The Garden of Prose: My Second Novel Wins a Prize and Finds a Publisher!

   

       My novel "Karpa Talesman" has won a competition and found a publisher in Hidden River Arts, a regional arts organization based in Philadelphia. 

          The organization chose my book as a winner in one of its literary competitions. Here's the announcement in the March-April issue of Poets &Writers Magazine: 
 

Hidden River Arts

Prophecy Creek Book Award in Speculative Fiction

Robert Knox of Quincy, Massachusetts, won the 2018 Prophecy Creek Book Award in Speculative Fiction for "Karpa Talesman." He received $1,000, and his book will be published by Hidden River Publishing. The editors judged. The annual award is given for a book-length work of speculative fiction.

Hidden River Arts, P.O. Box 63927, Philadelphia, PA 19147. (610) 764-0813. Debra Leigh Scott, Founding Director.

hiddenriverarts@gmail.com

hiddenriverarts.com

          Poets & Writers Magazine is the 'industry journal' for creative writers. I've been hoping to see my name in its pages for years. 
          Hidden River Arts has over the past half year announced 
winners in a range of literary genres.
                Speculative fiction is a publishing category encompassing literary fiction that employs elements of science fiction or fantasy, or simply imagines events in a world that resembles -- but is clearly not -- our own. 
          I don't have a publication date yet for the new book, and publication is sometimes a lengthy process. I'll share it when I do (no surprise there). But I couldn't wait to share the news of the announcement.

          
           Here's a brief summary of the premise of "Karpa Talesman," a story that takes place partly in a world much like good old earth, and mostly in the imagined sister-world of urth, which resembles our planet at earlier stages of the development of civilization:

          At a time when Planet Earth appears to be running out of time itself -- hours disappear and trees aren't where you found them yesterday -- the scientists of the Dream Project are looking to send the right somebody to another world. They're hoping that an off-world point of view might give them a perspective on the problem.

          Entomologist Sheena Drey, whose own work has been rendered meaningless by the disturbing changes in her planet's eccentric timeline behavior, discovers that the last gasp planet-saving project is setting up a lab in her building in the MIT neighborhood of Cambridge. She then learns that her husband Copper, a part-time college teacher and 'dreamer,' has volunteered for the project and is lying in an induced coma-like state in the project's lab.

          The project's drugs have transported the dreaming Copper to a different existence in a different world, where he struggles to cope with an alien way of life and the radical solitude caused by the lingering intimation that he is living the wrong life in the wrong place. On 'urth,' a planet at a technically lower stage of development, Copper becomes Karpa Talesman, eventually turning his experiences with brutal slavers, back magic, rival dukes, assassins sent from his own world, a powerful shaman, Homeric bards and sophists-for-hire into the stories he shares with the co-inhabitants of his multiverse 'dream.' But have the 'wizeguys' or gods of this world planted in his mind the clue that will help save his own planet?...

          After that, pretty much everything I can think of to happen, happens. 

           I can't wait until I can share the whole thing.