Thursday, September 27, 2012

UPDATE: Young readers rate ancient Egypt fiction children's series - Goodreads

"Before Harry Potter books there were three other children - Cousin Harry, Josh and Amy - and the magic of playing eerie Egyptian computer games..." (Quote: University of Sydney academic)
Here is my collection of young Egypt fiction now on Amazon Kindle - published under the name Roy Pond. (My adult fiction uses Roy Lester Pond)

 
The first in this book set was published in USA as The Mummy's Revenge


Originally published separately as:
Book 1 THE MUMMY's REVENGE... is deadly (Scholastic USA)  (or 'The Mummy Monster Game' in Australia)

 Amazon Customer:
“This book is great! This book had me spooked until the very end. I advise against reading it at night unless you're practically fearless.It makes you want to read until the very last word. I don't scare easily, but this book managed to scare me pretty bad. Plus, it's one of those books that you can read and re-read again and again. It's a great, scary book, that pulls you right into the action and doesn't let you out until you finish it. I recommend it to anyone that likes to be scared.”

Book 2 Who knows the secret of... THE MUMMY'S TOMB (USA) (Or 'The Mummy Tomb Hunt' (Australia)

Book 3 'The Mummy Rescue Mission' (Australia)


Little Cousin Harry is really weird, but he is family, so Josh and Amy decide to play along with him. They join Harry in playing a series of totally spooky ancient Egypt computer games.

Trouble is, Harry's games become more and more real and dangers start to leak out of the games into real life and into their lives.
The popular Egypt series - now available in one monster book of three adventures.

“I literally consumed those three books when I read them! I sat and read the books in two days, and even when I wasn't reading them I was thinking about them. Though from memory I distinctly remember The Mummy Monster Game being my favourite, it's safe to say when I read them this time, the last in the series, The Mummy Rescue Mission was my favourite - I could literally feel the desperation Harry, Amy and Harry felt in trying to save Aunt Jillian. I had to keep reading at such a fast pace as though I had to keep up! I like the idea of mixing video games with Egyptology, being that both those things interest me. I'm glad I finally got my hands on these books…. now I can read them as often as I like.”
Carli

Click on this link below...





UPDATE 2023
Kindle and paperback

Monday, September 24, 2012

Why a female Mummy movie would be scarier

Mummy scariest


I was interested to read (in Geektyrant) that Len Wiseman is to direct a 'darker scarier' version of THE MUMMY for Universal Pictures.

Yet in fact, to the ancient Egyptians, nothing was more scary than the female dead.

Egyptians feared reprisals from the malignant female dead and were at great pains not to offend against them.

Why would the female of the dead species be more deadly - and crankier than the male? 

There is something darker, more poignant and disturbing about the female mummy. 

Do we feel they would be angrier about the crumbling dissolution of their beauty? 

Or do we have a latent fear of female magic and psychic power?

You can meet a truly terrifying, yet curiously engaging female mummy character in THE ISIS MUMMY.

You decide.

Isn't it time for a female mummy (of the ancient Egyptian kind)?

See THE ISIS MUMMY. New (and thousands of years old) on Amazon Kindle

My Ultimate Ancient Egypt Augmented Reality App as an Egypt Fiction Writer

3D Augmented reality: "History virtually restored!"

NOTE: This the original blog idea that I posted a couple of years ago, and now someone has actually done it! (click on this link)

As an author of ancient Egypt fiction, I have this idea for a new app that really appeals to me.  Here's my rough visual/mock-up above

It would work through the gps on your iPhone or iPAD. 

You simply point your device at the ancient ruin and then magically see what it looked like in ancient times... Egypt Now...and Then... in 3D.

Also, you could see the site at other stages of history, for example in Howard Carter's period, or even at the time of early photographers and explorers.

 
It could really bring history to life and revolutionise travel guides!


I also believe that the "Ancient History Virtually Restored" concept could ultimately roll out from ancient Egypt Now & Then, to Ancient Greece Now & Then, Ancient Rome Now & Then , Ancient Mesoamerica etc etc

For the Egypt App, it would would need 3D artwork impressions to cover a group of popular sites. (Could some of these be accessed under license from existing artist reconstruction artwork as well as new artwork being generated? Don't know.)

