late again – sorry people – got really busy.
Anyway – here is this weeks.

Most people seemed satisfied with that. He kept moving south along the coast, although at one stage, he had to detour to a considerable distance inland to avoid the radioactive ruins of a large city. He had a run-in with a small group of armed refugees, or thugs, or survivors. They’d tried to shake him down for whatever he possessed, which at the time wasn’t much, but he took exception to it. Unfortunately for the six thugs, most of them allowed themselves to get too close to him, so when he moved at his genetically enhanced speed, they died quickly and without being able to injure him. One man did manage to get a couple of shots off, but they went wide in the confusion of the fight.

The little battle presented him with weapons, useful supplies, and some useless money, as the economy had collapsed completely by that point. He did gain some half-decent clothes to replace the rags he had been walking around in for months. His other problem was that his combat boots were getting pretty ragged, but he had to keep them as none of the other men’s boots fitted. In the end, he only took three guns. He took two of the assault rifles the men had been armed with, with nearly all the available ammunition for those weapons, and a small pistol he didn’t recognize, but the man had clips for it, so he found a pocket on his uniform to fit them in and kept the gun.

One of the men had a usable backpack which he added to his ensemble and left all the other bits and pieces where the men lay. And the bodies. He felt no need to waste time and energy burying them. After that, it took him months but eventually, he reached the port of Karwar, which had somehow not been nuked. Although it was so damaged, it looked like a bomb had hit the city. He had to detour inland to finally get across the Kali River as the bridge had been destroyed at some point. As had the dam further up the river, which had caused a lot of destruction in the city, he guessed.

He spent some considerable time at Karwar, passing as a native from the north with his yokel accent. Eventually, his lack of apparent aging led to him taking a job on a ship as a deckhand. The ship mostly traveled the western Indian Ocean, calling at ports that hadn’t been bombed during the war. The trading wasn’t brilliant, and the lack of a suitable port where the ship could be dry-docked and the hull maintained would eventually result in the ship sinking.

Andrew wasn’t sure how long Mikail spent on the first ship, but at some point, he swapped vessels to one that traded between Southern Africa and South America. The ship was attacked by pirates in the South Atlantic some years later. Mikail was instrumental in driving them off but having shown his martial abilities to the crew, he thought it best to disappear and he jumped ship in South Africa.

–

Sorry people- real life got in the way. (I.e. I was busy and forgot)

His own father had lived for so long that he had been forced to do the fake death trick as well. In fact, both his father and grandmother had supposedly died in a boat tragedy off Nowra many years before Andrew was born. His grandmother had aged badly over the last forty years and died for real thirteen years ago. His father had not had any children before his first death, and it had taken him ten years into his new life here in Tweededs before he had found and married Cheryl Harkness.

His father had been fifty at the time but looked and passed for twenty-five. Andrew was their second child. Allison had been stillborn four years before Andrew had been conceived, and he was approaching his sixteenth birthday in two months. Which meant his father was at least seventy but still looked to be in his thirties. His younger sister Caroline was now ten, and he was worried about how she would go when she got to puberty.

But that wasn’t the end of the strange antecedents in his family. His mother was at least fifty and possibly older as she was careful never to give any clues as to her real age. She was the daughter of Arthur Harkness and Miranda Anderton. Except her surname was really Andropov. One of the events that led to the nuclear war was the assault on a train in the subcontinent by a group of Russians who were genetically engineered super soldiers who had managed to get free of their handlers and then immediately run amok.

While all the rest of his fellow soldiers grabbed women and then fled into the rough terrain, Michail Andropov had found a culvert and followed that to a stream where he had hidden for two days surviving on muddy water. The area had been searched thoroughly by allied forces, yet they somehow missed him despite troops passing close by several times. Over the next week, mostly moving at night, he kept up a southerly march until nearly a month after the train assault, he reached the coast in what had been Pakistan, and because there had been a nuclear explosion to his west, he headed east-southeast along the coast.

He stayed in the more sparsely settled farm areas, although there were plenty of refugees to hide amongst as the nuclear war lashed the world. He gradually picked up the local language or languages along the way, although at first, he presented himself as a casualty of the war. He had found a discarded robe or something that had been splashed with blood, now dried, which he ripped up and turned into a turban of sorts. He got around his lack of the local language by miming holding and firing a gun, then a shell dropping to produce a big explosion, and he point his blood-soaked, cloth-wrapped head and then wave his hands as if he couldn’t hear.

