Trapdoor Books

Critical acclaim for The Magician of Lhasa continues with a wonderful review in the New York Journal of Books. I’ll post some excerpts below, but you should read the entire review on their website here.

“Reading with a writer’s eye, I’ve always been an admirer of first-person, present-tense narrative. A difficult literary style but, when done well, it can give an unparalleled sense of immediacy to a story. The prologue of The Magician of Lhasa begins just so. The reader is immediately in the temple, at the feet of the Buddha, lighting butter lamps.

Congratulations to Brian for soliving last week’s simple addition puzzle!  Here’s his winning solution.

This week’s puzzler is an epitaph from 1538AD. It is a favorite of mine, although there may be more than one solution. You are walking along in an old graveyard and come across a tombstone with the following verse carved on it. How might this happen?

“Two grandmothers, with their two granddaughters;
Two husbands, with their two wives;
Two fathers, with their two daughters;
Two mothers, with their two sons;
Two maidens, with their two mothers;
Two sisters, with their two brothers;
Yet only six in all lie buried here;
All born legitimate, from incest clear.”

Figured it out?  Post your solution here.  Need help?  Invite a friend to join the community and help in the fun.

PRWEB just sent out this press release about The Magician of Lhasa and Trapdoor Books. Below is an excerpt. 

Lyons, Colorado (PRWEB) Jan 26, 2010 — Geek quantum scientists and Tibetan Buddhists are set to collide this week. No, we’re not talking about a bizarre experiment in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, but a rare intersection revealed with the official launch of The Magician of Lhasa, the world’s first Buddhist thriller, published by emerging geek fiction press Trapdoor Books.

The Magician of Lhasa by David Michie is a suspenseful adventure story and a tale of corporate intrigue, involving a lama and his two novice monks fleeing the Red Army invasion of Tibet in 1959 carrying their order’s most well-guarded secret.

It’s difficult to convey exactly how much I love movies. I grew up watching movies, like the 1986 classics No Retreat, No Surrender (purely a “period piece” now) and Three Amigos. These are just two of the movies I’ve seen more times than I can count. Want more? How about Last of the Mohicans, Terminator 2: Judgement Day (the best sequel ever), and Rambo 3? I can quote them throughout.

Today I’m going to talk about a peculiar sub-genre of speculative fiction, the Post-Apocalypse story. By its very definition, post-apocalypse deals with what might happen on Earth after some catastrophic event (or series of events) has destroyed many of the things we take for granted.

I love movies. Not just watching them, but discussing them and getting involved with the worlds they create. I semi-frequently blog on ways The Matrix could have been improved, probably for no better reason than hindsight is 20/20. Recently, I’ve been seeing more movies than usual and it’s provoked a few thoughts.

Today I’m going to talk about the twist.

Probably the most famous (infamous?) director when it comes to twists these days is M. Night Shyamalan. Who can forget The Sixth Sense, when we find out the main character has been dead the whole time, or Signs, where the aliens are damaged by water (and yet still chose to invade a planet 70% covered with it).