Some sites for the App.

The sphinx and pyramid/s

Djoser's Step pyramid complex

Saqqara pyramid fields

Memphis

Amarna

Dendera

Temple of Seti/ Osirieon

Temple of Hathor

The Colossi of Memnon (and of course the vanished temple of Amenhotep behind them.)

Deir el Bahari and gardens

Ramesseum

Medinet Habu

Ancient 100-gated Thebes

Karnak (and various temples and features within it, sacred lake etc)

Luxor temple

Edfu

Philae

??


I have put out some feelers with local app developers, but I think it is a bit outside their scope and so I have got no further.






Saturday, September 15, 2012

What was my inspiration for writing THE EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY MURDERS?



THE EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY MURDERS is something very different and separate from my fiction series about the renegade Egyptologist Anson Hunter. The protagonists are a regenerating Isis herself and Jennefer, a young female trainee curator at one of the world's most famous museums.

In a sense, it’s fan fiction. I was smitten by Rider Haggard’s ‘She’ as a younger man. 

I guess we all start out life as clean skins and certain books leave indelible marks on us. If that's true, then "She" left me tattooed like the illustrated man.

Does the novel have echoes of "SHE"?

I have always relished the fun of the macabre and can’t resist shows like The Walking Dead and I loved The X-Files. Interestingly, here’s Scully and Mulder with Isis and Osiris.

Isis and Osiris, two deities at the centre of my novel

Hopefully I’ve put a new spin on the mummy mythos with THE EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY MURDERS.

I hoped to make THE EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY MURDERS an emotional and engagingly human read and I was pleased to hear my editor describe the book as “quirky, fascinating and unexpectedly beautiful…” adding, “I really liked Isis and found myself rooting for her, in spite of her actions and dreading the possible consequences of her achieving her goal of returning the Death God Osiris to the world and unleashing catastrophe!”

This book is no doubt quirky. In one scene, the regenerating Isis actually Googles herself, and that has to be a first!

In Hollywood movie speak, I’d have to describe THE EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY MURDERS, as:

‘SHE’ meets ‘THE MUMMY’(the movies and Anne Rice novel) and the X-FILES and THE WALKING DEAD, with, bizarrely perhaps, a  touch of ROMAN HOLIDAY thrown in, except this novel is set in London. Many of the scenes take place in The British Museum, a place I love to haunt. (My other favourite museums are The Egyptian Museum in Cairo, The Louvre in Paris and The Metropolitan in New York.)


Much of my novel is built around The British Museum













Friday, September 14, 2012

UPDATE Try these Halloween Reads! 'THE EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY MURDERS' with opening excerpt...

Eerie and "strangely beautiful"

-->
Chapter 1


A female mummy from ancient Egypt lay outstretched inside a hospital scanning machine.

The British Museum had brought the mummy to St. Thomas’ Hospital for a non-invasive examination of the body beneath its wrappings.

“We’ll begin by doing the head and neck in two millimetre slices. I’m just relieved that nobody will have to give this patient the bad news that she’s terminal.”

The radiologist had made the joke to bridge the jarring disconnect between ancient death, wrapped up in magical spells, and the modern day machinery of medical imaging. 

The radiation scan - at a dose lethal for the living - blasted through the linen windings. It was like a penetration of sunlight warming the bones after the ache of the desert night.

The machine hummed. A spinning cylinder curved around the mummy’s head like a night sky arching over Egypt.

The sand-dry cells of the body, spread out in an undulating landscape on the CT tray, stirred in a sudden breath.

Life! Resurgent life! It eddied, thickened, mounted in force, blowing, gusting, then blasting through the mummy like a desert sand storm.

She opened one green eye to look out through a small gap in her wrappings.

“Shall we pipe in some comforting music for the patient?” a voice said outside the chamber.

A man laughed.

Her first thought was not a word, but a symbol, the glyph of union between a man and a woman.

That first thought, like the first sunbeam of clarity penetrating into the blackness of a temple sanctuary, pierced the inchoate state of her mind.
The radiation blasts and the flashing had aroused her from her sleep of centuries, but she needed more. She must have the generating fluid of life to begin to restore herself.

