This is my post during the blog tour for The Jade Talisman by Alanna Mackenzie. In The Jade Talisman a band of rebels explores a wild, desolate island beyond the borders of an Empire controlled by artificial intelligence, in the hopes of finding animal spirits to join the battle against their oppressive rulers.
This blog tour is organized by Lola's Blog Tours and the tour runs from 12 till 18 July. You can see the tour schedule here.
By Alanna Mackenzie
Genre: Science Fiction/ Fantasy
Age category Young Adult
Release Date: 30 March, 2021
Blurb:
A talisman. A song. A gift that bends time, and alters the course of destiny itself.
It is the year 2762 in the Empire of Khalendar, and AI Masters rule the civilized world, striving to crush all dissent. But they have not yet managed to quell the Jade Rebellion or its leader, Walter Saltanetska. The rebels have sailed beyond the Empire’s borders to the infamous isle of Vei’arash. Their mission is to find animal spirits exiled long ago by the AI Masters, and return them to the mainland. With any luck, the spirits will strengthen the fading magical powers of their allies, the Western Mages, and join the battle against their oppressive rulers.
As the rebels plunge deeper into the jungle, physical laws are upended. The plants and animals of the rainforest are inextricably linked to divine beings. An ancient shaman-god entrusts Walter with the Jade Talisman, an enchanted gemstone that warps the basic rules of time and space.
The Talisman allows Walter to gaze into a mesmerizing labyrinth of future possibilities. But the visions it offers up are troublingly dark, giving Walter insight into the potential fates of himself and his loved ones. This gift proves to be a crushing burden, and Walter desperately longs for an ordinary life. But there is no going back…
The gripping sequel to The Jade Rebellion, The Jade Talisman explores whether nature and spirituality are capable of persevering in a world dominated by the cold logic of artificial intelligence.
Links:
- Goodreads
- Bookbub
- Amazon ebook
- Amazon paperback
The Jade Talisman – Excerpt #2
In the lobby of the apartment building, Elaine deliberately avoided eye contact with the concierge, who smiled and nodded at her as she passed him by. The hovering spirit of Walter exited the building with her. It was a clear but crisp autumn day; the wind was gusty, and the trees lining the streets were ripe with leaves the color of burnished copper. Elaine drew her coat tightly around her body, shivering as she stepped outside.
The woman now began walking quickly, each of her movements infused with purpose. After a few blocks, Elaine arrived at a train station that was crowded and bustling with people going about their daily business. When the hovering spirit observed the throng of people more carefully, he could see that it was comprised primarily of humans, but also included many mixed-race peoples, who had actuators and elastic nanotubes embedded onto their arms, legs, and faces. It soon became apparent that there were robots everywhere, scattered throughout the masses like clues buried in a puzzle. Most of the guards and officers at the train station were uniformed AI Fighters, and there were a few higher-ranked AI Masters. The Masters could be distinguished from the Fighters by their sleeker, more sophisticated humanoid bodies and red badges emblazoned with white diamonds: the official symbol of Crystal City.
The train station itself was a large public square surrounded by screens projecting lists of dozens of cities and villages in Khalendar and beyond, along with the arrival and departure times of the trains. The hovering spirit noticed that each screen appeared to be devoted to a particular region, and that Elaine was perusing a list related to the region “Barrens Reserve IV.” Elaine appeared to have found the platform for her train and hastily walked toward it, keeping her head lowered but her eyes alert. She glanced around nervously, deliberately avoiding clusters of AI guards and trying to blend in amongst the crowd as much as she could.
When Elaine arrived at the correct platform, she impatiently checked an old-fashioned golden watch she kept in her coat pocket. There were a few other people scattered around her, but the general sparseness of the crowd suggested that she had arrived early. After what seemed like an agonizingly long wait, a silver bullet train finally appeared in the distance, snaking its way rapidly toward the platform. The hovering spirit saw that Elaine was now more than mildly anxious; her brow was sweating profusely, and she was shifting back and forth on her feet in impatience. The crowd had grown substantially by this point, and everyone jostled each other as they lined up along the train tracks. The spirit saw Elaine’s eyes widen as she spotted, through a clearing in the dense multitude, blue-vested AI Fighters arriving at the station: Crystal Militsiya. These heavily armed cyborg cops were equipped with state-of-the-art facial recognition software and were hard-wired to detect criminals based on their appearance. When a bystander witnessed a crime, or suspected that one had occurred, they would report a description of the suspect’s appearance to an employee at the central police station, who would input the description into a database and send out a unit of these trackers to hunt down the criminal. The hovering spirit of Walter understood this intuitively, without knowing why.
