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HELLGATE #4: Probe
 Recovering from the events of Cry Liberty, Neil Travers and Curtis Marin are pleased to be mere spectators for a time ... but the scenes at which they are on the sidelines are beyond their imagination. The super-carrier Shanghai has driven into the Deep Sky, poised for the invasion of Ulrand ... on Kjorin, Dario Sherratt believes he has discovered the key to the Zunshu stasis chamber ... in the storms of the Rabelais Drift, the Wastrel plays pool with cosmic forces ... in Marak citybottom, Vaurien and Jazinsky pit themselves against old enemies. And Michael Vidal prepares to fly the mission of his life, into the dark heart of Hellgate. A place the Resalq call El'arne ... 'The stormy side of the sky.' Into this void, the explorer Ernst Rabelais vanished many years ago; and out of it, the Zunshu strike at the new human worlds as they once destroyed the Resalq... For Travers and Marin, these are strange, bittersweet days, on one hand filled with self-discovery, on the other, shadowed by fear. They long for the so-called 'Colonial Wars' to be over, yet find themselves at the very crux of the danger, politics and intrigue as General Harrison Shapiro makes his gambit. The stakes are the liberty and the survival of the Deep Sky. Gay-themed SF at its most astonishing and rewarding. If you loved the NARC novels, and like serious SF with a strong gay twist, don't miss this series!  Read the first 10% of this novel right here, in PDF format
Novel length: 155,000 words Rated: adult (18+; sex, violence, language) ISBN 0-9758080-4-4 Publication date: 2006 Publisher: DreamCraft Price: $9.99 - ebook Cover: Jade      
 
  
READER REVIEWS: HELLGATE #4: Probe REVIEWED BY ARICIA GAVRIEL The flavor of CRY LIBERTY/PROBE changes in the middle. The first part is about running for your life and staying about one inch ahead of the truck that's about to roll you into the road till you're part of the tarmac (warning: don't start reading at nine pm. Dumb thing to do. I did it). The second part is like sitting on the bomb, knowing it's going to go off and not knowing when. (Another warning: keep tissues to hand. In the middle of this one, you're gonna need 'em. The toast is, 'Absent friends,' and no, I'm not going to tell who. But you'll need those tissues.) This one is also about a space battle so big, George Lucas probably wishes he thought of it (;-D). And a 'hero' so unexpected, I was speechless. Woah! And it's killing me because I can't say a thing here, because any syllable is going to come out like plot spoilers! (And DreamCraft will excommunicate me if I do that.) Somebody's going to kick my shins for this next remark, but I'm going to make it anyway. MK's got a vein of high-octane soap opera running through this series ... and I love it. There's the whole Tonio Teniko and Richard Varien thing (yes! [punches the air]), and then this other strand, with Harrison Shapiro and Jon Kim, and is Kim playing Harrison for a sucker? Is he an agent? For me ... sure, I love the tech stuff (god knows, I grew up on the trek movies. I speak techno babble better than I speak English) but you gotta love this thread of soap opera that's winding and coiling through these books!!! (Don't kill me for that, right?) HELLGATE #4: Probe REVIEWED BY J.GRENFELL Okay, Aricia, I won't kill you for getting off on the character development material! Call it soap opera at your peril, young lady! (LOL ... seriously, guys, we're drinking buds, okay?) You want soap, try tuning into something like The Young and the Restless, and you'll see what soap-shmoap is all about! Seriously, I do LOVE what MK is doing with these characters. I LOVE the thing that's going on between Mick Vidal and Neil Travers. Also, you get what they call the 'warm fuzzies' from the Leon Sherratt and Roy Arlott relationship. These are very, very male characters. Any one of them would make a superb role model. The soldier, the scholar, the statesman. The 'fact of their gayness,' if you'll forgive the phrase, is bliss. Incidentally, I read a review of the HELLGATE series somewhere on the web (sorry, I have no idea where), and some reader was saying it was 'too technical' ... huh? Sure, there's tech stuff in these books. They're set against a very real science background, so they better have a firm tech foundation, otherwise they'll fast bomb out into what Aricia called, in the previous review, 'techno babble.' Thanks heavens MK either knows his science or is bloody good at faking it. But the tech background in these books is exactly that: BACKGROUND. And Aricia Gav just made a fine point. It's the CHARACTERS which drive these books. You want to call it soap opera? Oh, boy. The Bold and the Beautiful would kill to get their hands on these characters and situations. In legitimate fiction