I will be one of the guests of honor at Zenkaikon 2023 this coming weekend at the Lancaster County Convention Center in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I will have a table in the Exhibit Hall — I believe I will be at Table #14, between A Case of Random and DerpyCon — where I will have a mess of my books for sale, including all seven Precinct books, all three of my Supernatural novels, Alien: Isolation, Spider-Man: The Darkest Hours, Thor: Dueling with Giants, Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness–The Beginning #1, A Furnace Sealed, All-the-Way House, Ragnarok and Roll, Without a License, Animal, a bunch of anthologies I’m in, including The Eye of Argon and the Further Adventures of Grignr the Barbarian, and many more besides!
I’ll also be doing some programming:
Friday
1-2pm: Opening Ceremonies (Freedom Hall A)
4.30-5.30pm: “Selfie Squares” w/Manly Battleships, Carolina Manga Library, and Uncle Yo (Freedom Hall A)
10-11pm: Guests Against Humanity! w/Bubblepop Entertainment and Carolina Manga (Freedom Hall A) — NOTE: this panel is 18+ and you must have an 18+ wristband from the con to enter the panel
midnight-2am: Eye of Argon Reading (Heritage A) — NOTE: this panel is 18+ and you must have an 18+ wristband from the con to enter the panel
Saturday
1.15-2.15pm: reading (Commonwealth 3)
4.45-5.45pm: “Writing in Other People’s Universes” (Commonwealth 1/2)
Here’s the current list of what’s coming of mine this year in book form. I also am continuing to write regularly for Tor.com (the Star Trek: Enterprise Rewatch, the superhero movie rewatch, reviews of the new Trek shows) and my Patreon (TV and movie reviews, and vignettes featuring my original characters).
Already out:
Phoenix Precinct. The latest novel in my epic fantasy/police procedure series sees Lieutenants Danthres Tresyllione and Torin ban Wyvald, detectives of the Cliff’s End Castle Guard, having to deal with the continued violence against refugees from the neighboring city-state of Barlin, the latest of which culminates in murder. But their investigation leads to much more than a simple hate crime, as they find corruption in the Castle Guard — and in the castle itself!
“Ticonderoga Beck and the Stalwart Squad” in Thrilling Adventure Yarns 2022. In 1938, Ticonderoga Beck defends the good ol’ U.S. of A. against those who would harm it, aided by his Stalwart Squad–his bodyguard, former heavyweight champion Sluggin’ Secundo Vecchia; his physician, the mysterious Oriental Chow-Lin; his pilot/chauffeur/mechanic Greg Johnson; his secretary Della Maze; and his cook, Greg’s sister Mary. But the Stalwart Squad has a secret! This is one of my favorite stories that I’ve ever written, and it’s just one of almost 30 pulp-style stories in this fabulous anthology edited by Robert Greenberger.
“This Little Light of Mine” in Phenomenons: Season of Darkness. My story in the second shared-world superhero anthology created and edited by Michael Jan Friedman sees Luminosity, the hero of the Bronx, having to find her best friend and partner, De’Andra Jones, who’s been kidnapped. Sarcastic Fringehead has also been taken, and Luminosity teams up with Red Sky, Black Hat, and La Particula y La Colosa to rescue them.
“You Can’t Buy Fate” in Star Trek Explorer #7. My first Trek fiction in thirteen years will be out on the 18th of April (which is also my 54th birthday, which is fabulous) in a story that pairs Nog and Ezri Dax on a first contact gone wrong taking place shortly after Deep Space Nine‘s finale.
Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness–The Beginning #2-5, and graphic novel. Issue #1 of this prequel to the Netflix animated series came out in December, and the second through fifth issues are scheduled to be released by TokyoPop over the next few months, with the 100-page graphic novel collecting the whole schmear being released shortly afterward (the ordering links below are for that graphic novel). The story stars fan favorite Leon Kennedy, trying to stop a terrorist attack in Pittsburgh.
“Whatever Joker Wants, Joker Goetz” in The Man Who Laughs: Exploring the Clown Prince of Crime. As part of this collection of essays about Batman’s greatest foe, edited by Lou Tambone and Rich Handley, I’ll be talking about the 2019 Joker movie and how it riffs on the Bernhard Goetz shooting in New York in the mid-1980s.
