Spawn of the Cataclysm by Robert Hoppensteadt - Humans carelessly wielded their power to create new things, a power that far outpaced their understanding. It was only a matter of time until something went terribly wrong. Something did. AND - Find out which scene was the most difficult to write in an interview with the Author.
by Robert Hoppensteadt
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic Adventure
Publisher: Solstice Publishing
Date of Publication: March 2. 2020
ISBN: 979-8620552344
ASIN: B085DN3K5V
Number of pages: Print 227; Kindle 194
Word Count: 70K
Humans carelessly wielded their power to create new things, a power that far outpaced their understanding. It was only a matter of time until something went terribly wrong. Something did.
Technology has been erased for millenniums, monsters spawned at the end of a world infest the forests and seas, and a new civilization has slowly risen from the long darkness. In sight of the looming ruins of what was once called San Francisco there is an evil growing.
The people of New Gate are about to face their greatest challenge.
An Interview with the Author
Robert Hoppensteadt
Spawn of the Cataclysm is an adventure set a thousand or more years in the future. I open each chapter with a fragment of a journal that shows what happened to our world. Most humans died, wiping out the grid and our store of knowledge, but over time there has been a recovery to the point there are some city-states along the west coast of North America. Most are civilized and in a kind of medieval level of development, though there are raiders and slavers and some rogue cities where anything goes. The Cataclysm, as it is remembered, also created mutated predators and humans. In this backdrop, a large band of raiders have joined with some of the mutated humans called Non and plan to attack a city near the ruins of San Francisco during an upcoming celebration. There is romance and adventure and deception and tragedy and there are characters that you will come to love (and in some cases hate.)
Writing isn’t easy. What was the most difficult thing you dealt with when writing your newest book?
Getting the first draft down on paper. Writing for me is kind of a love/hate thing, it takes me a lot to overcome inertia and start but when I do time seems to stop and I can pass hours that feel like minutes. I don’t do outlines, the story comes to me more organically, so another thing that happens is that I will get to the point where I haven’t figured out wat happens next and need to take some time to figure it out. Then the cycle starts over and I have to force myself to start. I can bang out 2-5K words in a sitting but sometimes there are many days in between.
Tell us a little bit about your writing career.
I have always enjoyed writing, I wrote short stories and poems and songs when I was younger. I also wrote my first novel about 30 years ago. I remember writing it on pads and then typing them into a PC. The whole process of submitting was different then and I have to admit that first novel wasn’t very polished. I had it professionally edited and tried again but no luck so I self-published on one of the early platforms. It didn’t sell a lot, and my real career was lucrative and stressful. I turned to writing poetry and read a lot around the San Francisco area and also MC’d an open mic, and some of my friends in the writing group I had there have gone on to be successful poets. I did well enough in my career to retire early, so I started writing novels again. Both of my novels have been picked up by Solstice Publishing, and I am working on a third.
They say Hind-sight is 20/20. If you could give advice to the writer you were the first time you sat down to write, what would it be?
Write something you care about and know, and set out with the goal of creating a professional level product. I know people who say they want to write a book but I think they are more into being a writer than doing the work. Just like learning to paint or play an instrument, writing is hard work and you need to practice and learn the technical aspects of it just like anything else. And know before you start that writing the book is the easy part.
What was your most difficult scene to write?
There is a large battle scene with a lot of moving parts and different players. I think that was the hardest part - it wasn’t a linear scene with a few characters. It was much broader and writing it so it was immersive and not just a description of this happened then that happened was hard for me.
Are themes a big part of your stories, or not so much?
I have some themes and ideas I like to weave gently in but they aren’t explicit. They are more drivers of the action and storyline.
What are you working on now?
I had a pretty interesting youth and many people have told me I should write about it. I didn’t want to do an autobiography (I’m not that important) but thought I would use real experiences and weave them together into a story about a year in the life of a very delinquent young teenager in the early ‘70s.
Is there a release date planned?
No, I am only on about page forty right now and I am not sure about how I am going to try to get it published.
Who is your favorite character from your own stories, and why?
In this novel I like the Non mutant Tuk. Even though he is not the main character, he is a very complex person who goes through a lot of growth during the course of the story.
Most writers were readers as children. What was your favorite book in grade school?