A man.

Only a man’s life force could magically start the flow of energy to rebuild the ruined temple of her being.

Am I lying here in the body of Mother Nut, the goddess who held up the sky and stars?

No.

A much harder, metallic place.

She found that she had been swallowed up in the round mouth of a vault-like chamber. Not Nut’s star-lined body, but a gullet, like that of the great serpent of outer darkness and evil, Apophis.

She stirred and the bandages, though finely wrapped, crackled like dry rushes around the length of her high-waisted and long-legged form.

“Vibrations on the screen. Is there construction work going on outside? She just twitched!”

“I certainly hope not!”

Where am I? There was no sweet, chanting for her here, nor the soothing shimmer of the sistra rattled by her priestesses and no burning gum of incense from Punt to celebrate her divine aroma.

Instead the cold stink of hospital antiseptic flared her nostrils.

Her supranormal awareness told her that this was not Egypt. It was a green, island place, far from Egypt, across the expanse of the rolling Great Green.

That realisation brought a pang.

But it was nothing like the pang she felt as the first powerful emotion that she had experienced since her ‘night of ointment and bandages’ thousands of years earlier speared through her. She gave a low moan.

Osiris.

Lost to me!

Isis felt her chest rise in grief, but it felt like heaving dunes of sand and not warm flesh, and there was no moisture to rise to her eyes in tears, just a trickle of dust disturbed by her moving eyelashes.

“This is unusual. The skull shows no sign of being emptied and packed with linen…”

“She’s very early period. Her mummy case is simple and severe, the earliest typological style,” the voice of a young female Egyptologist explained. “She was obviously named in honour of the goddess Isis, an extremely ancient deity…”

A beeping alarm cut across her voice and the scanner machine plunged into darkness and so did the room.

“What’s happened?”

“Power outage.”

“Our own auxiliary generator will kick in.”

It did. Immediately. The light and the whirring resumed.

“Back on stream. But it might be wise to pause and continue this later to be safe. We’ll bring her out of here temporarily and resume when the glitch is over. If we’re quick, the tea will still be hot in the hospital cafeteria.”

She felt her body moving, being dragged out of the gullet along the sliding CT tray, vibrating under her back, and she came out through the round mouth of the scanner into a wider space.

Then the hospital’s back-up power died too and the room now swarmed with darkness again. As black as the tomb.

“Curses!” a voice said.

“Is that an imprecation or an explanation,” the CT operator said.

An uneasy chuckle.

“Anybody got a pencil light? Where’s a GP when you need one?”

“Come, this way, folks. Follow my voice. I can find the cafeteria in the dark.”

She heard footsteps retreating.





Osiris. I will begin a new journey for you.

I, Isis, Great of Magic, will rise and search for you – for your remains, your pieces, even the atoms of your dust - and through the power of my magic I will restore you.

Isis renewed the vow of a new cycle, a cycle that the Egyptians believed took place every 5,000 years and that had now been re-activated by a blast of twenty-first century radiation.

But first, she must revive herself and that meant seeking the life force.

She gave a dusty croak and writhed like a serpent sloughing its skin, snapping the rotting bonds that held her limbs against her body and her legs together. She sat up, as slowly as the ancient ceremony of the raising of the Djed pillar.

She rocked and swung stiff legs over the side of the tray. The knees would not bend, so she slid the rest of the way stiffly to the floor.

The feet of Isis touched earth again.

Now walk.

The thin bones in her feet cracked like breaking tubes of glass. Gingerly she took one step and then another, shuffling out of the CT suite into the big city hospital, in darkness.

Isis walked the earth again.


AMAZON Kindle and Paperback

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

A threat from an esoteric ancient Egypt weapon? Did US Intelligence paranoia go this far?

