At age five, he read “The Odyssey.” In grade school, he studied Latin. At 6-feet-8, he may be the world’s tallest living science fiction author. He’s also a hospital pathologist. And a violinist. Who is this remarkable specimen?
Guy lives in Bournemouth, a stone’s throw from where Robert Louis Stevenson wrote ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.’
Guy has written a sequel to "The Scion," and I've read the first draft. "The Line of the Dead" is brilliant. It comes with a BONUS: the race that went extinct in Book One is not entirely extinct. A few surviving Arkenthrians (with awesome tails intact!) raise a little hell in this story. Book Three is almost finished.
The Steemhouse Fiction Trail
My mission is to see SFT, Steemit's own publishing house, get funded and ready to release Guy's novels.
(Does he have anything to say about that? We shall see. Fandom is a dangerous thing.)
Quick change of subject!
"Kite"by Guy T. Martland: Sat in an ancient alien artefact, a boy watches a girl trying to fly a kite through the sky of code which surrounds the Earth.
Next mission: publish an anthology of Guy's assorted short stories.
Here is an excerpt from his blog:
Blowing The Scion’s Trumpet Posted by Guy T Martland
A few lovely Scion-related things have happened since I last blogged. Things which have cast the shadow of self-doubt away from my feelings about The Scion and, perhaps rightly, elevated its status in the world. I find self-doubt always creeps in somewhere, with the insidious nature of the Wraith – a healthy part of the process, until it becomes all-consuming…
(Say what? Tall, dark, and handsome; talented; erudite; brilliant. And he suffers self-doubt?)
Anyway, here we go: the trumpet is blasting, hopefully not deafening the rest of the orchestra, or swallowing the viola’s delicate melody. Unfortunately, I think maybe the entire brass section were in the pub in the interval.
The Scion was longlisted for a British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) award. BSFA members can vote for the book (alongside other fabulous works like Al Robertson’s Crashing Heaven and Paul McAuley’s Something Coming Through) up until the 31st January. Fingers crossed it’ll make the shortlist.
( The Scion also placed second in the 2015 annual Preditors & Editors Poll)
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MORE EXCERPTS:
Tuesday, 19 April 2016
The Scion Is Dead! Long Live The Scion!
Have no fear - The Scion's story is not yet over. However, unfortunately my publisher has decided to close down...
... I have no intention of ending The Scion's story just yet. The sequel is almost finished and there is another planned (A trilogy! Woot! Woot!). So my protagonist, Septimus Esterhazy, is out there trying to find another publisher on my behalf. Will he succeed? Only time will tell. But he is a persistent bugger and keeps telling me more stuff about him that I dutifully transcribe.
I'd like to take this moment to say a huge thanks to Safkhet for publishing my debut and throwing me out there into the world. We've come a long way together in a short time, and it has been a lot of fun. Thanks again to everyone who bought the book, read it, reviewed it and supported my fledgling efforts. There will be more. --GTM
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Yes! More! More!
My 5-star review of “The Scion” appeared in the January 2016 Perihelion Science Fiction, which has suspended publication for several months due to a crashed computer system and Sam Bellotto’s hospital stays (two in a year’s time with months of physical therapy to recover use of his hands). I’ll repost it here, FYI, because it is no longer available online.
Out of This World, or Any Other
THE WORLD-BUILDING IN GUY T. MARTLAND’S “The Scion” is, for lack of a term we’d all understand, out of this world. The novel is layered deep with gravitas, veritas, and severitas. Normally I don’t use such words, but Martland at age five read “The Odyssey,” and some of that erudition may spread via osmosis to the reader. At least, I feel smarter just for having inhaled the rarefied air of his prose.
This epic tale may sound a bit intimidating if you prefer Space Opera Lite. Even if you didn’t study Latin (at the traditional English boarding school Martland attended, it was mandatory), you can intuit that gravitas signifies weight, seriousness, dignity, a sense of the importance of the matter at hand; severitas connotes severity, sternness and self-control; veritas sounds like veracity, and “The Scion” delivers. Bursting at the seams with planets, space ships, futuristic technology, wars, peoples, and monstrosities, “The Scion” is the hardest type of #HardScienceFiction, as we in the Twitterverse say. You could safely scrape the Mohs test-diamond over this story without leaving a visible scratch.
The story opens with a writhing black cloud of evil blasting a warship from the sky. On the beach, people with tails watch in horror, knowing all of Arkenthria is doomed. The prologue ends with the whole planet up in flames.
I stopped reading right then and there. If the point-of-view character dies in the opening pages, I’m packing my bags. Annihilate his friends and family as well, not to mention everyone in his world, and I’m outta this story for good.
But ... but the tail-people were awesome, and the alien invaders couldn’t have destroyed every single one of them, right?
