{"id":1808,"date":"2011-05-24T15:56:13","date_gmt":"2011-05-24T21:56:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?page_id=1808"},"modified":"2025-10-21T15:34:51","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T22:34:51","slug":"my-books","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?page_id=1808","title":{"rendered":"My Currently Available Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

This page is a guide to all the books I’ve written that I consider current. A lot of my technical books are now very old; the first edition of Complete Turbo Pascal<\/em> appeared in 1985. All of my technical books from traditional publishers are now formally out of print except for x64 Assembly Language Step By Step<\/em> and Learning Computer Architecture with Raspberry Pi<\/em>. That said, nearly all of my technical books are available on the used books sites (including Amazon) for a few dollars. Most of the books listed here are my self-published science fiction and fantasy, which are either ebook or print-on-demand editions and thus will never go out of print.<\/p>\n

My fiction tends toward the technical, toward ideas, and (especially) toward AI. I’m an upbeat person, and with only one (possible) exception, none of my stories are downers. I also do humor: Ten Gentle Opportunities<\/em> is a humorous romp, and Firejammer<\/em> is a deliberate tribute to Keith Laumer and his light-hearted Retief adventures.<\/p>\n

<\/a>The Cunning Blood<\/h1>\n

\"TCBCover-165High\"<\/a>Sample Chapter (PDF)<\/strong><\/a>
Kindle EBook ($3.99; also available on KU)<\/a><\/strong>
Trade paperback (360pp. $12.99)<\/strong><\/a>
First edition hardcover book (360pp. $28)<\/strong><\/a>
<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Caught violating the Zero Tolerance for Violence laws, Peter Novilio is sentenced to a one-way trip to Earth’s prison planet in the Zeta Tucanae system. Hell is forever: Its ecosphere is infected with microscopic nanomachines that destroy electrical conductors, condemning its inmates to a neo-Victorian steam-and-gaslight society without computers, spaceflight, or any hope of escape. Peter had in fact been framed by Earth’s paranoid world government, and is offered a pardon in return for conducting a reconnaissance mission to Hell and back. There were hints that Hell was developing impossible technologies or had somehow evaded the wire-eating nanobugs entirely. How Peter would return from Hell is a secret known only to his grim mission partner Geyl Shreve.<\/p>\n

But Peter has a secret as well: He is a member of the outlawed Sangruse Society, and in his blood flows the Sangruse Device, Version 9, the most powerful nanocomputer AI ever created. Although supposedly Peter’s protector and advisor, the Device answers to no one but the Society’s mysterious leader, and has reasons of its own for visiting Hell. Peter soon discovers that he is little more than a disguise, caught in a covert war among Earth, a revolutionary group bent on overthrowing Earth’s government, Hell’s ingenious inmates, and the deadly mechanism in his veins. For as fearsome as it is, the Device itself is afraid – and the fates of whole worlds would be decided by the threat that The Cunning Blood had discovered outside of space and time.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Ten Gentle Opportunities<\/h1>\n

\"Ten<\/a>Kindle Ebook ($2.99; also available on KU)<\/strong><\/a>
Trade Paperback (310pp. $12.99;)<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Having been caught cheating a powerful magician out of ten nuggets of pure uncommitted magic in a rigged card game, Bartholomew Stypek needs a place to hide. As a spellbender he is at best a partial magician, who can read and change magic spells, but, absent a stash of magical force, cannot cast his own. With his anarchic familiar spirit Pickles and the ill-won kitty of magical Opportunities, Stypek throws himself on the mercy of the all-powerful Continuum and leaps blindly across universes, hoping to be dropped someplace far away, boring, and utterly without magic. As the Continuum chuckles in the background, Stypek lands in the break room of a small-town advertising agency in Upstate New York.<\/p>\n

Because this new universe doesn\u2019t support spirits, Pickles manifests as the nearest local equivalent: AI software in the agency\u2019s heavily networked copier. She wanders into a nearby corporate network looking for allies, and discovers a virtual universe where AIs live in virtual bungalows and meet in virtual coffee shops for virtual doughnuts. Pickles is soon seducing Simple Simon, an earnest but naive AI tasked with controlling an immense robotic assembly line in the corporation\u2019s manufacturing plant. Stypek, meanwhile, is mistaken for a penniless Eastern European computer science intern, and is taken in by Carolyn Romero, the ad agency\u2019s copywriter. Expecting the usual suspicion and contempt, Stypek is humbled by the kindness he\u2019s shown, and one by one uses the stolen Opportunities to help his new friends with their problems, including Carolyn\u2019s failed marriage.<\/p>\n

But Jrikk the magician isn\u2019t so easily thwarted. Soon Stypek, Pickles, Simple Simon, and their human and virtual friends must fight for their lives against the evil force sent to retrieve Stypek to the magician\u2019s dungeons.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Dreamhealer<\/h1>\n

\"\"<\/a>Kindle Ebook ($3.99; Also available on KU)<\/strong><\/a>
Trade Paperback (369pp. $12.99;)<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

