Excerpt from Crisis in Fire and Snow

 

 It's been a long weekend. I'm tired. So tired. You needn't suffer. Feast upon this excerpt from Crisis in Fire and Snow:

Hugh ran through trees and brush along a narrow trail. Leaves and branches passed in a close green blur, occasionally grabbing at his clothing or slapping him in the face. Two braves followed close behind. One of them whooped from time to time, and Hugh renewed his flagging efforts at the unnerving encouragement.

He broke into a clearing. A little field of wheat stretched between him and a rail fence. A log cabin rose beyond the fence. Hugh leaped into the wheat, still running at top speed. He went faster without the leaves and branches clawing at him. The wheat was pale and mature, but not tall, and offered little resistance. Fifty strides into the field, he heard the whoops of two warriors. He didn’t look back.

Hugh leaped the rail fence without slowing. He had doubted for a moment that he would clear the obstacle, but the memory of jumping over crates and barrels in London under the threat of arrest persuaded him. While the natives might spare him a stern lecture, experience informed him that they would surpass the London police in both general unkindness and specific intent to harm.

...

H

ugh lunged against the door. It fell open and he tumbled inside as the tomahawk passed through the space his head had occupied a moment before. Hugh sprang to his feet and dropped the bar across the door as he pushed it closed. The windows were already shuttered.

“Sweet England, I never should’ve left ye,” he muttered.

He took rapid account of his resources. He had his musket and his pack along with his knife, tomahawk, and one stone cat antler—he had lost the other antler somewhere. Before he could begin an inventory of the room, war cries and pounding came from outside the door. Tomahawks bit into the wood like teeth into a ripe apple. Fortunately, the door hung on metal hinges and not wood or leather. He scanned the room. A table and three chairs, an empty fireplace, and a bedframe were the most notable features. There were two windows in the wall opposite the door and another in the wall opposite the fireplace, above the foot of the bed.

The pounding and chopping continued at the door.

A muzzle pushed through the loophole in the shutter by the bed. Hugh raised his firearm and fired as a painted face became visible at the other end of the intruding weapon. The musket thundered and the warrior fell away. The native’s firelock remained stuck in the loophole. Hugh dropped his own weapon and dragged the musket into the cabin. He confirmed that it had powder in the pan before placing it on the table. He removed his pack and slung it into the corner beneath the leather straps of the bed.

He began reloading his own weapon and grumbled, “Lee can have his magic hat. Maybe the magic is all gone or only works for him.”

He completed the reload and swiped the hat from his head. “There’s no point in breaking the hat’s streak of good luck on my account.” He threw the cap into the fireplace before taking a musket in each hand to face the splintering door.

_________________

Hugh is a character that became more interesting as the series progressed. He began as an odd man in the troop of dragon hunters. He was a complainer and had designs on Alex's stone--he was a criminal, after all. A lot of things happened to file down the greedy edge on Hugh's character and he has decided to become a frontiersman like the indispensable Lee. He's in the thick of it now with hostile Indians, stone cats, dragonlings, and the other denizens of the frontier out to relieve him of that burden called life.

Back to the Chateau

 

 I started off the weekend by traveling across the state. I knew I would get hungry along the way, and refuse to compromise when it comes to nutrition. I walked out of the gas station with the priceless gems pictured below. Actually, they were priced at a little over five dollars -- which I thought was a good deal when compared with the package of six of these beauties for which they were asking almost three dollars.

 

 

Of course, I already had a bottle of pop in the car to keep myself properly hydrated. The traffic got worse as the day wore on, but I completed the journey without notable incident. Mowing and replacing a check valve broke the monotony of packing stuff. Fortunately, a good friend was able to give me a hand with one of those tasks. 

I did get two welcome breaks. First, Les Freres Corses came to pick up the feline from which Le Chateau au Chat Gris derives its nomenclature--our place in Byzantium isn't appropriate for her wild nature--and we stopped by the local shake shop for shakes and fries. The second distraction came in the form of a football game that I had to watch as I was too exhausted to do anything else. Although not terribly exciting, I found the 69-0 score completely satisfying. It may be the only time I get to watch that team play this year.

After our return to the eastern empire, I was invited for some gaming fun and passed this afternoon playing the rescue at the ruins scenario three times. The green men came away victorious twice, and the red men successfully rescued the princess and slayed the green men once. Unfortunately, the great white ape didn't make an appearance, so we did not get to experience martian red men being clubbed, rent, and flung against the ruins. I also forgot to take any pictures of the event.

 

Nick Nethery

 Interview with Nick Nethery

Author of

Relics of the Fallen

 

Please tell me a little about your new book published by Raconteur Press.

