Podcasting – Change of Pace

We’ve been sticking with the Privateer novella for a while now, so we thought that tomorrow we’d give you a taste of my current project, a novel tentatively titled Alchemist. I’ll let Kate do her usual great job of setting up the background for tomorrow’s excerpt, but I thought that I would take a moment to describe the project as a whole.

Alchemist has been kicking around in my head for a while now. I’ve always been a fan of high fantasy. I cut my teeth on Tolkein in junior high, I discovered Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series about the same time I got married, and I devoured George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series in the recent past. I suppose that you could even add my teenaged liaisons with Frank Herbert’s Duneand Asimov’s Foundation to this list, even though both are science fiction. Regardless, what has attracted me to this type of fiction is the immense amount of world-building that took place before the first words could even be put on paper. Now that I have a novel length work under my belt (damn all slush piles anyway), two lengthy novellas, and a host of shorts, I finally feel as though I’m beginning to develop the chops to be able to write such a piece with a degree of credibility.

Something that has always fascinated me is the intersection between faith and reason. I’m trained as a scientist, yet my undergraduate education was at the hands of a liberal arts college with a decidedly Christian focus. I’m constantly wrestling with not just what it means to be human, but what it means to be human in a world dominated by reason and materialism. It is from this struggle that the world of Alchemist was born.

Imagine a world were a unifying relgion has fallen on hard times. People lose faith in the miracles of the past because modern-day practitioners of alchemy can craft miracles that defy common description. Corruption and bigotry has ruined the modern church. The forces of science are unleashed on an unsuspecting and largely ignorant world without the proper background or education to understand them. Place this sociological upheaval against the backdrop of a society experiencing the first throes of mercantilism and industrial revolution that is in direct opposition to its feudal history, and you have the world of Alchemist.

Tomorrow, Kate will introduce you to Tobias, an alchemist who comes by his knowledge in ways that are somewhat less than ethical.

As always, I appreciate comments and emails (even suggestions if you have them). We’ll return to Europa next week to discover what becomes of Anthony Mendoza, but for now, I would urge you to enjoy a change of pace.