Ancient Egypt and the danger of the unknown



 
The Homeland man, whose name was Bloem, shrugged, moving mountains under the shoulders of his coat.
“That’s on a need-to-know basis, I’m afraid.”
“I need to know. What exactly am I looking for?”
“We need you to join us in a race to stop a strike against us by some ancient and unknown weapon, or maybe to uncover something that may be masked as a symbolic threat. The term ‘smiting’ has been used. This weapon will be used against America especially, but also threatens our Western allies.”
Anson whistled. “The smiting of America! Using the ultimate dirty bomb. That’s unfair. You knew that would get my interest…” It did more than interest him. It electrified him. Were they serious? Did Intelligence community paranoia go this far? Maybe I’m not the only one, after all, who has respect for unseen realities.
Suddenly, as he went with that thought, a lifetime of theoretical abstraction collided in a blinding flash with the real world of national interests, conflict, geopolitics and the whole damned thing. Here was a real-world enterprise that an outsider like him could only have dreamt about, and, irradiating it all was the vision like the Holy Grail of some kind of validation at the end.
Was it possible that he might not have to gnash his teeth in outer darkness forever, after all?
Excerpt, The Smiting Texts, first in the Anson Hunter Egypt adventure series

Monday, September 10, 2012

German archaeology discovers the dangerous Stone Book of Thoth - The Ibis Apocalypse



Egyptology display, Berlin Museum, maps, period photos, field notebooks



Chapter 1
Berchtesgaden, Austrian Alps, 1939
THE REICHSFUEHRER of the SS, Himmler, made the introductions.
The newly arrived German Egyptologist, ushered into Hitler’s presence, felt terror grip his heart. Suddenly he understood how the ancients felt when they found themselves in the presence of pharaoh and ‘no longer knew whether they were alive or dead’.
The Fuehrer might have been dressed for a hunt or a climb in the mountains, but for the fact that he suffered from vertigo and could barely bring himself to look down at the heart-stopping views beyond the windows of his chalet.
Hitler regarded the archaeologist as if fitting him to a template in his mind.
Freshly returned from fieldwork in Egypt, Manfried Faltinger had come here by urgent request to see the Chancellor at his ‘Eagle's Nest’ mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, high up in the Alps of the Austrian border.
The room filled with silence like air pressure, relieved only by the ticking of a Bavarian clock that split tiny cracks in the silence. It was a surprisingly optimistic and airy room decorated by the Fuehrer himself. Arrangements of cut flowers with starbursts of edelweiss, his favourite flower, freshened the chalet and eighteenth century German furniture, his passion, glowed in the room, which included a long table cleared for the occasion.
“You have brought the power of the ages with you, Herr Faltinger?”
Faltinger swallowed and heard his own voice reply.
“Ja, Mein Fuehrer. Paper rubbings taken by my own hand from the original Stela of Destiny.”
“Reveal it.”
The weasel-faced Heinrich Himmler, a devotee of the mystical and the esoteric, now gestured to the long table.
Faltinger brought the clear perspex tube out from under his arm. He unscrewed the end and gently began to tip the roll of paper forward before moving towards the table.
“Wait!”
The Chancellor held out his hands. He wanted to receive and hold the texts himself.
Hitler knew better than most men the power of a book to change the world.
It was a point of pride that he had built his Berghof mountain retreat solely with money from the royalties of Mein Kampf, which at that point had already sold over four and a half million copies, but this was an imprint of the Book of Books, the stone book of Thoth.
Faltinger removed the length of paper rubbings from its tube and placed it gently in the cradle of the Fuehrer’s hands. Did the paper, fine grained and smooth, give a rustling sigh?
Adolf Hitler rocked the Texts of Thoth like a baby and, for a moment, his sharpened, bristled features softened into a fatherly mould. His eyes were moist when he looked up.
“Who else has possessed these words?” he said hoarsely. Faltinger sensed it was no time for small gestures and associations. This was a moment of history. “The author of legend, Thoth, also Prince Khaemwaset, Rameses the Great, and possibly even Alexander the Great.”
The militant prodigals of history were all men of superstition, the Egyptologist had noted. They held a profound belief in the power of fate and of mysterious forces.
Men like Alexander, Napoleon and now Hitler.
“You have translated it?”
There was a challenge in the Chancellor’s voice, as well as eagerness. Faltinger thought he detected a note of anxiety there too. What did the leader want to hear?
“I have made but a small beginning.”

(Excerpt from The Ibis Apocalypse, 3rd in the Egypt adventure fiction series about modern day renegade Egyptologist Anson Hunter)