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Aquamarine
 This colorful and sexy SF thriller is set in the late 21st Century when major land masses have been submerged by rising oceans and the Earth is a world of water. Russell is a hydrologist, based on the giant floating platform of Pacifica; his lover, Eric, one of fifty Aquarians, is a new sub-species of human who can breathe underwater. When the pair refuse an attractive offer for Eric's services on a suspicious salvage operation, Eric is kidnapped and a fast-paced intrigue starts to unfold on the "acorn principle" ... a small event turns out to be the key to a major war which would involve the whole Pacifica region.  Read the first 10% of this novel right here, in PDF format
(Caveat: material in this free sample is not suitable for juniors. Consider yourself warned!) Novel length: 125,000 words Rated: R (18+; sex, violence, language) Publication date: 2008 Publisher: DreamCraft Price: $9.99 - ebook Cover: Jade
READER REVIEWS: AQUAMARINE REVIEWED BY CHRIS R. You have to chalk up a mark to this book, because the plot and characters actually survive the machete-job done on the project by a publisher [the publisher in question was Millivres, not DreamCraft!! -ED] that found a way to get more slipshod than it's norm! I've read the interview segments on the Keegan webpage here where Keegan tells what happened. Shi-!! It wasn't copy edited! In light of that, three cheers to Keegan for getting AQUAMARINE as good as it was. The typos and type-setting mistakes do intrude now and then, but the story is fully engrossing. I started reading late at night, and wound up looking hungover the next day. The saga of Eric the gill-breather and Rusty Grant, the geneticist, is a very different, very fresh kind of story. If you might be tempted into thinking AQUAMARINE is something like that Kevin Costner flick that drowned at the box office, you'd be wrong. If I have one criticism (apart from the typesetting choas, which Keegan isn't responsible for), it's that I think MK passed over (glossed over??) the set-up for the Drowned Earth Scenario a bit too fast. I personally would have liked a lot more set-up and background on this ... but I also see AQUAMARINE is well over 300 pages. Loads of technical stuff might have pushed the book into the too-long cateogory, and anyway, lots of other readers could have wound up skipping whole chunks of the book to actually get away from the scientific stuff. After just coming thru HELLGATE (wow), I have to guess Keegan actually wrote in the science and then edited it back out for readability and overall-length??? despite the gloss-job on the science background though, the watery world in the book is described so richly, with such reams of detail, [the novel] doesn't suffer overall for having some techno stuff missed out. Another great read. Mel Keegan comments on AQUAMARINE I was very gratified by the Millivres edition cover note, "...the master of gay thrillers." The cover on this one is actually pretty good — excellent use of "spot color" while the publisher cuts costs by avoiding a full-color jacket ... the cost of 4-color (litho, or full-color) printing contribues big time to the cover price of a book. I was rather perturbed by the Millivres edition typesetting for two reasons: first, AQUAMARINE is a fairly small book that should have been about 225pp, and was blown out by 100pp by "loose" type ... I wondered, couldn't we have had a full color cover on a slimmer book?! And then I started to look through the text and realized something bad had gone wrong. The full story is told elsewhere on this site, but here let me just say, the Millivres edition of AQUAMARINE was not proofread! I never saw the galley before printing, and years elapsed between me emailing the raw files from Fairbanks, Alaska, and receiving the printed books. I was much more than mildly surprised by the presentation of the text, and am actually surprised that the book wasn't "roasted" by readers even more than it was! Readers' comments at Amazon tell the story: one reader gave it 4 stars and said the fifth star couldn't be awarded because of the production qualities. That makes me sigh, because I had no ability to in any way affect them, but I also acknowledge that a star-rating is granted to the book overall, which includes the publication package. I'm just pleased to have delivered my side of the bargain ... the story! Speaking of which, this one was great fun to write, though it spent many years in the desk drawer. I was just finishing it when early news of the disastrous "Waterworld" movie production reached me. There was nothing to do with AQUAMARINE but finish it and shelve it, and let the movie fade into the past. (Something similar had happened with DANGEROUS MOONLIGHT, my 18th Century highwaymen historical ... I'd just finished it, and no sooner did I mention it to my editor at GMP than I learned they were going to press with a book set in the same era. My story was shelved while we waited for the right time to come for its publication, and of course things didn't go well for GMP in years to come). AQUAMARINE is a romp, but the science is actually very sound. There's nothing impossible, nor even implausible, in the story, and I had loads of fun with both the characters and the technology. Researching this one was quite a challenge. The whole thing was done in Fairbanks, just south of the Arctic Circle, and with the temperature at about -20 degrees just outside the door, I did the vaster majority of the research on the Internet, while thinking nostalgically of the South Pacific region, to which I was due to return soon enough. I had a great time writing this one, and I'm sure that sense of fun comes through in the book. The 2008 reissue is another enormous pleasure to me, because (!) this time around we get to fix the typographical errors ... and put a full-color jacket on it. The typeset has been brought in at about 230pp, it's had one or two proofreads at the time of this writing (April 2008) and is due two more before we publish. With a little luck, it'll be online at the same time the massively rebuilt 2008 website goes up! And cheers to DreamCraft ... they've done a fantastic job. |
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