this material is called character development. (And IMHO these books most assuredly are legit fiction, even if they're SF, and gay ... what's wrong with gay SF, for cryin' out loud, to quote a currently well-known icon on the boob-tube.) Do I have a criticism? Only that MK needs to get his finger out and write the next one sometime soon! [According to MK, there's a huge HELLGATE episode due in 2009. Since we now have the printing done at Lulu.com, we don't have to manacle Mel to the 350pp (about 210,000 word) limit. Lulu can handle up to 700p in paperback and 800pp in harcover, so Mel can kick off the leg-irons and let the imagination run. On the subject of what's soap opera (!), MK just chucked, albeit somewhat evilly. And we totally agree: the character relationships are getting so rich and complex in the HELLGATE books, the technological aspect is definitely 'playing second string' since DEEP SKY. And we like it! -ED] Mel Keegan comments on PROBE I'm proud of this book (in fact, I'm proud of the whole series, but I think PROBE is the best one so far). The folks at DreamCraft who proofread it prior to printing go one better than that: I'm being told it's the best *book* I've written. Well, that could depend on what you want to get out of a book: if gay SF is your favorite fiction, you could be agreeing with the proofreaders! For those aficionados of the great historical saga -- hang on, stay tuned, come back next month, because as soon as I finished my final check of the PROBE galley, I began the final work on the DANGEROUS MOONLIGHT galley! But I'm supposed to be commenting on PROBE here, so don't let me wander (too far) off topic. Speaking as the writer, the best thing about getting to #4 of a series is, it's like coming home. You know all the characters, they welcome you back. In imagination, I can walk into Shapiro's office, or walk into the ops room aboard the Wastrel, and I'm there. I can actually hear these characters talking to me: they have clear and distinct voices, and each one has a speech pattern of his or her own. There are characters I love (duh), and those I've come to enjoy writing because I dislike them so much: Senator Rutherford, Sergei van Donne ...! A long time ago, a reader said to me she thought it was odd (perhaps a mistake??) that I'd gone to all that time and trouble to develop a villain -- Colonel Wayne Mulholland -- only to promptly kill him off. The fact is, there were better villains to come: Mulholland was vicious, but he was limited. He had no plenipotentiary powers, and since he worked under the auspices of the DeepSky Fleet, he had no connections among the smugglers and Freespacers. As we cruise into Book 5, whole vistas of opportunity are opening up. I can hardly wait to get into the next 'arc' of the story. It's worked up a full head of steam, and has a life of its own. There wasn't much in the way of world-building this time around, but I had the opportunity to go back to El Khouri, look at 'ground zero,' and examine what the heck happened there ... and what the logical outcome of it would be. One really constructive comment was made to me, literally as we were finalizing the galley: I should go back into Chapter Two of PROBE and actually decribe, explain, what happened in the Event. It was an implosion ... but here we are with half a hemisphere wrecked, and a nuclear winter in progress. Isn't that what happens when there's been an EX-plosion? Yep. And it's also going to happen when you have a #&%!ing-great-big IM-plosion. But perhaps some readers are left wondering why, so let me explain ... turn to Chapter Two of PROBE, the El Khouri segment. There's so much in PROBE, looking at it now, "I can't believe I did that." I actually plotted the whole thing *and* CRY LIBERTY, as the same story. My brain must have gone out for pizza and forgotten to come home. By the time I was done with PROBE, it was virtually the same length as CRY LIBERTY, and if we'd tried to sandwich both books under one cover, you'd have had a paperback of about 530pp. (The largest/thickest volume DreamCraft can produce is about 425pp). I'd like to say I've learned my lesson, but I just took a look at the plot notes for the next HELLGATE segment. And I do believe I need to go in there and perform some minor surgery before I start writing. For now, let me close here ... but I will reiterate the comment I made a few weeks ago: I'm close to speechless (and that's saying a lot fot me!). This one is a candidate for the best cover we've done yet -- it has an astonishing dynamism -- and the 'face design' process has resulted in a Mick Vidal who is so close to the vision I had in mind, it's eerie. Full marks to Jade for the face work and the background painting, and to Dave, who engineered the 'drift ship' in 3D! |
      
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