Tuesday, November 2, 2010

A whole Pak of trouble

Pak are humanity's (fortunately only fictional) cousins: lean, mean -- and scary smart -- fighting machines. In Destroyer of Worlds (which I first announced here), the Pak were the latest menace to confront the Puppeteers, aboard the Fleet of Worlds, and their human allies.

As of today, Destroyer of Worlds is out in paperback.

I've been delighted with the reviews since the novel debuted. To mention only a few:

"Fun, fast, and full of ... remarkable aliens."
— SFrevu

" ... An absorbing mix of problems and puzzles and conflicts, space battles and interrogations and negotiations, shot through with fresh takes on familiar tropes and themes."
— Locus

"You'll find plenty here to enjoy. There are bizarre aliens both old and new; there's more advanced technology than you can shake a neutron star at; there are ideas to make your head spin."
— Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Curious? Check out a sample of the novel on the publisher's website or click through to Amazon.

2 comments:

Bar said...

Hi Ed
I must say that it's very refreshing for us readers to be able to have contact "with the man" as they say. I was just wondering. In Destroyer I got the impression that the Outsiders don't really have too much of a clue how some of their weird hi-tec stuff (hyperdrive, reactionless drive etc) work. The only aliens that Larry invented who really seemed to know where hyperdrive came from were the Thrintun, and maybe the Tnictipun. Although maybe some other race developed this particular field of science for the Thrints. So would it be possible that the Outsiders happened upon all this technology (and a couple of tnuctip) in stasis, and maybe there is a story in it.

Best regards

Bar

Edward M. Lerner said...

Hi Bar,

It's refreshing for authors, too, to interact with readers. Writing is a solitary activity.

As you say, in Destroyer of Worlds it is revealed the Outsiders don't have a full explanation for some of their tech. (They're like humans that way. Case in point: we Earthlings use solid-state circuits despite the fact that the quantum-mechanical theory underlying that whole industry is complex math -- reliant upon imaginary numbers and cute tricks to avoid divide-by-zero problems -- about whose physical meaning physicists disagree. Indeed, some physicists insist that there's something inherently wrong about asking what QM means.)

Did Outsiders happen upon Thrintin or Tnuctipun relics? It's hard to believe otherwise. Other Known Space species, with far less time spent spacefaring, have found ancient stasis boxes.

That said, it's not obvious that Thrintin and Outsider hyperdrives exploit the same physical principles. See the fan essay "Hyperspace Theory & Practice" at http://www.freewebs.com/knownspace/articles.htm/#Hyperspace.

- Ed