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It’s Alive! For e-book versions of alive.

Mischief, mayhem, Mesopotamia, and teenaged boys . . . cooking.

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20 thoughts on “Book News”

  4. Got it! Dumb question… When does KU credit the book as read? I always do my first read from KU, then buy the book after it’s been checked back in under the assumption that you would get the KU royalty as well as the royalty from the purchase since it doesn’t cost me any more to do it that way. Am I correct or does it not work that way?

    • KU credits each page that it registers having been read. So if you read 50 pages today, and 28 tomorrow, then I get credited for those pages. Then the royalties are logged when you purchase the book. (Note: That’s as of this week, subject to change on short notice, see terms and conditions for details, past performance is no guarantee of future returns, in saecula saeculorum . . ..)

  9. Bought it, read it, enjoyed it.

    I wish banishing the socialist filth from DC was as easy as banishing blood magic…

  11. Now, I need to read it a second (maybe a third) time to grasp all the story entrained. So many interesting side-plots and linked tales are woven into the threads.

  12. Re: Mesopotamia, there’s various stories about gods coming down and teaching skills to humans. But the main one has the “seven sages” coming down and teaching humanity technology, makeup, perfume, astrology, and black magic. The “arts of civilization.” Then they had relations with human women, and their kids were Heroes Of Unusual Size. (Basically “nephilim.”) But if you killed one, the hero became a bloodsucking vampire ghost/zombie that lived in the underworld with the underworld goddess, and got revenge on stuff.

      • But yeah, that’s why the Bible has a lot of attitude toward Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Canaanite, etc. creation myths. Their gods made humans to be slaves and do all the work. Actual God made humans to care for the earth and guard it, as householders of Earth under God. The false gods wanted to destroy all humans because they were noisy. The real God wanted humans to stop sinning. The false gods had a rogue god sneak Ut-Napishtim away because he was a king, and explicitly made him not tell anybody beyond the rogue god’s chosen number of skilled people. The real God picked the worthy survivors, even though they weren’t perfect or royal.

        So the Sumerians and Babylonians were proud of the seven sages and all the “giants in those days,” vampiric vengeance and all — whereas the children of Israel knew they were evil fallen angels and their cursed line of people who turned vamp when they died. (The Bible does not explicitly endorse the vampire ghost underworld part, but there’s a “valley of the rephaim” that was associated with some nasty stuff. They do show up doing the monster thing in various Enoch-related apocryphal books.) The other important thing is that they were seen as ancestors of the Amorites, Moabites, Gibeonites, etc. But Ruth was an Amorite, so obviously a little rephaim ancestry isn’t particularly worrying.

        • I suspect, by Ruth’s time, that the Children of Israel were more willing to judge her as an individual based on her actions than solely by her origins. And her not coming with an army, and her being willing to follow the G-d of Israel couldn’t have hurt.

          What different cultures deify is always intriguing, and leads to a lot of “Why that force of nature? Why that concept of deity? What did the people need/want/value that they honored [creepy/horrible/brutal deity]?” Given how far back we now know that human sacrifice and the like goes in MesoAmerica, you can really understand why Cortez and Co. were so vehement about trying to uproot Aztec and Mayan religious traditions.

          • Some where (may have been on a documentary on human sacrifice), I heard that on the “first encounter” between Cortez & Co. and the Aztecs included the Aztecs “honoring them as gods” by sacrificing a child to Cortez & Co.

            Cortez & Co weren’t Angels but even Angels would have disliked a child being sacrificed to them. 😦

  13. Spent Wed/Thursday doing Life, and didn’t see the book drop until this morning. Buying! Sorry Larry, Warbound goes on hiatus.

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