By day, Larry Kettelkamp keeps ancient PDP-8 computers alive in a collapsing industrial bakery. By night he wages war on nightmares, and has been waging that war for thirty years. As a young man, Larry discovered that he could enter other peoples\u2019 nightmares, end them, and then vaccinate the dreamers against that nightmare with an ancient symbol that alters the relationship between the two hemispheres of the brain.<\/p>\n

For nightmares are not random concoctions of our dreaming imaginations. Strange creatures called archons living in the subtle realms of the collective unconscious craft horrifying dreams to drop into sleeping minds, and then feast on the terror those dreams evoke. This scheme goes back 15,000 years, to the dawn of human history. It was created by a sort of super-archon who claims to be the Demiurge of ancient Persian myth.<\/p>\n

Once Larry learns how to destroy archons instead of merely banishing them from dreams, this architect of all nightmares hunts Larry down and demands that Larry stop destroying the monster\u2019s archon servants. Thus begins an escalating conflict that draws in a bored title-search agent, a witch and a lightworker, two teenage prodigies, a modern-day cult practicing ancient Persian death magick, dream mechas a quarter-mile high, and a very very<\/em> large number of dogs.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Firejammer<\/h1>\n

\"\"<\/a>Print Book ($6.99)<\/strong><\/a>
<\/a>Kindle Ebook ($2.99)<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Having dropped a snooty alien-contact anthropologist on a newly discovered inhabited planet to establish a relationship with the aliens, starship Richard M. Nixon<\/em> and its crew returns two years later on a trade mission. The corporations of the Tripartisan Economic Combine are eager to buy the aliens’ internally generated epoxy glue, which is among the best ever seen in known space. Vincent Icehall, the starship’s young shuttle pilot, has little to do during the mission but hang out with what he assumes is the alien community’s jester and village idiot. Icehall can’t pronounce the alien’s name and dubs him “Turkey,” but slowly realizes that Turkey is anything but. Ignoring all of Turkey’s warnings for the crew to leave the planet immediately, Icehall stumbles on a plot by the anthropologist and the aliens’ chieftain to steal the Nixon<\/em>‘s shuttle for use as a weapon of war.<\/p>\n

Dedicated to Keith Laumer and very much in the wry style of his Retief adventures, Firejammer<\/i> is a tribute to the man who taught a whole generation of SF authors how to write funny aliens.<\/p>\n

<\/a>The Everything Machine<\/h1>\n

\"\"<\/a>Print Book ($14.99)<\/strong><\/a>
Kindle Ebook ($3.99)<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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Carrying 800 passengers and their household goods, agricultural animals, and farm-related supplies to Earth\u2019s first interstellar colony, starship Origen<\/span><\/em>\u2019s hyperdrive self-destructs, marooning its passengers near an Earth-twin planet orbiting an unknown solar-twin star. While settling in, the inadvertent colonists name their world Valeron, and discover that Valeron is scattered with hundreds of thousands of alien replicator machines\u2014but there are no aliens nor any other trace of them.<\/p>\n

Each replicator is a shallow 8-foot-wide black stone-like bowl half-full of fine silver dust. Beside the bowl are two waist-high pillars about 8 inches in diameter, one pale silver, the other pale gold. Tap on either pillar, and the pillar makes a sound like a drum, one pillar high, the other low. Tap 256 times on the pillars in any sequence, and something<\/span> surfaces in the bowl of dust. Simple sequences create simple and useful things like shovels, knives, rope, saws, lamps, glue and much else. Complex or random sequences create strangely shaped forms of silver-gray metal with no obvious use. 256 taps on the pillars can create any of 2E256 different things; in scientific notation, 1.16 X 10E77.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s just short of one thing for every atom in the observable universe.<\/p>\n

The artifacts are dubbed \u201cdrumlins,\u201d for the sounds the pillars make, and the replicators called \u201cthingmakers.\u201d Drumlins have strange properties. Although virtually indestructible, drumlins can change shape, especially when doing so will protect a human being from injury. Drumlin knives will not cut living human tissue, but they will cut living animal tissue or human corpses. Press a drumlin knife against your palm, and it will flow and flatten out to a disk. Pull the knife away, and it will slowly return to its form as a knife. Some claim that drumlins read human minds and grant wishes. Others insist they are haunted by invisible and perhaps hostile intelligences.<\/p>\n

After 250 years on Valeron, the colony prospers. Starship Origen <\/span><\/em>is still in orbit, and a cult-like research organization called the Bitspace Institute vows to repair Origen<\/span><\/em>\u2019s hyperdrive and return to Earth. With millions of drumlins catalogued using the thingmakers, Valeron\u2019s people live well and begin to lose interest in returning to Earth. This threatens the Institute\u2019s mission, prompting it to launch a covert effort to undermine public faith in drumlins. A low-key war begins between the Institute and those who value drumlins\u2013including farmers, rural folk, an order of mystical women, and several peculiar teen girls who have an unexplained rapport with the thingmakers and their mysterious masters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/a>Drumlin Circus \/ On Gossamer Wings<\/h1>\n

