Dear Readers!
The long (very long) wait is over! Apollyon’s Gambit’s is Live on Amazon!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M5GKTQ0
As many of you no doubt guessed there was an 11-hour issue with our upload file that delayed things. But that has been resolved (we believe happily).
The print edition will be ready in a week or so. We’ll post an announcement when it’s ready.
Once again, our deep gratitude to each and every one of you!
Hey Guys,
Thanks for another great read! I have to say it was well worth the wait.
I can’t tell you how happy I was to see more romance in the series although I’m a smidge pissed at what you two pulled. Cruel, cruel, cruel. The sex was hot!
I loved seeing the vulnerable side to Kris although I love all sides of Kris to be fair, I don’t think the girl could go wrong in my eyes.
Min is brilliant, she’s one of my favorite characters as well as Vasquez and Trin.
I’m so happy to see Mariwen back in the story and loved the ending!
I can’t wait to see where the story goes next.
Yeah, the end is pretty good and I hope we see more of the two (when they’re together) in the next books.
Didn’t like the first part too much, but I’ll admit half of my dislike is simply due to the fact that in my subjective world view Rafe is a horrible character (not in the sense that he is evil or anything, but, you know, the male equivalent of a Mary Sue, to utterly ridiculous levels…) and that he should be killed off instead of featuring so prominently in the story … not that I have much hope on that count, but one can pretend.
The 2nd part nicely made up for it, though. Even if all those future-relationship-predictions soured my moods occasionally 😉
What also soured my mood a bit too frequently was sloppy proofreading. I don’t remember the first three books having that problem, but this time I felt there were a few too many errors. The occasionally misplaced comma doesn’t kill anyone, and there’s a certain level of ‘getting used to errors’ in ebooks, but I’d prefer if that weren’t necessary …
Thanks for the comment! We enjoy hearing all our reader’s opinions. 🙂
We’ll endeavor to do a better job on the proofing. A bit more than 203,000 words gets tough to wrangle after awhile, and no doubt we could have done better.
Rafe pushed a few of my buttons in this one too but I have to say that when I gave it some thought the guy deserved a medal. Kris was damn difficult at times and honestly he handled those situations like a Saint. Personally, he is one of my all time favorite characters. I really hope we get to see more of him in the books to come.
The fact that he’s such a Saint is my problem. He’s rich. Great looking. Cocky and confident, but not arrogant. Not corrupt, but willing to break rules when necessary. Great fighter pilot. Great strategist. Great diplomat. Great at sports. Great at food and music and whatnot. Good at gambling. And drinking. Perfectly understanding when necessary. Great in bed, of course. Daring, but not suicidal. Knowledge about roughly everything that somehow comes up. Capable about figuring everyone else out, charming them, or intimidating them. Heck, even the lesbian considers falling in love with him (polygamous end? 😉 ) …
I always considered Weber’s Harrington to be overdone in positive character attributes for a protagonist in military scifi, but compared to this guy she’s nothing – it gives him this odd deus ex machina capability in the story. Need a fleet? Well, he pays for it. And smooths ruffled diplomatic feathers. And make sure the military doesn’t complain too loudly. And checks that everything runs smoothly. And and and and.
Sounds awfully critical and all, but it’s just one character out of many. Of course, he’s probably the 2nd most important one for the plot so far, so it’s not such an insignificant complaint, but it’s not (yet? ;p ) turned into one of those awful space romance operas, thank “gawd”, so it won’t keep me from continue reading. But I do consider it this flawlessness the biggest flaw of the series so far.
We discovered what the problem was. I won’t bore people with the gory details, but it was a Word issue I thought I’d conquered. I failed to do a comprehensive enough check — my bad. A cleaned-up version has been released.
Word cannot be conquered. It’s a sinister, dark entity that thrives on the pain of its users, always striking when least expected, constantly evolving to bring forth new methods of torture …
On a side note, the ebook links work just fine on iPhones.
I just finished the book and must say great work and the long(er) wait has certainly paid off.
In my opinion this is the best book in the series. It is very long, it concentrates more on Kris, Kris personality develops further, there are good descriptions of battles, politics, sex and romance, the Mariwen plot finally has some progress and there are a few nice hints at who could be Kris’s mother.
The only odd thing was the “talking stone” part, but then I thought this is a science-fiction book (Honor Harrington has this cat-bond-thing) so who cares (but still, it is a little strange ).
I am now looking forward to the next book.
Just one question: Will the sixth book, “Tears of Artemis”, be the last book in the series or just the last book in the first story arc, but the series will still continue with Kris as the main character?
PS: The link to download the glossary does not work.
Thanks for the comment! I hid a spoiler for other people who might not have read the book yet. I hope you don’t mind.
To answer your question: “Tears of Artemis” is not the last book in the series. The series will have a total of 8 or 9 books (that hasn’t been fully determined yet), plus some side-stories. The books coming after “Tears of Artemis” don’t have firm titles yet. Apologies if that was a bit misleading on our part.
Could you tell us what happens with the glossary link? We tested it, but different devices behave differently. If it’s not working on some devices, we’ll have to come up with a better way to link it.
It is good to know that more books will come.
I tried to open the link for the glossary with the kindle app for PC. This opens a Firefox window, in which is only unreadable code
The link to open the map of charted space works fine.
I am not an expert, but I think the problem is, that the link opens a Firefox window and tries to display a mobi-file. The mobi-file would have to be downloaded first and then opened with the kindle app in order to function properly.
I checked this out and that is exactly what is happening: Firefox does not recognize the file and so starts downloading as text. If you can right-click and “save link as” it will download the mobi file.
Alternatively, there may be a way to configure Firefox to recognize a mobi and download it or send it to the Kindle app. I’m not cognizant about that, however.
There is: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/applications-panel-set-how-firefox-handles-files
Same goes for other popular browsers, btw.
Don’t know if there’s anything that can be done ebook-wise. I suppose hypothetically the link could also link to a page that redirects the user to a html5 link – those can come explicitly with a download attribute that modern browsers would recognize. Don’t quite think it’s worth the complication, though ^^;
Thanks for the link. On a Kindle, the link works as intended: it’s downloads the file directly to the device (provided the browser is enabled). I think it works on properly on Android devices. iPhones, we have not yet been able to test thus far. If anyone wants to report their experience here, please do.