Smorgasbord Fantasia

We should preserve this guy for the next few generations so he continues to enthrall and entertain us with such wildly exciting books across a wide spread of genres. Period . He is one of the best writers out there – a prolific productivity, an inimitable sense of dark realism tinged with shiny hope and the gift to entertain through sheer imagination that knows no bounds. Heartland trilogy chugs ahead full speed with Blightborn, the second book that follows the adventures of Cael McAvoy and his buddies set in a dystopian future where evil schemes of the greedy man has killed the soil – there is only corn that grows out here on earth – and the Heartland dwellers – the “have-nots” stuck in this sunny dustbowl of a wasteland are grubbing their way through lives suffering under the tyranny of the sky-dwellers or the Empyreans. The title of the first book, Under the Empyrean Sky was apt. Evocative and lush, as the title imagery suggests, much of book one happens on the ground hid...

So a corn-punk fantasy? What in the name of blue blazes is that? Ah. Hear the answer from the Master of Diversity and Diversification and Versatility, the evil genius Chuck Wendig overlord at the fantastic blog, Terrible Minds – "I posted on TerribleMinds at one point, saying, "Let's come up with some funny sub-genres." Something-punk. You know, this-punk and that-punk. Funny-punk. It's punk-punk. And I came up with "corn-punk." It's a future run on corn, ha ha. But then I thought, "Well, that's actually creepy, because corn is sorta scary these days." So I started extrapolating that, and I created this very sunny, dustbowl, agricultural dystopia in the far-flung future where corn has taken over. And it's about a young boy struggling against the rich people who live in big ships above his head." The result is this. First book in a heart-stopping trilogy based on "corn" being the ulti...