After creating promo videos for other people’s books, I thought it was about time that I made one for one of my own. I hope you agree it captures the mystery and wonder that the book itself evokes in its readers so far.
If you haven’t tried it yet, see what all the fuss is about by following this link.
Since all of my previous countdown deals have been in the US territory, I thought it would be nice to mix things up a little and offer my British readership the chance to get my work for less. As of now for five days all of my books are available for the minimum kindle UK price of 99p each! Tell your British friends they have the chance to grab one of their fellow countrymen’s work for a paltry sum.
A new kindle countdown deal on Beyond the Mist started today and will run until Monday. The ebook can be picked up for 99 cents at amazon.com.
At the same time, the price in the amazon india territory has been reduced to 49 INR, the lowest price that amazon will allow. Please spread the word and take the splash if you haven’t yet.
The Conservative Libertarian Fiction Alliance has released its ten finalists for book of the year. In a very strong year, featuring outstanding works by some great authors, sadly Beyond the Mist finished just outside the top ten in the initial nomination phase, so cannot be voted for.
The nominations are in and counted, and the CLFA is thrilled to present our ten finalists for the CLFA Book of the Year 2017!
Beginning in January 2017, CLFA members have been hard at work, compiling a list of our favorite 2016 releases. We ran several rounds of voting to refine the list to the top ten in the survey. For the final winner, we always open up voting to the public.
To be eligible, books must be fiction of any genre and of novel length (50k words or more), initially published in any form (print, digital, or audio) during the calendar year 2016. Books may be an indie, traditional, or anything-in-between publication.
Voting is open until midnight on March 31, 2017. Winners to be announced in April 2017. Have at it!
You can still support Beyond the Mist (or any of my other works) in other ways by telling other people about it, submitting a review on Amazon, or trying out one of my other books that you haven’t read yet.
Book Horde has some very positive things to say about Beyond the Mist, and heartily recommends it for a wide range of readers.
This is a good story, with great world-building, and subtle Christian themes. I really liked that I can read it strictly for the story, and later I can think about the moral themes and questions it raises.
You can read the whole review over here, or click the image below to take a look for yourself:
Brian Niemeier, Campbell award nominee and Dragon Award winner, has some very nice things to say about Beyond the mist over on his blog:
A man finds himself weightless in a rushing mist. He doesn’t know whether he is flying or falling, and he has no memory of anything prior to waking in the fog. Much like the book’s protagonist, the reader is immediately cast into an existential mystery on the first page.
Also like the protagonist, I didn’t know what to make of the character’s initial situation. Was I entering a strange science fiction world so advanced beyond our own as to make the setting itself a puzzle? Had Zwycky crafted a surrealist parable to illustrate the folly of relativism through style and mood? A metaphysical science-fantasy like Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld?
Since discovering the truth is among the primary joys of reading Beyond the Mist, I won’t spoil the answer. I will say that the process of discovery is masterfully handled by Zwycky and immensely satisfying.
Read the whole review here, or better yet read the book by clicking on the image below:
As promised, I would like to expand on something I glossed over in my interview on Catholic Geek Radio, but now that I look back on it, played a much larger part in my motivations as a writer than I realized. It concerns how I moved from one university to another. It is not something I am proud of – instead it is something I am grateful for, since reminding myself of it is an effective defence against pride. This post will involve some painful memories, so please bear with me. Continue reading
On this sombre day, I will briefly mention my appearance on the Catholic Geek Radio podcast, where we briefly discuss this sad anniversary before moving on to lighter topics, such as superversive fiction, my background as a writer and the hope and beauty I try to capture in my work. The interview was recorded three days ago and will be available to listen to at 7pm EST today. There was one subject in the interview that I glossed over, and subsequently realised was worth covering in some depth, so I will follow up with a blog post on that in the next few days.
Once it goes live, the interview will be available here:
In stark contrast to the glowing review by Marina Fontaine, another review of Beyond the Mist appeared at the Publisher’s weekly website last week. The review contains a large number of spoilers and is a mixture of muted praise and sharp criticisms. Some of those criticisms claim that there are structural flaws in the storytelling and weak characterization. Perhaps those are justified, perhaps not, I am too close to the text to be able to be unbiased in that regard – I leave it to those who have read the book to decide if the reviewer is being fair. Other complaints seem to flow from political disagreements with the themes and concepts in the work. One issue in particular I would like to respond to without giving away too many spoilers. Continue reading
Dragon-award-nominee Marina Fontaine, up high in the echelons of the Conservative Libertarian Fiction Alliance, had some very kind words to say about both of my novels, highly recommending both and mentioning them in the same breath as the works of the great masters C.S. Lewis and John C. Wright.
To say I am flattered to be mentioned in this way would be a great understatement, it was Lewis who first fired my literary imagination, whose works I have read more of than any other author, and it was his type of literature that I was consciously trying to hark back to when I wrote Nobility Among Us. John C. Wright is of course a major influence in Beyond the Mist, the plot being based on some of his philosophical essays, among other things.
You can read for yourself what she had to say over here:
http://marinafontaine.blogspot.cz/2016/08/book-review-two-for-one-ben-zwyckys.html
The 99 cent deal on both books (and on Selected Verse: Heroes and Wonders) is still running for another day and a half, so take the opportunity to take a look for yourself for less.
The Zwyckyverse 