New books, and I'm finally writing!

I finished the first segment of Daniel Leon's storyline for the "Virtual Season of Heroes", and the creators really liked it. I'm still thinking about the next segment, and I hope it's just as good.

Also, I'm done with Theodore Judson's Fitzpatrick's War. I found myself really enjoying it. It has a fairly depressing premise (the book itself is said to be the "unabridged version" of the memoirs of Sir Robert Bruce, a former friend of Fitzpatrick, who is, in the time that this version of the memoir is published, a glorious war hero of times past), but it is stuffed with little bits of humour, most of it coming from the footnotes of the fictional "editor" of these memoirs, who occasionally fleshes out a point that Robert mentions, or discredits Robert's accounts of Fitzpatrick's mass-murdering deeds as wholely uncredited and spiteful lies.

The depressing aspect is that Robert writes his memoirs in order to show the world the truth about Fitzpatrick's rule, but in the future, he is still unbelieved.

The world itself is post-apocalyptic. All electricity is lost or banned by the usage of Storm Machines, weapons created during the Electronic Age (that is, our present age) that caused loads of suffering and death and allowed all of Canada and the United States to merge into a Christian fundamentalist confederacy known as the Yukon. So while medicine and weaponry have advanced, the social climate is very much like that of imperialist Britain.

The unique setting, a mixture of old-fashioned social beliefs and futuristic steam technology and feudal politics, creates a very interesting world that was intriguing enough to forgive the occasional info dump. On occasion, the author spends pages and pages on detailed descriptions of weapons and military manoeuvres, none of which is any interest to me, but if you can slog through that, the rest of the narrative is highly entertaining.