Coming later this year:
“The Thick Blue Line” in Sherlock Holmes: Cases by Candlelight Volume 2. Part of Christopher D Abbott’s “Watson Chronicles,” my contribution to this anthology has Holmes hired by a most surprising group of clients: the Scotland Yard detectives with whom he has often clashed. But they have a problem that only Holmes can solve…
“A Critical Hit with a Yo-Yo and Other Stories” in D20 or Die!: Memories of Old School Tabletop Roleplaying Games from Today’s Grown-Up Kids. Mine is but one of many reminisces about growing up in the 1980s and 1990s playing tabletop RPGs, put together by Jim Beard, with Forrest C. Helvie. I have a great time talking, not just about the RPGs I played in high school and college, but how they affected my professional life…
“‘The Curse of the Fatal Death’: I was Between the Covers with Steven Moffat” in Outside In Regenerates. I’ll be writing a piece on the 2000 Comic Relief parody special “The Curse of the Fatal Death,” which will also talk about how my professional path crossed with Steven Moffat in 1996…
Feat of Clay. Book 2 in the Bram Gold Adventures, this sequel to 2019’s A Furnace Sealed will see Bram hired to track down a golem that’s been animated. But his client is the guy who animated the golem that killed Bram’s parents a decade ago, which brings up all kinds of bad memories for Bram, who’s still smarting from the awful fate of his cousin in the last book. Plus, an older gentleman has a dragon in his back yard…
“The Legend of Long-Ears” in The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny. My contribution to this Weird Western anthology edited by Jonathan Maberry will have a team-up between two real-life legends of the West, Bass Reeves and Calamity Jane.
“Know Thyself Deathless” in Double Trouble: An Anthology of Two-Fisted Team-Ups. This will be part of the nifty anthology, published by the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers and co-edited by me and Jonathan Maberry, featuring team-ups of classic (and public domain) characters. My tale will feature Ayesha, a.k.a. “she who must be obeyed,” from H. Rider Haggard’s She, and the Yoruba goddess Egungun-oya.
Ragnarok and a Hard Place: More Tales of Cassie Zukav, Weirdness Magnet. The second collection of urban fantasy tales taking place in Key West involving rock music, scuba diving, folklore, Norse gods, and beer drinking, which will include Cassie stories that have appeared in anthologies, magazines, and collections over the last decade, plus a story that was previously only released to crowdfunders and a new story for this collection called “Stop Dragon My Heart Around.”
“What Do You Want from Me, I’m Old” in The Four ???? of the Apocalypse. My contribution to this anthology of alternate takes on the Biblical quartet will feature the four septuagenarians of the apocalypse. Wrenn Simms and I are also the editors of this nifty keen anthology that should finally be out this year…
“Another Dead Body on the Corner” in Joe Ledger: Unbreakable. In 2017, Jonathan Maberry opened up his Joe Ledger universe to other writers, including me. My story for Joe Ledger: Unstoppable, which was edited by Jonathan and Bryan Thomas Schmidt, won a Scribe Award for Best Short Story. I don’t know if history will repeat itself, but this time I’ve written a story featuring Ledger himself, during his time as a detective with the Baltimore City Police.
The Gold Archive: Birthright. This is an in-depth monograph examining the Star Trek: The Next Generation two-part episode “Birthright,” which focused on Data and Worf, the show’s two breakout characters. Not sure when this will be released, as the editor is dealing with some major health issues that have delayed things.
“Prezzo” in REDACTED. This has been turned in, but I can’t say where it will be appearing yet. I can say that the story takes place on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1932, and involves Italian immigrants and demons from hell.
KRAD readings (formerly KRAD COVID readings) is back! After a one-year hiatus, I’ll be doing a new reading in the middle of every month. This time ’round, it’s my story in the 2022 anthology Three Time Travelers Walk Into…, edited by Michael A. Ventrella and published by Fantastic Books. Each of us who contributed took three figures from different points in history and mashed them together. My story, “What You Can Become Tomorrow,” puts author Mary Shelley, Negro Leagues baseball player Josh Gibson, and NASA scientist Katherine Johnson together.
Coming soon from Becky Books, D20 or Die!, a book filled with reminisces about tabletop role-playing gaming in the waning days of the 20th century. This is a pure nostalgia-fest, edited by Jazzy Jim Beard, aided by Funky Forrest C. Helvie, and it’s tremendous fun. My own contribution is called “A Critical Hit with a Yo-Yo and Other Stories,” telling tales of my RPG adventures in high school, college, and my twenties, including how those experiences influenced my writing career.
The cover is above and here’s the back-cover copy:
D20 OR DIE! MEMORIES OF OLD-SCHOOL ROLE-PLAYING GAMES FROM TODAY’S GROWN-UP KIDS
Roll for Initiative!
A secret society once existed across the land, a roving band of thrill-seekers who defied the conventional pursuits of their elders to take on new personas in strange adventures that would shock the world! In basements, on back porches, and under barn roofs, they rolled the dice to decide their fates, hungry to play the ultimate games of chance!
This titanic tome will transport you back in time to the 1970s and 80s, an era when role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, Champions, and Traveller were new and exciting, attracting kids of all ages to draw fire from dragons, battle baneful bad guys, and surf the spaceways—all from the safety of a common card table.