The cyborg cops stopped momentarily at the entrance to the station to converse with the guards selling train tickets. One of the guards pointed in Elaine’s direction and the police followed his lead, marching briskly toward the platform where Elaine was standing. Fortunately for her, by now the crowd was very thick, and Elaine could conceal herself behind the wall of people standing in front of her. The train then suddenly arrived, blocking her completely from the Militsiya’s line of sight. Trembling, Elaine stepped impatiently onto the train, nearly knocking over a young child in front of her. The young girl’s mother began to chastise Elaine, calling her a “kayensta,” the Khalendi word for rude whore. Elaine did not turn around to acknowledge the woman, and upon entering the train, she immediately made her way toward the washroom and locked herself inside.
The hovering spirit followed her, effortlessly floating through the walls of the locked washroom. Elaine glanced in the mirror at her own exhausted face—the dark under-eye circles, the grey hairs, and the wrinkles on her forehead and around her mouth. She heaved a long, unsteady sigh as she opened her briefcase and carefully removed a black bag containing a brunette wig, a fake adhesive nose, and an elastic band. After tying up her long red hair with the band, she covered her head with the wig and meticulously tucked any stray hairs underneath it. She then removed another pouch from the briefcase which contained foundation, lipstick, blush, and eyeliner. Acting quickly, with trembling hands she placed the adhesive nose over her own and began applying the makeup onto her face, covering up the puffy bags under her eyes and bringing warmth and vibrancy to her pale cheeks and lips. When she was finished, she looked like a different person entirely, younger and prettier than the exhausted woman who had entered the bathroom.
When she left the washroom, Elaine tried to appear casual as she walked down the aisle to find an unoccupied seat. After a painful few minutes of searching, she finally spotted one next to a sleeping elderly man who was snoring quietly. As she settled in and tucked her briefcase under the seat in front of her, she could hear a man’s voice projecting over the loudspeakers: “Alert, alert: criminal spotted at Vennyest train station. Remain calm and seated while the train is searched for the suspect.”
Guest Post: The Process of Developing Characters and the Story
In my writing, setting plays a critical role, and I try to develop characters that live in an organic and natural relationship with their surroundings. I think that every author should strive to understand what makes a character tick and one of the most important aspects of that exploratory process is understanding how a character relates to their environment. A character’s motives should make sense when considered in the context of their upbringing and the social and cultural milieu in which they grew up, and in which they now live. After the characters are properly developed the story tends to unfold more organically, as their fears, desires, and aspirations are what propel the narrative forward and give it its structure.
All of this is a bit of theoretical and difficult to understand without concrete examples, so in the next part of this blog I will illustrate my point with reference to three of the main characters in my novel series The Jade Chronicles: Walter, Elaine, and Cyriana.
Walter, the protagonist of the series, is very much shaped by his experiences growing up in Crystal City. His parents were wealthy and prosperous people who fit seamlessly into the culture of the glittering metropolis. Walter grows up in an environment where conforming to the dictates of the ruling AI Masters is the key to success. Conforming comes easy to him, because he loves what makes his society tick: computers and code. It is his passion for this that leads him to land a prestigious government job translating AI Master code language into Khalendi. It also helps that during much of his youth, he has been drinking water that has been reducing his ability to remember past events and to dream vividly, the perfect way to turn him into an obedient and loyal citizen of the Empire.
Walter is shaped by his environment in complex ways. He is fascinated by artificial intelligence and he makes it his life work to translate their commands so that their will can be carried out. But growing up in this milieu also shapes him in another way – by giving him insight into things that he finds troubling, so troubling that he decides that it is worth giving up his career to rebel against the society that gave him everything in life.
