Showing results by author "D. J. Butler" in All Categories

Cheerful in the face of dark opposition. Innovative to improve a backward world. Industrial as a cure for oppressive conditions. Unyielding beneath all who seek to bind and control them. Faithful until they conquer the fear of death and rise to great acts of heroism and service. Mormons and steampunks are two faces of the same coin. Twelve authors spin tales of true believers facing impossible odds, risking this life in the hope of gaining something better after.

Buza System is Dyan’s world. She has been a Crecheling, one of the System’s children, trained in a broad range of skills and knowledge and prepared to take her place as an Urbane, a full-fledged adult member of the desert community with a Calling given to her by the System and its Cogitant Council. Between receiving her Calling and admission into the System, though, stand the Hanging and the Selection. The System has a lesson it wants to teach Dyan about death. Against that brutal experience, and entwined within it, destiny has a different lesson for her, about the family she has never known…and about love.

Sam Clemens, leading the U.S. Army's expedition aboard his amphibious steam-truck, the Jim Smiley, has a mission: to ensure that the Kingdom, with its air-ships and rumored phlogiston guns, brain children of the Madman Orson Pratt, enters on the side of the United States and peace.

An encounter with an old friend becomes tragically fatal, and Indrajit and Fix set out on a high-stakes, high-adrenaline quest across the ancient city of Kish to bring their friend back to life. At each step, the complications and the enemies alike pile up. The mysterious necromancers, the Vin Dalu priests, bind the heroes on an errand that sends them shuttling from one thieves' guild to the next, pitting Indrajit and Fix against the deadly House of Knives and embroiling them in a plot by the giant, wasplike Kattak to take dire revenge on Kish and all its great houses.

Indrajit and Fix are the founding partners of the Protagonists, a jobber company in Kish. Since the seven great families of Kish farm out all tasks they and the city need doing, a jobber might one day unblock a well; the next, man a tollgate for the fair; and on the third, hunt down a murderer on the loose, all in a corrupt old city that isn't so much governed as kept barely in bounds.