Unexpected Rain by Jason LaPier Excerpt & Interview

About the Book:

Title: Unexpected Rain
Author: Jason LaPier
Publisher: HarperCollins (HarperVoyager)
Pages: 350
Genre: SciFi
Format: Paperback/Kindle/Nook

In a domed city on a planet orbiting Barnard's Star, a recently hired maintenance man named Kane has just committed murder.
Minutes later, the airlocks on the neighbourhood block are opened and the murderer is asphyxiated along with thirty-one innocent residents.
Jax, the lowly dome operator on duty at the time, is accused of mass homicide and faced with a mound of impossible evidence against him.
His only ally is Runstom, the rogue police officer charged with transporting him to a secure off-world facility. The pair must risk everything to prove Jax didn’t commit the atrocity and uncover the truth before they both wind up dead.

For More Information

• Unexpected Rain is available at Amazon.
• Pick up your copy at Barnes & Noble.
• Read an excerpt here.
• Discuss this book at PUYB Virtual Book Club at Goodreads.

Book Excerpt:

Kane stepped out of the house, gently closing the door behind him. The operator had dialed up a gorgeous evening in the sub-dome block. Stars were out. The constellations were clear and familiar; Orion, the bears, and all that nonsense. There was a low, ambient light on the street, a bit red in color, but it didn’t come from the tiny, flickering flames of the decorative street lamps, nor did it cause enough light pollution to obscure the view of the Milky Way.

Of course, Kane knew the stars were all wrong. It wasn’t even night on the planet’s surface. When people started leaving Earth and building domes on any rock with the right gravity, orbiting a star within a few sleepy decades of the Sol system, they set them up with twenty-four-hour-day cycles, weather, mild seasons, and all the minor natural comforts and annoyances that Earthlings were used to.

In block 23-D of a sub-dome called Gretel, near the primary dome called Blue Haven, just off the equator of the fourth planet from Barnard’s Star, it was the middle of the night. All the residents were fast asleep, happy to comply with the artificial temporal configuration. Domers, in general, didn’t question much of anything; they took the life doled out to them by their authorities and passively accepted it – were even grateful for it.

About the Author

Born and raised in upstate New York, Jason LaPier lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and their dachshund. In past lives he has been a guitar player for a metal band, a drum-n-bass DJ, a record store owner, a game developer, and an IT consultant. These days he divides his time between writing fiction and developing software, and doing Oregonian things like gardening, hiking, and drinking microbrew. He is always in search of the perfect Italian sandwich.

His latest book is the space age noir murder mystery, Unexpected Rain.

For More Information

• Visit Jason LaPier’s website.
• Connect with Jason on Facebook and Twitter.
• Find out more about Jason at Goodreads.
• Contact Jason.

Interview:

Where are you from?

Born and raised in Upstate New York, but I've been an Oregon resident for 13 years now. Currently, I live in Portland with my wife and my dachshund.

Tell us your latest news?

My debut novel Unexpected Rain was just released by HarperVoyager as an ebook on May 7th, to be followed by a paperback in November. It's an interstellar murder mystery, and the first in a trilogy.

When and why did you begin writing?

Despite being a professional computer geek by trade, I've always sought a creative outlet. For a long time this was making music (first metal, then electronic), then it became game design. I'd dabbled with writing on and off but when I was writing quests for a role-playing game that I'd been developing in my spare time, I found I really enjoyed it. It was in 2005 that I started working on a couple of novels (neither of which ever got finished) and some short stories. I had the bug, and within a few years I was attending workshops and devouring books on writing and just getting more serious about it in general.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

In 2010, I submitted a short story to a contest for the Portland Wordstock literary festival. I had zero expectations, but my piece was one of ten chosen out of several hundred and I got to be in a small print anthology that was sold at the festival. Seeing my name on that physical book made me realize I better start calling myself a writer.

What inspired you to write your first book?

I'm going to go with the "first book I actually finished", because I had a few books that I started and never completed. In 2009, I took the National Novel Writing Month challenge and I wanted a fresh start, so I went back to my roots: classic sci-fi. I didn't want the scope of something too epic (which is always tempting), and I also knew that to make it through a month of nonstop writing, I'd need a strong plot before I got started. A murder mystery set in space was the perfect happy medium of futurist sci-fi setting with a strong plot backbone.

Giving myself a sort of "standard" setting and plot let me get more creative and deep with my characters. I love the dynamic of a hard-nosed tough guy paired up with an all-brains softy, and with the darkness of murder hanging over the story, I was able to broaden these characters a great deal, giving them the drive to solve the case.