A small consolation is that the shape-shifting race known as the Jarthiala can morph the Arkenthrian form, tail and all. If two Jarthialans can star in “Time Out at the Café Metropole” (12-NOV-2014 “Perihelion”), Martland can trot out his endearing Arkenthrians in future stories (hint, hint). OK. Deep breath in. After so many weeks of mourning the Arkenthrian holocaust, I decided to revisit “The Scion” and meet the rest of the cast.
It takes three pages to list all the characters but no time at all for us to remember them. Long after I stopped needing the index, Martland’s preternatural vocabulary made me grateful for Kindle’s built-in dictionary. Most of the words are familiar, but sometimes I have to make sure: e.g. oleaginous is oily, like it sounds. Plangent is more than loud or reverberating; it also connotes melancholy. A patent passageway is not merely an open path; it evokes “a patent airway at resuscitation (medicine creeping in),” and that came straight from the author via email. Some things just can’t be Googled.
Not to be confused with supernatural, preternatural means above and beyond, which precisely suits a six-foot-eight brainiac who plays violin, writes science fiction, and works full-time as a hospital pathologist. I don’t know the word for someone who’s viewed too many slides of diseased tissue under a microscope, but the chapter titled “Sections” makes me wonder. Not even in TV shows like “Dexter” have I seen anything so lurid and unthinkable. I’d love to post an excerpt, but you’d miss the gradual, inexorable build-up and the shock of comprehending what it is you’re seeing. No paranormal monster can compare with the horror of what human beings can dream up. Let’s just say we finally find out what’s behind the hero’s phobic reaction to shattering glass.
The spasmenagaliaphobic scion of the title is Septimus “Sep” Esterhazy. This idle young aristocrat exudes none of the gravitas of his great-grandfather, the original scion, who left Earth for Planet D. Clueless, reckless, or naïve on occasion, Sep spends most of his time mixing music, rather than jousting, fencing, or at least playing shoot ’em up video games. Much to his surprise, it falls on his shoulders to save the world, if not the entire universe. He gets by with a little help from a very old shape-shifter named Huwred, his great-grandfather’s secret legacy, and of course his friends. He gains and loses allies in the course of his journey. With secrets come betrayals, as avid readers know.
So many details of this story would be fun to share in a book club after everyone has already read to the end. I love the way the mysterious blue star rising in the east over Planet D adds to Sep’s “overwhelming sense of bewilderment at all that was happening: the strange man following him, the apparent kidnapping of his cousin ... Everything always seemed to happen at once. And the giddy, archaic music he had been listening to didn’t help.”
I haven’t even mentioned his widowed mother or the comic relief provided by the eccentric poet she’s seeing.
The setting, the characters, the imagery, are marvelous. Great-grandpa’s fossilized body, i.e. his weatherproofed and well-preserved cadaver, looms over Sep’s island like a man-sized version of Brazil’s Cristo Redentor. Twin brothers Manet and Derain are actually clones, the only known survivors of an army of genetically engineered soldiers, all named after French painters. A deteriorating old mansion is kept in a precise state of Gothic ruin by its romantic young owner, Persephone. An extraordinary spaceship, the Sciamachist, is brought to light. Thanks to Genotekk, the human life span has extended to 150 years. Cancer and other diseases have been conquered, but so what? Crow-like flocks of Wraith decimate whole planets for dinner or lunch.
Those nightmarish clouds of ravenous, planet-eating, winged monsters make Hitchock’s “The Birds” look like a carnival romp. This is the real deal, red in tooth and claw. Homer dreamed up nothing this creepy in “The Odyssey.” The sky roils with gargantuan flocks whose wings look like sheets of black metal. Not feathers but thin, black, arrow-like needles cover the Wraith’s body. Despite its size, it is quick, with claws forged from steel. The beak is a scythe. It has six yellow eyes.
Sep’s friend Persephone (Perse), a bleeding-heart idealist with a passion for the “ancients,” chooses to experience a slow and miserable death by cancer, confident that Genotekk will be able to reverse her death and restore her to good health. It looks like a publicity stunt, but she sees it as a sincere and noble way to identify with the suffering of her human ancestors. I think she is what my dad meant by an over-educated idiot. There’s more than enough suffering in the universe, one way or another, without asking for more to build character or empathy or perspective. If it isn’t cancer, it’s terrorists, tornadoes, solar flares, unrequited love. Alas, Persephone! Who needs cancer when Sep’s ex-girlfriend, the incredibly hot warrior-woman Voltina, comes back?
In alternating chapters, the Sassrit, aka “Protectors of the Known Universe,” try to thwart the Wraiths, but their resources are stretched. They’re running out of time. They recruit the old shapeshifter Huwred, and he too runs into an old girlfriend, which tells me there’s another novel here waiting to be written. Meanwhile, Perse is busy dying of cancer and getting resurrected, but she’ll rise to the occasion and help the hapless Sep save the universe. She’s that smart. Sep is no idiot, but he’s a late bloomer, a Peter Pan. It doesn’t help that his father tried keeping Sep’s destiny a big secret, which is about as sensible as Oedipus’ father and mother trying thwart fate.
