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Waiting on Wednesday: Excerpt from J. Patrick Black’s Ninth City Burning

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Ninth City Burning by J. Patrick Black // VBCHave you guys heard about J. Patrick Black’s upcoming novel Ninth City Burning? We read the blurb and immediately perked up. It kind of sounds like if Independence Day and Terminator 2 had a baby, only, you know, no time travel (as far as we know). The novel comes out on Sept. 6, 2016 (pre-order it), but we have an excerpt just for VBC readers.

Read on for the official book blurb and excerpt from Ninth City Burning.

About NINTH CITY BURNING

Centuries of war with aliens threaten the future of human civilization on earth in this gripping, epic science fiction debut…

We never saw them coming.

Entire cities disappeared in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing but dust and rubble. When an alien race came to make Earth theirs, they brought with them a weapon we had no way to fight, a universe-altering force known as thelemity. It seemed nothing could stop it—until we discovered we could wield the power too.

Five hundred years later, the Earth is locked in a grinding war of attrition. The talented few capable of bending thelemity to their will are trained in elite military academies, destined for the front lines. Those who refused to support the war have been exiled to the wilds of a ruined Earth.

But the enemy’s tactics are changing, and Earth’s defenders are about to discover this centuries-old war has only just begun. As a terrible new onslaught looms, heroes will rise from unlikely quarters, and fight back.

Excerpt from NINTH CITY BURNING

The Valentine War, Earth 500 Years Ago

It starts with the world how it used to be, with countries and billions of people living everywhere. Back then there was no such thing as thelemity, and people built houses and machines sort of like they have in settlements today, but all of that changed when the Valentines came.

The reason we call them the Valentines is that the day they first attacked, February 14 on the old Western Calendar, was called “Valentine’s Day”. We still don’t know what the Valentines call themselves, because we’ve never been able to talk to them. We don’t even know what they look like. People had all sorts of different names for them early in the war, but “Valentine” is the one that ended up being the most popular. It used to mean something totally different, but not many people remember that now.

We never saw them coming. All at once cities just started disappearing. A city would be there, everything totally normal, and then it would be gone, nothing but rubble and a cloud of dust. By the time we figured out we were under attack, half the cities in the world had already been destroyed. We tried to fight back, but the Valentines had thelemity, and our strongest weapons were next to useless. They probably would have killed every single person on the planet, except for one thing: It turned out we could use thelemity too.

One Response to “Waiting on Wednesday: Excerpt from J. Patrick Black’s Ninth City Burning”

  1. Maria D. says:

    This does sound interesting – I’m not big on the cover – feel like it could be better – but the book sounds pretty good. Here’s my WoW post

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