As some of you who frequent these forums know, I'm the author of
several sf novels for Pan Macmillan/Tor (UK). Some years ago I wound up semi- kind of- collaborating on a novel called 'Judgement' with another author of my acquaintance, Fergus Bannon (meaning: he wrote it, I rewrote parts of it to update it, and then we back-and-forthed for a while).
Partly because we're lazy, partly because his life circumstances mean he's unable to pursue more typical roads to publishing, and partly because we're interested in experimenting with self-publishing, we decided to
sell it through Smashwords for two dollars where, despite a publicity budget of zero and minimal mentions on a couple of blogs, it's been selling and eliciting emails from readers telling us they'd have happily paid a lot more than two dollars for the privilege.
Judgement is a science fiction novel set a few years from now. I've sometimes referred to it also as a psychedelic thriller, or reading like an episode of CSI, if CSI had been written by Timothy Leary and filmed by James Cameron. Here's the blurb:
"It started with a few isolated incidents. A mob shootout in Las Vegas, a firefight in the Central American jungles - one apparently unconnected event after the other, hinting at a worldwide conspiracy of unprecedented proportions. But before long CIA computer expert Bob Leith realises it's something much more than mere globalised terrorism, something literally not of this world ..."
After reading certain forum threads very carefully, we had decided instead of giving the book away entirely to both sell it
and put the complete text online as a web page. The reasoning is that people value something a lot more if they've even paid a little bit of money for it but, since downloading even the 50% sample from Smashwords requires the extra step of signing up there, those who can't be bothered can nonetheless read it in its entirety at the aforementioned link.
The website can be found at
fergusbannon.blogspot.com, and also contains short pieces about Fergus by the likes of
Hal Duncan, author of the well-regarded literary fantasies
Vellum and its sequel Ink. You can also find various stories and articles Fergus has had published over the years, including
Burning Brightly, that first appeared in Interzone.
We wouldn't be going to this much trouble if we didn't seriously rate Judgement, and it's our hope you'll get as much of a kick out of it as we did.