Andrew knew he was probably a Tallie as well, amongst other things. His paternal grandmother had been one of the very few full-on engineered people to escape North America. Perhaps the only one. She had been in the local town’s hospital when multiple nuclear missiles had hit the main genetic engineering site. Although severely burned, she had somehow survived radiation poisoning and slowly made her way south over the course of the next decade until she reached a part of Central America that had not been targeted.

Unfortunately, there was a lot of anti-engineered prejudice in the area, so when a ship called planning to sail to southern Africa, she went for the ride. Southern Africa was not as badly hit as the northern hemisphere. All the big cities were glowing ruins, but there hadn’t been the saturation bombing that had occurred in most of the northern hemisphere countries. On the other hand, most whites had been in the cities, so she felt out of place and was treated like a second-class person because of her skin color.

A couple of years there, and when a rickety boat came through heading for India, she went with it. She arrived just in time for a war to break out between two rival successor states in the country’s southern half. As was the case elsewhere, most of the major cities had been bombed here as well as many of the military sites. There was also serious devastation along the border with Pakistan and, to a lesser extent, the border with China. The local warlord commandeered the ship she had traveled on to help transport a part of his army to land in the rear of his enemies. Which had left his grandmother high and dry in the port she had arrived in rather than where she had been headed.

Sixth months later, after the warlord’s overly ambitious campaign plan had led to his separated forces being defeated in detail, the victorious enemy army had swept into the city. His grandmother had become friendly with a young fellow at one of the few foreign-embassies still extant, the Ostrayan one, and found refuge with the young office worker. When he was transferred back to Ostraya, they had a quick marriage ceremony, and as his wife, she was allowed to come home with him.

Gilong was the largest city not to be bombed and had become the capital of Ostraya in the years following the war. It had taken ten years and a marauding mass of invaders from the islands to the north before both Kimberley and Pilbra had re-joined the Commonwealth. Through careful investments and judicious use of carefully made underworld contacts, she had periodically appeared to die, each time leaving her estate to a distant relative who was clearly several decades younger than her. Andrew didn’t know how many times she had managed this trick, but it had to have been several. She had finally started to age after his father’s birth, who was only the third child she had carried to term. Most of her somewhat frequent pregnancies ended in a miscarriage.

I have decided that on Mondays I will post a section from a novel I am writing set in Pam Uphoff’s Wine of the Gods series. If you haven’t heard of this series I heartily recommend it for sheer entertainment. Don’t be put off by the number of books – a lot are relatively short.
This is the first book. You can start elsewhere but The Empire of One is a good place but really, the beginning is the best place to start.
https://www.amazon.com/Outcasts-Gods-Wine-Book-ebook/dp/B005VFXN3U/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2CXFF6S6NS1QR&keywords=wine+of+the+gods&qid=1653894870&s=digital-text&sprefix=wine+of+the+gods%2Cdigital-text%2C277&sr=1-1

now to the first section of Ostraya part 1

Chapter 1

The dirt path that ran along the edge of the cemetery was not used by most people. The two-meter brick wall and occasional crypt upper works made it a gloomy place with its east-west orientation. When combined with the dense scrub, mostly lantana, that encompassed most of the path’s right-hand side, it meant the path was only used by the brave or desperate.

Andrew Harris walked along it steadily, hoping none of the small group of bullies that frequently made his life hell had noticed him duck down the track. The wall that surrounded the cemetery curved to the right just past the end of the track, so if none of them saw him duck right, then they would expect to see him around the curve of the wall. The track itself turned right about three meters in for about two meters, then returned east-west till it emerged on Franklin Street. The odd dog leg was obviously due to some ancient change in land boundaries at the western end, where there were two meters at one alignment and then the rest of the block at a more southerly alignment. It meant the block with the scrub had once been two blocks, really, now that he thought about it.

He glanced around before emerging onto Franklin Street, but he seemed to have escaped the other boy’s attention, if they had come after him at all, rather than just yelling abuse at him from a distance. He could deal with them if he had to, but he would rather not. Too much trouble and awkward questions if he got into a fight and beat up the four of them. Yes, he took karate lessons, irregularly as his mum could afford them, but his blue belt would not seem to be advanced enough to account for his taking them down. Better not to have questions asked by avoiding trouble.