Do you have a specific writing style?

Depends on the story. I write some short fiction, and I like to change up my style to keep it interesting. For my novel Unexpected Rain, it's a pretty standard, tight third-person point of view across three characters. In terms of tone, it has a pretty classic sci-fi feel to it, similar to Isaac Asimov's work, with influences of more modern writers such as Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. With a bit of edge thrown in - it's on the gritty side.

How did you come up with the title?

The title refers to an example of operator programming that one of the characters, Jax, uses when he's trying to explain the systems inside a dome. In order to maintain the environment, the operators have to periodically create rain inside each dome, and since domers are sheltered folk and don't like getting wet, they get a warning when it happens. Jax comes to realize how much his example represents dome life in general, and how much he'd put up with getting all wet in exchange for the thrill of spontaneity and unpredictability. I talked about how I apply this same idea to the rocky ride to publication in this blog post: http://jasonwlapier.com/2014/12/2014-wrap-up-riding-the-unexpected/

Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?

A lot of sci-fi these days is trying to send a warning or a message that's right there on the surface - dystopias, for example. I consume a lot of that stuff, and I place a great deal of value on any work that can successfully bring a strong message to readers. However, I think for the health of the genre you have to have some less heavy-handed (for lack of a better word) stories to balance things out and remind us that ultimately this is all for entertainment purposes.

There are some of those dystopian-esque warnings in Unexpected Rain, but as a backdrop almost; it's not a full-fledged dystopia, but far from the utopia of the old Star Trek designs. There are backhanded digs against capitalism running unchecked, but I admit my approach is less a lesson and more just a cynical "it is what it is". And there are other challenging themes in there; racism rears its ugly head from time to time, which is my way of saying, even as humans evolve technologically, there will still be assholes among us.

Above everything though, the core arc of Unexpected Rain is internal to the main characters. They all struggle with being a little different, and with the direction their lives are heading; however their obstacles are different, and thus each has vastly different lessons to learn.

How much of the book is realistic?

It's set about six hundred years into the future, so I've dropped some common sci-fi tropes in to lubricate the story: faster-than-light travel, terraforming, that sort of thing. This stuff is all unrealistic by today's standards, but who knows, in the future? I have tried to use some real science in the story - such as the behavior of planets and moons, the effects of gravity, vacuums,  solar radiation, etc - as much is necessary to create a source of tension without getting in the way of the story with too much science babble.

Are experiences based on someone you know, or events in your own life?

I'm a software engineer by trade, and so a lot of my day-to-day observations inform some of the underpinnings of my future world. I love to play with the disconnect between the designs of engineers and the real-world usage of their efforts by consumers. As most writers will tell you, all characters have a bit of real world people in them, but most of the time they are amalgamations and can't be attributed to any single person.

If you had to choose, which writer would you consider a mentor?

I'm a big fan of everything that Jeff VanderMeer does. In particular, his book on writing - Wonderbook - is the single most helpful, insightful, and downright delightful text on the craft. It will appeal greatly to speculative fiction writers, but really his guidance applies to all genres of writing.

What book are you reading now?

The Day Before by Liana Brooks. Set in the near future in the 2060s, it's a murder mystery involving human cloning. The characters are very real and the fuzzy legalities around cloning make for interesting police politics. If you love police procedurals and a bit of sci-fi like I do, I highly recommend it.

Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

James Smythe. Among his books are these two deep, dark, sci-fi novels, The Explorer and The Echo. They are not typical action/adventure sci-fi, but creepy and lonely and mind-bending. Very remarkable.

What are your current projects?

I'm currently working on the sequel to Unexpected Rain, which will be followed by the conclusion of the trilogy. Aside from that, I've been working on an unrelated book: a modern day private-eye thriller with some mind-bending sci-fi twists. And I'm always working on various short pieces - short fiction is where I allow myself to branch out and experiment.

Name one entity that you feel supported you outside of family members?

I've been in several critique groups over the years, and at one point I joined up with two other writers to form a very small, focused group called Writers With No Name. We met every week for about two and half years and it was as much a support group as it was a critique group: we kept each other motivated and on track, we cheered each other on through victories, we consoled each other through defeats.

What would you like my readers to know?

My sci-fi murder mystery, Unexpected Rain, is out now in ebook, with a paperback release coming later this year. It's the first in a trilogy that takes place several hundred years into the future, where humankind has colonized a few planets in other solar systems. It's dark but adventurous and overall I'm told it's a fun read. You can find an excerpt at my site: http://jasonwlapier.com/books/unexpected-rain