Hecate

Recently widowed engineer Timothy Conner would always remember it as the day his life changed forever. The day he went to the estate sale.

Timothy Conner bought an ancient book and got a cat into the bargain. But the cat and the book concealed a centuries-old secret. Conner probes that secret and releases an ancient being of unimaginable power.

Life for Timothy Conner would never be the same. The world would never be the same.

Because the world had never been what he had always thought it was.

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INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND

"Hecate" is pretty clearly fantasy. This is a new genre for you?

Yes, although I think of it as 'fantasy with rules.' That is, there are no deus ex machina moments, no place where our heroes are in dire straits and pull out some whiz-bang magic the reader doesn't know about. The reader is up to speed on each bit of magic by the time it is used. And the magic has to all fit together, be internally consistent, and make sense in some way.

What sub-genres of fantasy is "Hecate" in? Your previous books were pretty solid in Military SF or Colonization SF or Hard SF.

"Hecate" is in 'Gods and Godesses Fantasy' as well as in 'Sorcerer's Apprentice Fantasy.' The G&G Fantasy is because the main characters our hero comes in contact with are the gods and goddesses of the Greek pantheon. The basic 'what-if' question of "Hecate" is, What if the Greek gods and goddesses were real, and they were still around in the modern era? SA Fantasy is the genre of things like J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books and Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy, where someone sets out on the journey to learn magic. Our everyman hero gets caught up in the Greek pantheon's activities and has to learn their magic.

How well did you stick to Greek Mythology?

The players here are all characters in Greek mythology, and their family relationships to each other, their areas of expertise or oversight, and much of their personalities are all from Greek mythology. Some of the weirder parts of Greek mythology - like Athena being born fully adult from Zeus's brow after he had swallowed her mother while already pregnant - are treated as "Where do people get that stuff?" by the characters in the book.

The Greek gods and goddesses did a lot of sleeping around within the family.

Yes, and that's all here. Zeus and Hera, for instance, were brother and sister, were then husband and wife, and had children together. I kept all of that, as it is essential to the story of the Greek pantheon. They just didn't play by our rules. There was really no way to write that out of the book. So some of the goings-on - like Aphrodite putting the moves on Zeus, who is her father - may be strange to someone who doesn't know the story.

How fast did "Hecate" write, given that you're working in a new genre?

A bit over 2000 words per writing day, where I'm usually more like 2500. There were parts that wrote slowly because I had to research the Greek pantheon rather than just make everything up. There were also two science fiction conventions in there, with half a dozen days out each given travel and attendance, so in calendar days it was longer than normal.

What about the cover?

Paola Giari of Rotwang Studio did the cover art to my specification. It is a scene directly from the book, as all of my covers. Paola did a tremendous job on it. That is the Hecate I saw in my mind.