            Relics of the Fallen.  Dan Kelly, an Army bomb technician getting close to retirement, is recruited into a secret unit dealing with highly advanced, dangerous artifacts and devices scattered around Earth by…who?  Aliens?  A human civilization that predated our known history?  We find out as Dan finds out.

            I think of Relics of the Fallen as military science fiction, but it could also be called military fantasy or military thriller.

            I wrote most of it on lunch breaks when I was stationed in the Netherlands working for NATO.  My boss knew I was retiring soon and was gracious enough to let me shut my office door and just write during my lunch hour.  (Thanks, Ralph!)

            You can enjoy it as a standalone book, but I’ve got four more ideated and the next two outlined.  I’m starting on the next book as soon as I’m done with my current project, which will be very soon.

 

Where did you get the idea for this book or series?

            My own career as a bomb technician and my love of science fiction combined to inspire the idea.  I was deeply steeped in ordnance from different countries and was struck by how much they vary.  Logically, a howitzer round or a landmine should look the same no matter who makes it, right?  But no, they’re wildly different.  The Soviets and Chinese don’t care about their soldiers, so their ordnance is made with many fewer safety features.  The Italians, of all people, make the best landmines in the world.  GREAT landmines, just head and shoulders above anyone else.  There are lots of little examples like that.  The wide range of both quality and philosophy of ordnance intrigued me, so I started wondering what ordnance made be an alien race would look like.

I also love “alien archaeology” or “alien artifact” themed fiction like The Fifth Element, the books of Jack McDevitt, The Expanse, Halo, Escape Velocity…I could go on.  Many of those stories inspired me as well.

 

Do you write in more than one genre?

            Yes!  I lean toward SF/F because it’s what I prefer to read, but I’ve written short stories that are westerns, mysteries, and just conventional military thriller.  I’ve had some nonfiction articles in various professional magazines like Proceedings, the in-house magazine for the US Naval Institute, and a couple of other places.  I wrote for Duffel Blog (military satire) for years.  I’m also nearing completion of a fantasy novel.

Tell me about something that you believe makes your writing unique or worthy of attention.

            I try to have a love for my characters, and I hope it shines through.  Almost all my characters are based on or strongly resemble people I’ve been lucky enough to work or serve with over my adult life, or interesting people I grew up around in my crazy little Southern small town.  My hope is that my characters are all rich in their own way, and feel like they’re living their own lives that the reader might only glimpse narrowly.  My favorite games and movies make me believe that we’re only getting a smidgen of the full picture.  I vividly remember playing one of the Fallout games, I can’t remember if it was 3 or New Vegas, but it was night, pitch black, and I came over a ridge and saw muzzle flashes and lasers out in the dark.  I used the scope on my rifle to look at what was going on.  There was a whole huge battle playing out between some Super Mutants on one side and some bandits on the other, and it went on for several minutes.  None of them knew I was there watching them, and I just let them kill each other while I watched.  Once the fight was over, I just wandered off.  It made the world of the game feel so rich, like I was just a tiny part of it.  I love the idea of the world my characters live in just carrying on around and without them.  I want to bring that to my writing.

 

Is there anything about your personal history or personality that manifests strongly in your writing?

            My dark humor and complete lack of seriousness in all situations.  People who take themselves too seriously amuse me, so I enjoy deflating them a little, and gallows humor is great for that.  My characters frequently whistle past the graveyard, because they’re in terrible situations, and what else is there to do but joke?  If you’re in a hopeless situation, you might as well make the people around you laugh one last time.

 

What would be helpful for readers to know about you? Or something that might surprise to know them about you?

            I don’t know about helpful or surprising, but a lot of my writing is drawn not just from my experiences in the military but with my kids.  The older boys and I have a long-running game of Gloomhaven that we’ve had going for a couple of years now (we’re going slowly!), and all of them, once they reach about seven years old, get to play through all the Halo games with me.  Up to Halo 4, that is.  Everything after it isn’t worth it.  It’s one of the great disappointments of my life that first person shooters have started to get away from split-screen co-op.  No explanation justifies this.  Anyway, playing through Halo with Dad has become a sort of rite of passage for the kids.  I’m most of the way through the first Halo with my third, and he’s loving it.  I can’t wait to get to the later ones before 4, like ODST and Reach.

Last year I also got to hike Hadrian’s Wall with my oldest son.  That was truly an experience I will remember for life.  I like the idea of reinforcing for my kids that if you’re tired, or the going gets tough, we still have to march.  We still have to do the job.  I’ve got the knees of a guy forty years older because of my time in the army, but I walked every step of that damn wall, and along the way we got to share some amazing moments together.  I am proud that I demonstrated for my boy that no matter how tired or sore you are, you don’t call a cab or give up.  You keep putting one foot in front of the other.  I also owe a lot to the scoutmaster (we did it with our Boy Scout troop) for lending me one of his hiking sticks.  Pro tip: hiking sticks REALLY help if you have bad knees.