The Pellucidar and Barsoom series of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
What are your plans for future projects?
I will keep writing as long as I am enjoying it and people are interested. I hope to have a first draft of the story I am writing now done by July, and then the editing process will begin. I have so many ideas in my head the hardest thing for me usually is landing on one above the others. For me when am writing a novel it is to the exclusion of other writing projects.
Is there anything you would like to add before we finish?
I would just like to thank you for this opportunity to let me talk with your readers. I write novels that I would like to read myself, and I work very hard to make sure that if someone spends there time reading one of my books they will come away from the experience being glad they gave it a chance. My goal is to create an immersive, engaging story that lets folks experience something they would not experience in their day to day lives.
You're welcome. Good luck with your newest release, and thank you for being with us today.
Keep scrolling for an excerpt from Spawn of the Cataclysm
Excerpt
Chapter One
“We didn’t create the virus, it lived in the wild. We found it when Howler monkeys began starving to death even though they stripped every local crop in the area. The virus triggered their metabolism to speed up ... we were paid by the Defense Department to develop an offensive application, said we could keep exclusive rights to all its commercial uses if we delivered. It could have changed the way we grow food but they pushed us. It wasn’t ready to test, and when the earthquake hit… is out now. The death toll will be on their heads. And ours.”
Translated from the Cataclysm
Rik Arrowen leaned over the gunwale, his gaze following dancing green shafts of sunlight that plunged into the depths. He strained his eyes, thought he saw movement. A huge shadow drifted slowly below the light. He knew the creature they Hunted was down there, a hungry thing that lurked unseen.
“It is here,” he muttered.
A school of silver fish darted upward, their bodies flashed like a thousand mirrors. Rik’s heart jumped in the instant before a sail-sized fin, jagged and scarred, cut slowly into the green twilight before receding back into the murk. He had no time to catch his breath, or shout a warning, when the great misshapen spawn rose fast and straight into the light, its gaping jaws filled with teeth. The thing ignored the weighted haunch of bloody meat they had drawn it in with, and hit the wooden galley on the port side with enough force to knock four Hunters into the bay.
As the hull rocked, the water turned red and raw screams filled the air.
“What a beautiful day to be alive.”
The voice blew away Rik’s memory and brought him back to where he stood, high above the countryside on the windy battlement of Stonehaven’s north wall.
“Oh, forgive me,” the voice continued. “Did I startle you?”
Rik did not bother to turn around.
“No, Jerold,” he replied. “I was watching the bay. It’s been six days since we lost those four Hunters to the spawn. I can’t stop hearing their screams as the thing ate them. Nothing we could do. We hit it with five harpoons and it still swam away. On the way down, it swallowed the bait haunch whole, and would have pulled us under if we hadn’t cut the rope.” He paused for a moment. “I have never seen one that big. I hope it has gone back out to sea.”
“May the Mystery welcome them all,” Jerold said. “I don’t often see anyone else up here this time of day. I like the solitude, the view calms me when the Council is crawling up my back about money.”
Rik scanned the horizon. The morning mist had burned away, and the sea breeze held a hint of pine. To the west rose a low range covered with giant redwoods, some of them hundreds of feet tall. The ridge continued to wind its way from the south, ending in cliffs at the mouth of the bay. The wide channel reflected the blue of the sky, and ripples that ran counter to the waves marked strong currents that carried the tide out to sea. Across the water, the redwoods picked up again and became the great northern forest. Long ago, when the seas were lower, a famed bridge the ancients called Golden Gate stretched above the treacherous waters from shore to shore. Nothing was left of it now but a few worn mounds of concrete piles at each end.
Below the fortress, starting near the base of the hill, the city of New Gate sprouted like a garden. It spread down to the bay, a bright jumble of buildings and spires that tumbled to the busy harbor. There, sailing ships and galleys crowded together, bare masts bobbed within the walls of the breakwater. New Gate was home to almost twenty thousand souls and a passing refuge for a few thousand more at any given time. Now, it was bursting at the seams with wagons and people who could be seen crowding the streets and setting up stalls in the Market Square for the upcoming Equinal Games.
