Readers and writers blog

It’s Valentine’s Day, and our gift to you is a romantic one. Well, actually, it’s a Romantic one, in the traditional literary sense — a story filled with fantasy, heroism, adventure, mystery, maybe even a bit of the supernatural. (And it’s not in Latin¹.)

It’s a futuristic work called The Unearthing, and we offer you its first four chapters.

In fact, this sample of the novel was a gift to us from its author, Montreal writer Steve Karmazenuk, and now appears in our Works section at the upper right of this main page. Just click on the Fiction link and select either the full work by its title or one of the individual chapters.

The story opens amid the swirl of elemental forces at the beginning of time and space and moves into the quest of sentient beings to explore their universe. Suddenly, we’re dropped into another exploration, this one in the dust-blown reaches of New Mexico. It’s postwar New Mexico, but the war was War Three, and it’s not the same place.

Buried in the dry earth of the Southwestern Native Protectorate is an unnatural object. And Professor Mark Echohawk goes there to unearth it.

Everyone who has seen the object is mystified, some frightened, by its presence beneath the desert soil, and there’s a struggle to keep it a secret. Just as word gets out to the general population — wouldn’t you know it? — the four-chapter sample ends.

The full 411-page novel is available at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

Besides The Unearthing, Karmazenuk is the author of a second novel, Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind (excerpts available exclusively through www.phyte.ca), and a weblog, Kspace, where he discusses writing, life, politics and other subjects. He is also a music journalist with Confront Magazine.

By the way, both the Amazon and Barnes & Noble sites are awaiting a first reader review of The Unearthing. We’d also like to know what you think.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

1. The word ‘romance’ came into being in the 14th century to describe a heroic adventure story that was written in a Romance language — a vernacular, initially French — rather than the traditional Latin. By the 17th century, the definition was extended to love stories and included other Latin-derived languages such as Spanish and Italian. The word’s use as a verb — that is, to court someone as a lover — isn’t believed to have appeared until the 1940s.