I love the archetypes, the classic mythology mixed with futuristic genetics and clones, the Esterhazy family’s Genotekk company with its life-extending enhancements to the human race, the tails, and the little scientific asides—e.g., the forces of evolution decided a prehensile tail wasn’t worth the trouble, so we lost them? I want a flip of the epigenetic switch to bring our tails back. With opposable thumbs we may not need tails for grasping, but what about that phrase “I only have two hands?” With only two legs, we could use a tail instead of a cane in our old age. But I digress.
Genotekk’s eradication of disease, speedy healing of wounds, and other medical advances are among the reasons I love science fiction: “Unzipping DNA with their biochemical knives, fiddling with bases, swapping purines for pyramidines, restructuring the helix until there wasn’t a single cell which hadn’t been guaranteed for at least one hundred years.” If only ethics and consequences were as easy to control. Somehow it seems easier for writers to envision revolutionary medicine than an end to war and other social ills. Will there ever not be a nasty cousin who breaks your toys and fails to outgrow his petty spite?
Ventsath, Sep’s evil cousin, is the kind of villain we can understand. GemmGakk, on the other hand, is the most unfathomably evil sort of terrorist. No amount of time or distance seems likely to weed his kind from the gene pool.
It’s hard to summarize the plot itself without spoilers, but certain scenes stand out. Sep inherits his great-grandpa’s vinyl albums, brought back from 20th century Earth, and he tries mixing the vintage music with some of his high-tech “gels.” I never did grasp how “gels” work, but no matter; in real life I have no clue how my son’s recording equipment works. When Sep discovers noise from outside getting into his DJ mixes, I have to laugh. In high school, my son would create ambient noise (open and shut a cupboard door, put it on repeat) and mix it into his compositions. Sep’s musical aptitude serves a purpose when radio harmonics become part of a weapon woven into his very DNA.
“I have been obsessed with the idea of a piece of music or series of tones being able to kill someone ever since I heard of a musician who had died while playing the piano,” Martland emailed me. “I imagined that she’d hit a certain pattern of notes which had a fatal effect.” (A theme Martland explored in “Esterhazy’s Cadence,” an earlier “Perihelion” story.)
He cites the Kate Bush song “Experiment IV” with “a sound that could kill someone at a distance.” That, in turn, reminds me of Monte Python’s ultimate weapon, the world’s funniest joke. Martland’s harmonics have so much gravitas and severitas it isn’t funny, as my husband would say.
Broadcasting a particular harmonic wavelength could be fatal to the Wraith’s flying fiends of death? I’d accept this as readily as “Beam me up, Scottie” (how did that work?), but I married an electrical engineer who can employ willing suspension of disbelief in matters of religion but not science. Yes, via marriage or osmosis, I now obsess over anything that involves high frequency. Is it really possible that a unique set of complex oscillations, played in a specific timeframe, would render a creature (mechanical or organic) stone dead? My husband started sketching a sine wave. Then he drew a square wave and spoke of the third, fifth, and seventh harmonic. My brain cells staggered away, gasping for air. Frequencies beyond the audible hearing range of a human might bother a bird, but to fry anything to “stone dead,” you need the intense heat of a fundamental signal up at microwave frequencies—which has nothing to do with “harmonics.”
After sleeping on it, I surfed the web for radio harmonics. The Hammond organ uses sinewaves to compose a signal, and you can Google a beautiful animation by LucasVBexplaining the Fourier decomposition of a square wave. Should the Schiamachist employ microwave frequencies, not square waves? The Wraith agents are not birds, but electrical flocks of Death Metal with black feathers. Mix that with the Seventh Harmonic, and Sep might have the next hit on the Top 100. In any case, Sep does something spectacular with “radio harmonics,” and if that’s not the right term, we’ll just blame the Arkenthrian.
The climax is all that military science fiction should be, which is to say, I had to speed-read through most of the battle scenes. (I always do.) Sep’s journey comes to a satisfying and victorious end, though he may never again be carefree, idle, naïve, or reckless. The epilogue is a heart-wrenching reminder of fatum (kismet, inevitability). The door wide open to a sequel, which is in progress.
I wonder what our novel-writing pathologist could possibly come up with next? A future issue of “Perihelion” will bring more of the artist Sirius Andervich—“a bit of a dark story about revenge,” Martland says with characteristic understatement.
Martland lives in Bournemouth, a stone’s throw from where Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” I’m afraid there’s no end of eerie things to inspire the lurid imagination of the world’s tallest living science fiction author.
As for a word that means “out of this world” in the sense that properly describes this novel, I’m waiting for Martland to supply it. (“The Scion,” Guy T. Martland, Safkhet Fantasy) —Carol Kean