Eight hundred years after the nuclear war, a lot of people had a few of the engineered genes in their DNA, and no one really cared. Andrew, on the other hand, had a lot. By the time society had rebuilt to the point they could actually test DNA easily, the genes had spread so widely from the few modified survivors that had escaped the holocaust in the northern hemisphere that there was not a lot anyone could do about it. In fact, there was a growing movement where people started proclaiming how many of the engineered genes they had like it was some sort of scout’s honor badge or something.

Two main groups were leading the charge, the Tallies and the Purples. The Purples were a group that had a gene that induced a purple shade to their skin and hair. It was not that common, and the purple coloration was extremely faint, but it was definitely there. The Tallies had an engineered gene or genes that gave them great height. Mostly in the plus two-meter category, sometimes approaching two and a half meters. They weren’t the same as normal tall people who tended to be thin, lanky, and somewhat ill-proportioned. The engineered Tallies were proportionally shaped for their height and made up a considerable proportion of the teams in sports that required height, like basketball, and strength, like football.

The second book set in Ithria is out. Kyron is contemporary with Taroniah although he starts out at the other end of the world.

While I wait for my artist to finish the cover of Kyron the Swordsman (gggrrr) I thought I’d give you all the benefit of my thoughts on time travel – and the problems therein.
As I see it there are three types of time travel –
1: The easy type where the hero (sic) travels to an alternate reality so he can change the future without any problems of causality. (Arturo is an example of this)
2: Magical time travel where the problems of causality may or may not apply but the magical method of travel gets around the practical problems of mechanical time travel.
3. Mechanical time travel. HG Wells is the father of this sub-genre with the classic story The Time Machine. The problem with the the stories of mechanical time machines is that they almost never address the physical location problem that time travel inherently involves. The only time machine I can think that indirectly address the problem of location is the Tardis.
The problem with most time travel stories is that their machine may well be able to move backwards and even forwards along the time stream but they rarely, if ever, address the issue of physical displacement. If you go backward in time an hour the Earth will be in a different location. The earth is rotating at 460 m/sec and it is revolving around the sun at 30 kilometers per second and around the center of the galaxy at 220 k/sec and our galaxy is moving through space at nearly 1000 k/sec.
so in an hour the earth with have moved roughly 4,503,000 kilometers . This is roughly ten times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
basically it means that unless you have some way of moving your time machine and your self some four and half million kilometers back where the Earth came from your machine will emerge in the vacuum of space.
Go back a day and the distance you need to move is 108 million kilometers. Go back a week and you a most of the way to Jupiter. Travel backwards a year and you are a third of the way to Alpha Centauri.
And so on – This question of the sheer distance the Earth moves through space is almost never addressed in time travel stories. Trying work out where the Earth would be a hundred years ago would need a supercomputer, a big supercomputer!

I meant to include these in the book but ran into problems and put it aside for later.
Here is the Academy and the local area.

and here is the general region

and marland

I would welcome anyone nominated Taroniah for the Dragon Awards and also can you all vote please 🙂

Kyron the Bowman will be out early next month – not sure of exactly when as yet – I’ve had some real life delays….
That will be followed by Arturo 8 – Arturo Ships Out, which is at 90k as of this morning. This will be the last New Roman Republic book with Arturo still participating – he heads home at the end. Of course that doesn’t quite work out as he expects….
There will be a ninth book in the series which will feature Cymlac and Lucilla and their kids, Coren and others but it almost certainly won’t be out this year unless I get a ‘real good idea’

Arturo Ships Out will be followed by Taroniah at War then Kyron the Swordsman. After that probably The Princess and the Travellers. it gets a bit tentative after that but I am leaning towards Taroniah at Peace, Kyron the Mercenary then The Republic Endures (Arturo 9) then The Princess and the Spy and after that I have like 3 or 4 choices besides the next Taroniah and Kyron books.

On another note I have submitted my multidimensional wizard book to another publisher. I am going to give it till the middle of next year and then I’ll publish The Sorcerer Arrives myself if nobody wants it.
In other news: I hope there is a palace coup and Putin goes…. perhaps another democratic revolution.
Oh and vote for Pam Uphoff in the Dragon Awards when they come up.

Peter

Yes! I finally got myself into gear and did the paperback version of Taroniah – Yay

The vote is running heavily in favor of Taroniah 2: Taroniah at War at the moment –