Daniel Abraham
Daniel Abraham is a Hugo-nominated, American fantasy/science-fiction writer.
If things got out of hand, it would mean six or seven million dead people and the end of everything Miller had ever known.
Odd that it should feel almost like relief.
The enlisted guys will be okay, but the officers get the sense of humor trained out of ’em.
If Fred couldn’t build himself a peace treaty, the OPA would never win against the discipline and unity of an inner planet navy. But they would also never lose. War without end.
Well, what was history if not that?
And how would having the stars change anything?
He considered recording it. His suit would be able to make a simple visual file and stream the data out in real time. But no. This was his moment. His and Julia’s. The rest of humanity could guess what it had been like if they cared.
This was the kind of man who’d killed Julie, Miller thought. Stupid. Shortsighted. A man born with a sense for raw opportunity where his soul should have been.
Say what you will about organized crime, at least it’s organized.
The beautiful thing about losing your illusions, he thought, was that you got to stop pretending.
I was listening to Tim Powers talking and he said he didn't want his villains just defeated, he wanted them humiliated and destroyed. And I thought: I don't. I want my villains to be understood and forgiven.
Never knew if you had any luck left unless you pushed it.
He couldn’t fix the cancer of war, couldn’t even slow down the spread, but at least he could admit it was happening.
For the moment, it's called the Dagger and the Coin, but with any luck, that'll swap out for a better name. There are some things in the proposal that need to get smoothed out so that everyone's on board, but I think it'll happen.
It's a very different from the Long Price books. It looks and feels more like traditional epic fantasy -- quasi-Europe, ferinstance, and some dragons in the background, no 15-year gaps between books -- but the plot structure is packed with everything I think is cool. There are echoes I'm intentionally building in of from things as familiar as Firefly and The Count of Monte Cristo and as obscure as Tevis' Queen's Gambit and Reck-Malleczewen's Diary of a Man in Despair. And the magic system is all about faith and deception, which will be tricky and fun both.
What I want to do is write something that I could read now (39 years old, married, raising a kid, 10 year IT career behind me, post 9-11, post-Bush, etc.) with the same joy I read the Belgariad when I was 16.
It was as easy as keying in a door code. Somehow he felt that arming fusion bombs to detonate around him should have been more difficult.