are my totally unscientific predictions, based on my own anxieties and neuroses and overall pessimism as opposed to anything REAL.

1) The environment will be beyond messed up. The bad things that happen now every few years around the world will happen all the time, everywhere: earthquakes leading to tsunamis leading to nuclear meltdowns, hurricanes breaching city walls, crop-scorching dust bowls, shrinking arctic shelves. And the creepy stuff re. runoff and chemicals in our water will get even worse…. I predict heavy-duty mutation in our not-so-distant future and a reliance on purely laboratory-made food.

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Guest Post and Giveaway: James K. Decker

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I WANT TO BELIEVE by James K. Decker

One of the themes in The Burn Zone is ‘how much can people be made to believe?’ In the book, this concept is taken to an extreme, but it began with me wondering how hard (or easy) it would be to convince a large number of people something was true, even when it clearly was not.

I mean sure, you could convince a small group of people that black was white – a sliver of the population could be made to believe just about anything – but how about, say, an entire nation? It’s easy to say ‘people are sheep and can be made to believe anything’ but there’s a caveat buried in that statement, which is that the person making it is not one of the sheep. Even if you could get a lot of people to believe something patently untrue, wouldn’t there be at least a subset of free-thinkers who would see through the lie? Wouldn’t they share information, and get validation that proved they were right in spite of what everyone else claimed?

In The Burn Zone, an alien race called the Haan crash land in the fictional city of Hangfei, wiping out a quarter of a million people in the process. That would seem reason enough to dislike and distrust them, and yet fifty years later, human surrogates are caring for haan young and eighty percent of the nation’s food supply is being funneled to the haan, even while the rest of the country, and the world at large, starve. Even as poorer nations push at their borders, attempting to take what they need to survive. The people of Hangfei seem to accept that things need to be this way, and will even defend it, but what could possibly convince them that this arrangement was in their best interest? Even if it was, could you ever convince them of it?

I decided that, given human nature and the way we form opinions that you could, under the right set of circumstances. People of every country have historically traded freedoms for security, and the people of Hangfei have a lot to fear. The haan offer wealth, technology, power and protection. The people are hungry, but they’re also scared. They’re scared they’ll be overwhelmed by the desperate barbarians at the gate, and scared that even if they’re not they’ll succumb to the same decay that the rest of the world has – that even if they are the last to fall, they will still fall.

Add to that the fact that, although they consider themselves free, the people of Hangfei don’t really live in a free society. The city is under martial law. Information comes from strictly controlled sources, and those who dissent tend to disappear. Attempts at contact from the outside are blocked, and attempts to contact the world beyond their borders get you labeled a spy and thrown in prison. The haan have the support of the government, and in turn, the government has the support of the haan. Together they control the flow of information, for better or worse, in support of a larger plan which will, they promise, benefit the greater good. Given the alternative, most opt to believe in a plan they know little to nothing about. You can see those dynamics in effect in the real world, even now.

Like the real world, things in The Burn Zone are never absolute. It’s difficult in Hangfei to point your finger and say ‘those are the bad guys’, but it becomes even more difficult when you don’t, at the outset, know the full truth about the world you live in. Before you can know what you believe, and whose side you’re on, you first have to be able to distinguish what’s true from what’s false. Even when, with a nudge from the highly advanced haan, you might be compelled to truly believe that black is white. Finding the truth would be very difficult, and very risky, and for Sam Shao, it is both. I’ll leave to you to discover what it is along with her.

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About the author:
James K. Decker was born in New Hampshire in 1970, and has lived in the New England area since that time. He developed a love of reading and writing early on, participating in young author competitions as early as grade school, but the later discovery of works by Frank Herbert and Issac Asimov turned that love to an obsession.

He wrote continuously through high school, college and beyond, eventually breaking into the field under the name James Knapp, with the publication of the Revivors trilogy (State of Decay, The Silent Army, and Element Zero). State of Decay was a Philip K. Dick award nominee, and won the 2010 Compton Crook Award. The Burn Zone is his debut novel under the name James K. Decker.

He now lives in MA with his wife Kim.

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Courtesy of the author, I have a copy of The Burn Zone by James K. Decker for one (1) lucky winner!

Contest is open to US residents only. No PO Boxes, please. To enter, just fill out the form below. Contest ends March 22. I’ll draw a name on March 23, and notify winner via email.

Good luck!

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