Eighteen, Blue (Short Stories Volume II) #69703

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Five Short Stories AND Chapter 1 of both Iron I: Too Bright the Sun and Ordo Lupus and the Temple Gate for FREE.

Henry's Car
In this hilarious science fiction story, a Royal time traveler from the 16th Century develops a taste and talent for for stock-car racing.

Eighteen, Blue
On the Rebel held wastelands of North American in the 22nd Century, biker bounty hunters choose their victims according to their playing card rank. But in this life-or-death game of poker, one player holds the trump card.

Another One for No 19
Machine 19, the last Janitor bot still moving, travels on to its last assignments as Isha and Danel in NewYork District of Central City wonder how to change their meaningless lives.

Lacunashka
Ilya Kuznetsov, a clerk in Stalinist Russia, has discovered that what he thought of as his fool-proof system of recording mail delivery has gone wrong. An envelope is missing and he is determined to find it.

From the author:

My own family's roots, uncovered gradually over ten years of concerted research, had led me to one Guillaume, a Chevalier (Knight) in 13th Century Languedoc, France. He was my earliest ancestor. Simultaneously, I had been pursuing a theological interest in the Cathars; first though reading a number of books by Henry Lincoln and later through an interest in Monségur and the Rennes-le-Château, near where the lost treasure of the Cathars is said to be hidden. The Cathars believed that the Christian god was really Rex Mundi, or 'God of Earth' and that he was an illusion created by dark forces, while the real God remains hidden somewhere outside Earth. I quite possibly sympathise with the Cathars because my later ancestors probably escaped the Catholic persecution of Huguenots when they came to England in the 1500s.

These two areas of interest came together for me when I discovered that one of my ancestors was cast out by the Catholic Church and had been prosecuted for some unknown violation. This resulted in him having to pay the church an annual tithe of a man's weight in wheat. What his misdemeanour was, I cannot say but he was certainly very wealthy and his daughter married well so it must have been a personal crime against the Church. Was he a heretic or Cathar, even though officially they had all been killed in Monségur 200 years before? This question started me on my journey.

Lastly, I wanted the gothic. The themes of blood, death, eroticism, sex and transcendence are all things that I desire in a good novel. My influences were Kate Bush, The Mission, Lord Byron, John Keats (The Eve of St. Agnes is a particularly favourite poem of mine) and, to some extent, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Sex and death are the themes that everyone seems attracted to. As a consequence, I couldn't resist a climax to my novel that took place in one of the world's greatest Gothic masterpieces. But you will have to read the novel to find out where ...
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