In D20 OR DIE! writer-editor Jim Beard acts as a game-playing guru as he expands his “Memories from Today’s Grown-Up Kids” series of pop-culture reminisces to crack the covers of all the classic, old-school, tabletop role-laying games of legend and lore! Just watch those hit points, adventurers!
More information will be forthcoming as it’s revealed…..
Meant to post this sooner, but when the calendar flipped to March, Phoenix Precinct, the sixth novel in my series of epic fantasy/police procedurals, officially went on sale! You can now get the trade paperback or the eBook from whatever your online dealer of choice is. Or you can order the trade paperback directly from me and I’ll send you an autographed copy! (This applies to the other Precinct books, too, as well as several other titles that I have in stock…) Email me at krad@whysper.net or comment below for details…
Two Crazy 8 Press anthologies launched at Farpoint last weekend, and they’re now on sale to the general public.
Thrilling Adventure Yarns 2022 is an anthology edited by Robert Greenberger that has 28 pulp-style stories by a variety of nifty-keeno folks, including a new story by Doc Savage creator Lester Dent, plus tales by best-selling authors Jody Lynn Nye, Diane Duane, Raymond Benson, Greg Cox, Jean Rabe, Lawrence Watt-Evans, and Steven Savile; comics creators Harvey Kurtzman, Fabian Nicieza, Alex Segura, and Michelle Sears & Bart Sears; Hollywood veterans David Gerrold and Mark Verheiden; Crazy 8 Press stalwarts Peter David, Michael Jan Friedman, Robert Greenberger (him again), Russ Colchamiro, Mary Fan, Aaron Rosenberg, Paul Kupperberg, Hildy Silverman, and Geoffrey Thorne; as well as Jenifer Purcell Rosenberg, Lucienne Diver, Caitlin Rozakis, and pulp master Will Murray. Oh yeah, and also me: I wrote “Ticonderoga Beck and the Stalwart Squad” for this one, and it’s one of my favorite stories of mine.
Phenomenons: Season of Darkness is the second volume in the incredibly nifty shared-world superhero anthology created by Michael Jan Friedman. As with the first volume, subtitled Every Human Creature, my story in Season of Darkness is about Luminosity, the hero of the Bronx who can control lightwaves, but it’s also a big-ass team-up that includes Michael A. Burstein’s Red Sky, Mary Fan’s Sarcastic Fringehead, Aaron Rosenberg’s Black Hat, and Dan Hernandez’s La Colosa y La Particula. Besides my tale, entitled “This Little Light of Mine,” and stories by Michael, Mary, Aaron, and Dan featuring their heroes, as well as two yarns by editor MJF, there are stories by Russ Colchamiro & Hildy Silverman (a two-part tale featuring Penny Trouble and Syntax), D.H. Eisenberg (featuring Neutrino), Alex Segura (La Sombra), Robert Greenberger (agents of the Cyber Engagement Division), Paul Kupperberg (Torque), Peter David (Professor Paracelsus), Ilsa J. Bick (Darya and her pack), Marie Vibbert (Lipstick Lily), Glenn Hauman (<null>), and Geoffrey Thorne (Rascal).
Back in 2017, Jonathan Maberry opened up his hugely popular “Joe Ledger” series of fantastical thrillers to other authors to pen short stories involving his characters, which appeared in the anthology Joe Ledger: Unstoppable, which Jonathan co-edited with Bryan Thomas Schmidt. I was one of those other authors, and the result was a story that focused on one of Ledger’s team — Lydia “Warbride” Ruiz — called “Ganbatte.” It won me an award (my first and only one so far for a specific work of fiction), specifically a Scribe Award for Best Short Story from the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers. (Ironically, I shared that award with Jonathan, as it was a tie between me and Jonathan’s Planet of the Apes story “Banana Republic.”)
Later in 2023, there will be a second other-people-write-Ledger anthology, Joe Ledger: Unbreakable, and I’m in this one, too! This time I’ve written Ledger his own self in a story called “Another Dead Body on the Corner,” tale of Ledger’s time as a detective for the Baltimore City Police.
And holy crap, am I in good company. Here’s the full list of contributors, listed alphabetically:
While I did do The Klingon Art of War in 2014 and contributed material to Star Trek Adventures (bits of the Klingon Empire Core Rulebook in 2020 and coauthoring the adventure Incident at Kraav III with Fred Love in 2022), I haven’t written any straight-up Star Trek fiction since my novella in the 2010 anthology Seven Deadly Sins.
That streak will thankfully end in April of this year when Star Trek Explorer #7 is published with my Nog-and-Ezri Dax Deep Space Nine short story “You Can’t Buy Fate.” It takes place shortly after “What You Leave Behind” and involves a first contact with a new Gamma Quadrant species that goes horribly awry.
I had an absolute blast writing this tale, which is dedicated to the memory of the late great Aron Eisenberg, who played Nog.
