https://www.baen.com/servants-of-war-earc.html
The eARC for Servants of War by me and Steve Diamond is out now. (Steve is the other host on WriterDojo, so this is the book we’ve been talking about a lot if you are a listener)
For those of you who don’t know, an eARC is an Electronic Advanced Reader Copy. This is basically the early, preproduction version of a novel that would get sent out to book reviewers. Only Jim Baen discovered a long time ago that there was a market for readers who just didn’t want to wait several months for the actual book to come out, so Baen makes our eARCs available for sale.
Even if you don’t buy the eARC, the first ten chapters are there as a free sample.
There will be some typos and that sort of thing, but honestly my manuscripts tend to be really clean, and I’ve never had a major change between an eARC and the final product in all the years I’ve been doing this.
I hope you guys enjoy reading this as much as I did working on it.
The cover giving me a Malcontents vibe.
Read the first 10 chapters and… holy crap! I swore I wasn’t going to spend money on another eARC when I know I’m just going to buy the book anyway. But I just don’t know as I can wait. So many interesting characters, so much tantalizing backstory, so many plot threads. I don’t want to wait until March….
You had me at magical Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Well there went my day. Really liked this one. Other collaborations have been very hit or miss for me and think this is well above others as my favorite. For anyone skimming comments I’d say it’s a must buy.
I’m in…
Full disclosure…I wasn’t blown away by The Black Sword novels [PLEASE DON’T HATE ME!] but I’m more than willing to give this a try.
It’s cool. We stopped burning heretics about two years back.
*discreetly striking sparks* Keep him talking…
Good stuff. Any word on an audio book? And if there is one it would great to have the The Privileges of Violence guy back.
Yes.
I don’t know the narrator yet.
I’m sure you don’t have 100% control over the who but my 2 copper thoughts if not the Privileges of Violence guy I could go for another Ray Porter Audio book. Porter did a epic job on the Malcontents books
Thanks to both you, Larry and Steve for all your great works.
Well done, as always!
Will there be an audio version? If so, do you know who will be narrating?
Yes. No.
It’s a funny coincidence that I was telling a Russian friend of mine in Miami just last Saturday about your books and your interesting career. The friend’s last name, I kid you not, is Glazkov. And I had had no idea that this book even existed. The Witch must’ve been involved somehow 😉
Hi, Larry. Not sure if you are intentionally using the word familiar to non-Russian speaking people, but one can’t be thrown in “gulag.” It’s not a place, but an organization. One can be sent to “lager” – means “camp”.
Yeah, I know, but we went with the way the word was used by most readers (who are westerners)
I kind of guessed why it was. 🙂 So far really good book!
I have a question about pronunciation. How is “Cobetsnya” meant to be said? The other proper nouns so far (I’m near the beginning of ch.6) tend to use K or S in perfectly obvious ways, and often have clear parallels in the mundane world. This one has C, a notoriously slippery and mischievous letter. In English and most Latin-based languages C is usually like K, but can be like S or CH depending on which letter follows it. In other languages C can be like TS (Esperanto, Mandarin) or CH (Hindi) – or like S (Russian). So when I see Cobetsnya I think it looks an awful lot like Сове́тская (sovyetskaya), meaning “Soviet” or “of the council”. But with the K turned into N. Which would make it closer to Sovyetsnya. Possibly that one letter could change the meaning for an actual Russian speaker, but to me it still sounds like a good name for a capital city. It’s the place where the council meets… Or (following standard English pronunciation rules) it could be like Kobetsnya, which I haven’t figured out a meaning for yet. What say you? I want the voice reading the story in my head to say it right.