When I was a kid, John Steakley was an author I was immediately interested in for two reasons. He wrote cool, pulpy genre fiction with an emphasis on character dynamics … and he was actually from my home town, Cleburne, TX. In fact, his second novel Vampire$ was partially set in Cleburne, which was even more rad (to use a term from back then). He published that book in 1990, when I was in high school. Buildings that featured in the story, like the Santa Fe railroad depot, took on a new relevance in this place that, honestly, didn’t particularly interest me at the time. And as a wannabe sci-fi writer in rural Texas, knowing someone else from my neck of the woods had made that journey was inspiring. I kind of became fixated on Steakley.
J Barton Mitchell
Fiction and Excerpts [1]
The Stark Realities of John Steakley’s Military SF Novel Armor
Series: That Was Awesome! Writers on Writing
The Severed Tower (Excerpt)
Check out The Severed Tower, the second volume in J. Barton Mitchell’s Conquered Earth series, available November 19th from St Martin’s Griffin.
Holt, Mira, and Max have fled Midnight City with Zoey after watching her repel an entire Assembly army. Zoey’s powers are unlocked, but who and what she is remains a mystery. All she knows is that she must reach the Severed Tower, an infamous location in the middle of the world’s most dangerous landscape: The Strange Lands, a place where the laws of physics have completely broken down.
But the closer they get to the Tower, the more precarious things become. The Assembly has pursued Zoey into the Strange Lands. Among them is a new group, their walkers and machines strangely bereft of any color, stripped to bare metal, and whose agenda seems to differ from the rest. To make matters worse, the group hunting Holt are here, too, led by a dangerous and beautiful pirate named Ravan. So is Mira’s first love, Benjamin Aubertine, whose singular ambition to reach the Tower threatens to get them all killed.