I’ve got another story pitch in with Explorer, and we’ll see what happens. But it’s a real blast to finally be writing Trek fiction again……
Very soon now, the fine feathered finks at Crazy 8 Press will be publishing a new essay collection edited by Lou Tambone & Rich Handley that looks at the long and impressive history of Batman’s arch-nemesis, the Joker, in both comic books and in screen adaptations. Above you can see the final cover, and here are the full table of contents by an impressive set of scribes (and also me):
Introduction: “Let’s Get Nuts” by Rich Handley & Lou Tambone
Foreword: “Who is the Joker?: A Question from the Answer Man” by Bob Rozakis
“Text Messages of the Dark Knight” by Tom Mason
“The Banter and the Bat” by Michael Jan Friedman
“My, What Big Teeth You Have!” by Bobby Nash
“Delicious!: The Joker as Latin Loverboy” by Jim Beard
“One Card Short: Missing the Joke(r)” by Brian Cronin
“Something Tastes Funny–That’d Be the Clownfish” by Duy Tano
“Why I’m Fed Up with the Joker” by Alan J. Porter
“Is the Joker Gay?: Queer Representation and the Crown Prince of Crime” by Valentina Rossi
“Joker: Stop Punching Down” by Jo Duffy
“The Joke Book: Laughing Along with the Joker’s 1970s Solo Series” by Lou Tambone
“The Joke’s on the Audience” by Robert Greenberger
“One Hell of a Joke: From Laughing Magician to the Man Who Laughs” by Rich Handley
“Empathy for Emperor Joker” by Paul Cornish
“Don’t Get Even, Go Mad: Joker and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Days” by Joseph F. Berenato
“Why Do We Care that the Joker Hates Nazis?” by Alex Galer
“Toward a Short Comparison and Contrast of the Joker with Trickster Characters of African Folklore” by LaMar Forte
“Whatever Joker Wants, Joker Goetz” by Keith R.A. DeCandido
“Fixing the Laughter: Voice Casting the Joker on Batman: The Animated Series” by John Trumbull
“The Joker: Just How Crazy is He?” by Glenn Hauman
“Mountebank to Monster: The Bloody Road from ‘The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge’ to The Killing Joke” by Paul Kupperberg
Afterword: “The Last Laugh” by Steve Englehart
My essay is about the 2019 movie Joker in general and the parallels between some of the events of the movie and the Bernhard Goetz shooting here in New York in the 1980s. Though the one I’m most looking forward to reading is LaMar Forte’s one about Trickster myths…..
Coming very soon from the fine feathered finks at Crazy 8 Press: Thrilling Adventure Yarns 2022, the third in the pulp anthology series edited by Rollickin’ Robert Greenberger, and featuring my story “Ticonderoga Beck and the Stalwart Squad.”
Here’s the back cover copy:
The pulp magazine era was bristling with brawny men and statuesque women globetrotting, getting into and out of danger. Their exploits quickened the pulses of their readers, young and old alike. They gave rise to some of the most enduring heroes known the world round.
To celebrate this bygone era, Crazy 8 Press has assembled a stellar line-up of writers to produce new thrills and chills, spanning mystery, sword and sorcery, horror, science fiction, romance, and adventure.
Returning favorites Angela Hardwicke and Trouble are joined by the likes of Gunshade, the Penumbra, and Sword & Sorcery. Thrill to swordsmen and swordswomen, sorceresses, demons, the living dead, and perhaps the biggest baby you will ever encounter.
DELIGHT IN TALES BY:
Raymond Benson! Russ Colchamiro! Greg Cox! Peter David! Keith R.A. DeCandido! Lester Dent! Lucienne Diver! Diane Duane! Mary Fan! Michael Jan Friedman! David Gerrold! Robert Greenberger! Paul Kupperberg! Harvey Kurtzman! Will Murray! Fabian Nicieza! Jody Lynn Nye! Jean Rabe! Aaron Rosenberg! Jenifer Purcell Rosenberg! Caitlin Rozakis! Steven Savile! Bart Sears & Michelle Sears! Alex Segura! Hildy Silverman! Geoffrey Thorne! Mark Verheiden! Lawrence Watt-Evans!
EXULT IN PICTURES FROM:
Dennis Calero! Kerry Callen! Mike Collins! Gene Gonzales! Daerick Gröss! Karl Kesel! Peter Krause! Luke McDonnell! Adriano Moraes! Ron Randall! Tom Raney! Josef Rubinstein! Kevin West! Mark Wheatley! Rod Whigham!
Each collection is bigger and better than the one before it!
That last line is quite serious: the book is 430 pages of pulpy goodness! It should be going out to Kickstarter supporters soon, and we should also have copies at Farpoint 2023 in February. Ordering links should be available soon…
KRAD's Inaccurate Guide to Life 