Of course it was a good time that not many people ever get to experience, shared with my oldest boy, but it was also incredibly inspiring to me as an aspiring writer.  We visited an unearthed Mithras temple, six or eight Roman forts and a very large Roman bathhouse, and the scenery was almost always breathtaking.  You can’t beat doing challenging things that you’re not sure you can finish.  It forces you to dig deep and find toughness you didn’t know you had, and it’s inspiring as hell.

 

Excluding your own work, what underrated author or book would you recommend that more people read? Why?

            Wallace Breem was a librarian at a law school library (I think, if I’ve understood his bio correctly) and only wrote a handful of works of fiction, all about the Roman Empire.  One of them was The Legate’s Daughter, a fantastic book about a hopeless mission with little hope of success.  Another is maybe my favorite book of all time, Eagle in the Snow, about the doomed efforts to stop the barbarians from crossing the Rhine in 406, which ended up being the beginning of the end of the Western empire.  Both books are dark without being hopeless, and cynical enough that they remind me that no matter what time or place, a soldier is a soldier.

            I’d recommend Neal Asher here, but he’s already pretty popular, so I’ll just say, his Prador alien species, the crab analogues whose culture is ultra-violent and prizes selfishness and betrayal above all else, are the most terrifying alien species I’ve encountered in fiction.  The Quarn from In Fury Born are great (radial symmetry!), and David Gerrold’s Chtorr species may be scary as well, but the Prador take the cake.

            My favorite writer, though, is Tim Powers.  He specializes in speculative fiction about real historical figures and imagines a supernatural explanation for unexplained things in their lives or gaps in our historical knowledge of their actions.  Powers also does great science fiction, but he truly excels at the historical fantasy stuff.  I wrote a review of his latest, My Brother’s Keeper, for the Raconteur substack.

            I also would recommend some writers we at Raconteur have published this last year, like Fred Phillips, Wally Waltner, and J. Kenton Pierce.  All of them write such good stuff but with a unique voice.  I have loved everything I’ve read from them.  I knew them from short story submissions, and they’re so good at that you won’t believe it, but the novels from all three are just…they’re just so good.  I’m jealous of their creativity and talent.  I’m sitting here as a bomb tech writing a story about a bomb tech, playing small ball, but they’re on the varsity team smacking homers out of the park with incredible rich worldbuilding in fantasy and science fiction.  I’m a little in awe to be in such amazing company.

 

Which of your books do you most highly recommend? Why?

            I only have the one out, so for the moment I recommend Relics of the Fallen!

What would you hope a reader would take away from experiencing that book?

            A wonder about things we are not yet able to understand and explain.  The strong bonds that I’ve only ever seen form quickly and deeply in small units of highly-trained professionals doing important, rewarding work.  Hopefully, some rumination on whether the “magical” artifacts in our own mythologies and folklores are really any different for us than, say, Wifi or the iPhone would be for someone living in 1925.

 

How did you get involved with Raconteur Press?

            The DOD has a program for servicemembers departing the military called Skillbridge.  (The Army calls it CSP, Career Skills Program, but it’s the same thing.)  For a few months before you’re discharged, you still draw your paycheck, but instead of reporting for duty, you work with a private industry partner as an intern.  I approached several publishers to ask about interning with them, but no one seemed that enthusiastic about it when I said I was primarily interested in writing.  My goal was not to be a gopher or a mailroom guy.  I didn’t mind getting my hands dirty—editing, social media, layout, submissions reader, whatever—but I wanted to write as well.  Raconteur was the first publisher which agreed to at least look at what I wrote for possible inclusion in anthologies.

            Not long into the Raconteur internship, some scheduling conflicts arose and an anthology was left without an editor, and I volunteered to take over.  That was Space Marines III, and I’ve done several anthologies since then.  I’ve also learned about editing, putting together a well-sequenced collection, doing layouts for print and eBooks, social media…what am I leaving out?  I’ve learned a lot, and much of it has helped me develop as a writer as well.  One of the best pieces of advice I would give aspiring writers is to edit an anthology.  You gain a ton of knowledge very quickly.  I think it’s made me a much better writer.

You’ve edited some anthologies at Raconteur, do you have a favorite of those?

            I don’t have a favorite, but I have a habit of thinking my “best” one is the one I’ve done most recently.  Each one teaches me something else about pacing, consistency and variety, coordination, or even just engaging with submitting writers.  My next one is Mercs and Mayhem, so ask me after that one is out!

 

 What short stories have you had published?