\"Drumlin<\/a>Print Book ($11.99)<\/strong><\/a>
Kindle Ebook ($2.99)<\/strong><\/a>
Nook \/ EPub Ebook ($2.99)<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

In a tribute to the legendary Ace Double paperbacks, the first Copperwood Double combines two short novels back-to-back, each with its own cover, both set in Jeff Duntemann’s Drumlins world. On an abandoned alien planet, 700 castaways from Earth find thousands of alien manufacturing machines, which can produce anything you want…if you know the 256-bit code. The artifacts (dubbed “drumlins”) that come out of these “thingmakers” are themselves mysterious, and seem to understand what humans are doing and perhaps even thinking. 250 years later, drumlins have allowed the unwilling colonists to create a thriving society resembling 19th Century America, with steam power and a very wild West. Some want to use drumlins to repair their starship and return to Earth. Others prefer the life they’ve created in partnership with the thingmakers, even though rumors hold that some drumlins are dangerous and even deadly, or at very least not what they appear to be.<\/p>\n

Drumlin Circus:<\/strong> When a circus master’s wife learns how to make smilodons as docile as housecats using a drumlin whistle, agents from the cultlike Bitspace Institute abduct her, hoping to use the whistle to create animal assassins. One of the circus’s clowns, himself a former Institute man, returns to Institute HQ to free Pretty Alice and settle some unanswered questions about his early life. In doing so he sets off an escalating battle between the Circus and the Institute that draws in a coven of witches, a miniature hydrogen airship, and a steam calliope that speaks to the deepest minds of men, animals, and the half-sentient drumlins themselves.<\/p>\n

On Gossamer Wings:<\/strong> In a hardscrabble town among the rye fields of the sparsely-populated West, a mute and aphasic teen girl dreams of constructing a flying machine out of drumlins. Lacking the power of words, she has an unobstructed grasp of the mathematics of flight. She also has a mysterious rapport with the thingmakers that allows her to locate the drumlins she needs, even when their bit-pattern is unknown–including spheres of elemental iron and ducted-fan engines running on zero-point energy. Drawn by rumors of unnaturally pure iron, a ruthless Institute agent seeks her out in the hope of harnessing her talent before fearful townfolk expel her from town and destroy her dream of flight.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Cold Hands and Other Stories<\/h1>\n

\"\"<\/a>Print Book ($11.99)<\/strong><\/a>
Kindle EBook ($2.99; also available on KU)<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Jeff Duntemann’s second collection of short fiction runs the gamut from spaceflight to mathematically rigorous witchcraft. The volume includes “Cold Hands,” (nominated for the Hugo Award) “Our Lady of the Endless Sky,” “Inevitability Sphere,” “Whale Meat,” “Born Again, With Water,” “Drumlin Boiler,” “Drumlin Wheel,” and “Roddie,” plus a new excerpt from his hard SF nanotech adventure novel, The Cunning Blood<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Souls in Silicon<\/h1>\n

\"Souls<\/a>Print Book ($11.99)<\/a><\/strong>
Kindle\/Mobi Book ($2.99; also available on KU)<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Veteran computer book author Jeff Duntemann turns his talents to the challenges that “strong” artificial intelligence may face in this, his first collection of SF shorts. Stories include: “The Steel Sonnets”; “Guardian” (Nominated for the 1981 Hugo Award); “Silicon Psalm”; “Marlowe”; “Borovsky’s Hollow Woman” (with Nancy Kress); “Bathtub Mary”; “STORMY vs. the Tornadoes”; and “Sympathy on the Loss of One of Your Legs”; plus an excerpt from his novel of nanotech AI, The Cunning Blood<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/a>“Whale Meat”<\/h1>\n

\""Whale<\/a>Kindle \/ Mobi Ebook (99c)<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

In one of Jeff Duntemann’s few works of short fantasy, two 700-year-old witches in modern-day Chicago must confront a demand from the community of whales living in Earth’s oceans, that their unborn son join in their effort to heal the broken soul of humankind–with death the outcome should he fail. Homeless, hungry, and mostly without hope, Yonnie and Mara find help in some unlikely places, including a young mathematics student struggling to understand calculus, and an alcoholic bum who is much <\/em>more than he seems. (Note that this story is also included in the author’s collection, Cold Hands and Other Stories<\/i>.)<\/p>\n

<\/a>Odd Lots: Essays, Ideas, Parody and Memoir<\/h1>\n

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Print Book $12.99<\/a><\/strong>
Kindle \/ Mobi Ebook $2.99<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Jeff Duntemann began writing about technology in the mid-1970s, at the dawn of the microcomputer era. In his role as a technical magazine editor and early blogger, he wrote literally thousands of essays, editorials, blog posts, and humor pieces, many of which exist only in paper magazines from decades ago. In response to requests from his fans, he’s collected the best of his non-technical writing, and thrown in a little memoir to cast some light on the odd man behind these truly odd lots. Some highlights:<\/p>\n