A lot of the forces that shape Walter’s actions and motives are not part of the environment itself, but are rather other characters and Walter’s relationships with them. But I think what gives a story life and energy is how the interactions with those characters play out over a world with different settings. Imagine how boring Lord of the Rings would be, for example, if the hobbits didn’t actually travel very far to Mount Doom, as it was just a few steps away from their homes. A writer could give them exactly the same motives, interests, and personalities, but the story would lose its vitality quickly. In The Jade Chronicles, Walter’s story is enlivened by the fact that he travels a long way outside of his neighborhood and voyages to distant lands. These travels are not just physical, but also mental; he undergoes a process of self-exploration as, by moving farther away from Crystal City, he regains his memories and dreams. And later in the series, he is endowed with a gift, the Jade Talisman, which allows him to perceive of visions of the future. But all of these mental journeys are also grounded in setting, as Walter visualizes places that are familiar to him but have also been altered, sometimes permanently.
The character of Elaine is also heavily influenced by setting. She grew up in the Barrens, a desolate colony of the Empire. To her, though, the Barrens is far more than a desolate colony; it is her homeland, the place where her family lives, and a place where she envisions a better future. Her totem animal is the lizard, associated with Demeter, the goddess of rebirth and fertility. Elaine’s dream is to revitalize the place where she grew up so that it can once more be the thriving and bountiful land that it once was.
Finally, the character of Cyriana is similarly shaped by setting, and the drive to make her homeland a better place. She was born and raised in Serrahan, the kingdom of the Mages, one of the few remaining places in the Empire where the magic arts are practiced. Cyriana feels suffocated in this kingdom because it is cut off from the outside world, for security reasons, and it has been weakening as a result of its isolation. Cyriana has a firm belief that war is the only possible remedy for the problems faced by her homeland, and she has a burning desire to destroy the AI Masters so that magic can once again permeate the entire empire. Cyriana runs away to Crystal City to escape the oppressive confines of her life, which is where she learns about the AI Masters and their nefarious operations. Cyriana’s life is again changed when she travels to Vei’arash and meets her totem animal, the jaguar, who is as hungry for war and conflict as she is.
In summary, the setting of a story can be a powerful tool to help shape the characters and their motivations. In this way, fictional stories are similar to real life, where setting has obvious influences on our own personalities, motives and choices in life. In some genres like science fiction and fantasy, which is the genre of The Jade Chronicles series, setting plays an even more pivotal role because the world is so different than our own, and the characters only make sense with reference to that world. Also, that genre tends to include more epic adventures than other genres like literary fiction, where a fascinating story can unfold within a single house. To meaningfully shape characters, setting doesn’t necessarily have to be epic and grandiose; some of the best stories are written in settings which are modest and humble. But the puzzle of figuring out what drives a character often begins by asking the questions, “where are they now, where are they from, and how did their environment shape them?”
“A reckoning. A rebellion. The worlds of artificial intelligence and ancient magic collide.”
The Jade Rebellion by Alanna Mackenzie is the first book in The Jade Chronicles series. It’s currently discounted. You can get the paperback for only $7.99 and the ebook for only $2.99!
Links:
- Amazon ebook
- Amazon paperback
Alanna Mackenzie lives in Vancouver, Canada. She holds degrees in History, French studies, and Law from the University of British Columbia. An environmentalist at heart, she believes in using the law as a tool for social and environmental change. When she is not pursuing that passion, she can be found brainstorming the next chapter in her novels, playing Irish fiddle tunes on the violin, and hiking West Coast trails.
You can find and contact Alanna Mackenzie here:
- Website
- Goodreads
- Amazon
There is a tour wide giveaway for the blog tour of The Jade Talisman. Prizes are US and Canada only. These are the prizes you can win:
- 3 winners win paperback copies of both The Jade Rebellion (book 1) and The Jade Talisman (book 2)
- 2 winners win a paperback copies of the Jade Rebellion (book 1)
For a chance to win, enter the rafflecopter below:
a Rafflecopter giveaway
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