            Let me see.  Crowdfunded, which I co-wrote with Spearman Burke and which won a short fiction contest sponsored by Proceedings, the Navy’s professional magazine.  Current Affairs, a story about a mermaid for hire.  Several stories in various Raconteur anthologies.  You can find links to all of these on my website, and my nonfiction work as well.

            I can also share here, for the first time, that I’ve got a story in the upcoming Monster Hunter Files volume 2, an anthology set in Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International universe.  I wrote it with my writing partner, Mike Burke, and I’m pretty proud of it.  Like a lot of my writing, it’s informed by our experiences.  I lived and worked in Stuttgart, so I know the setting a little more than most; and Mike is like a genius at tactical tracking, so he was able to write the tracking scenes really well.  I’m looking forward to seeing it published in March of 2026.  The name of the story is Monsterkommando.  It was a blast to write.  Mike’s about the best writing partner I could ask for, other than his brutal and efficient hatred of double spaces between sentences.  Get over it, Mike!

 

Is there a character in the works of your favorite authors that you would enjoy being, or a place in those works where you would enjoy going?

            I would absolutely love to be an AI or augmented human in Neal Asher’s Polity universe.  The possibilities seem endless to me, in a world where anyone can effectively sidestep the natural aging process and expand his mind to allow much higher thinking.  I’m not sure if his most recent work explores it, because I’ve been so busy I haven’t read the last couple, but after the Prador War in his Polity series, a bunch of the AIs created to fight the war just go off on their own into uncharted space.  They’re effectively immortal, so time isn’t a concern for them, so they just point their ships toward somewhere nobody has ever been, and that’s the last humanity ever hears from them.  What must they be experiencing in the new territory they find?  The potential is almost too much for me to comprehend.  I would love to be one of them, and I hope Asher writes about them someday.

 

With reference to your own works, is there a character or place you particularly like?

            I like the Dungeon, the facility in Relics of the Fallen where the Wormwood organization tests and analyzes the various artifacts that have been recovered from around the world.  It seems like a place that would never be boring and where I could spend years learning and being amazed.

            As far as characters, I like Kat, the wife in Relics.  I like Namura, the novice accompanying the main character in the fantasy book I’m currently writing.  There’s a girlfriend character who is named but whom we have not met (yet) in a couple of short stories I have written about a rural “county wizard,” one of which appeared in the second Wyrd West collection.  The people who motivate my main characters intrigue me sometimes more than the protagonists themselves.  A hero does what he does because he loves someone.  He puts his own mortal body in between danger and the people he loves.  Sometimes those people are no longer with him, just a memory, but he still does what he does from love or affection.  Someone recharges his batteries and gives him a rock to ground himself upon.  That someone is his One Thing he can rely on—and is exponentially more damaging to him if they betray him, seem to lose interest in him, treat him poorly or let him down.  For all these reasons, I find spouses, children and significant others intriguing as characters.

 

What question do you wish you would get asked more often?

            “You want to come housesit at my villa on the Aegean?  Or Ibiza?  Or Malibu?”

 

Do you have a catch-phrase or quote that you like? What is it? And why do you choose it?

            “Fear not, for I am with you.”  From the book of Isaiah.  I wore that on a chain for much of my adult life and prior career.  It reminds me that fear, like despair, is a sin.  No cause is ever truly lost, although your part in it might end.  Even if you don’t have a faith, I think it’s a good sentiment to remember.  Take risks.  Ask for the raise, volunteer for the interesting missions (God knows I did, and had possibly the most interesting career of anyone I know), dye your hair that weird color you’ve been thinking about, wear that loud shirt.  Go chat up that gorgeous girl!  I wish more than anything that I had somebody when I was twelve or so to tell me to stop being shy and just go talk to the girl.

One of the founders of Khan Academy put it a different way: “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?”  I think that’s a good philosophy.  Take leaps.  Do the scary thing.  Get outside your comfort zone.  For the awkward, introverted nerd I was as a kid, and who still occupies much of my soul, it reminds and encourages me to take risks.

 

Do you have a nickname? How did you get it?

            Just Nick.  Nicholas sounds so formal to me.  I’m not Father Christmas. 

 _________________________

Thanks to Nick for Participating. I walked right into that last one, didn't I? I should've revised that  question.

 I had a weekend traveling, digging, packing, and hauling. Zero stars given. Would not recommend - especially the digging. At least the ground wasn't too hard and the associated repair bears the fruits of apparent success. Also, during the traveling part, I did get to finish listening to The Great American Novel - by which I mean The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The narrator was great. I give it 5 out of 5 stars and do highly recommend. I wish I had time to delve into that book again and share thoughts both profound and goofy. The language and expressions used by Huck really struck me this time; that  alone makes reading the book a delight and deserves its own separate study.