To the east and scattered around the bay were ruins. Most were settled into oddly geometric mounds and small hills covered in green, but in some places, they rose like monstrous patches of black lace from the dense hardwood forests that covered the lowlands around the bay. The largest cluster of these, called Lily’s Bones for reasons nobody could remember, contained broken and crumbling towers so immense that their ragged peaks were sometimes lost in the clouds.
Robert Hoppensteadt lied about his age and started working in Reno when he was fourteen, washing dishes on the late shift at a casino restaurant. Since then he has been a grunt in the Forest Service, a carpenter, and, after receiving a degree in Information Systems, a recruiter and senior manager. Now he writes full time. He has lived on both coasts and several places in between but currently resides in Virginia with his wife and two seriously spoiled and obnoxious cats.
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“We didn’t create the virus, it lived in the wild. We found it when Howler monkeys began starving to death even though they stripped every local crop in the area. The virus triggered their metabolism to speed up ... we were paid by the Defense Department to develop an offensive application, said we could keep exclusive rights to all its commercial uses if we delivered. It could have changed the way we grow food but they pushed us. It wasn’t ready to test, and when the earthquake hit… is out now. The death toll will be on their heads. And ours.”
Translated from the Cataclysm
Rik Arrowen leaned over the gunwale, his gaze following dancing green shafts of sunlight that plunged into the depths. He strained his eyes, thought he saw movement. A huge shadow drifted slowly below the light. He knew the creature they Hunted was down there, a hungry thing that lurked unseen.
“It is here,” he muttered.
A school of silver fish darted upward, their bodies flashed like a thousand mirrors. Rik’s heart jumped in the instant before a sail-sized fin, jagged and scarred, cut slowly into the green twilight before receding back into the murk. He had no time to catch his breath, or shout a warning, when the great misshapen spawn rose fast and straight into the light, its gaping jaws filled with teeth. The thing ignored the weighted haunch of bloody meat they had drawn it in with, and hit the wooden galley on the port side with enough force to knock four Hunters into the bay.
As the hull rocked, the water turned red and raw screams filled the air.
***
“What a beautiful day to be alive.”
The voice blew away Rik’s memory and brought him back to where he stood, high above the countryside on the windy battlement of Stonehaven’s north wall.
“Oh, forgive me,” the voice continued. “Did I startle you?”
Rik did not bother to turn around.
“No, Jerold,” he replied. “I was watching the bay. It’s been six days since we lost those four Hunters to the spawn. I can’t stop hearing their screams as the thing ate them. Nothing we could do. We hit it with five harpoons and it still swam away. On the way down, it swallowed the bait haunch whole, and would have pulled us under if we hadn’t cut the rope.” He paused for a moment. “I have never seen one that big. I hope it has gone back out to sea.”
“May the Mystery welcome them all,” Jerold said. “I don’t often see anyone else up here this time of day. I like the solitude, the view calms me when the Council is crawling up my back about money.”
Rik scanned the horizon. The morning mist had burned away, and the sea breeze held a hint of pine. To the west rose a low range covered with giant redwoods, some of them hundreds of feet tall. The ridge continued to wind its way from the south, ending in cliffs at the mouth of the bay. The wide channel reflected the blue of the sky, and ripples that ran counter to the waves marked strong currents that carried the tide out to sea. Across the water, the redwoods picked up again and became the great northern forest. Long ago, when the seas were lower, a famed bridge the ancients called Golden Gate stretched above the treacherous waters from shore to shore. Nothing was left of it now but a few worn mounds of concrete piles at each end.
Below the fortress, starting near the base of the hill, the city of New Gate sprouted like a garden. It spread down to the bay, a bright jumble of buildings and spires that tumbled to the busy harbor. There, sailing ships and galleys crowded together, bare masts bobbed within the walls of the breakwater. New Gate was home to almost twenty thousand souls and a passing refuge for a few thousand more at any given time. Now, it was bursting at the seams with wagons and people who could be seen crowding the streets and setting up stalls in the Market Square for the upcoming Equinal Games.
To the east and scattered around the bay were ruins. Most were settled into oddly geometric mounds and small hills covered in green, but in some places, they rose like monstrous patches of black lace from the dense hardwood forests that covered the lowlands around the bay. The largest cluster of these, called Lily’s Bones for reasons nobody could remember, contained broken and crumbling towers so immense that their ragged peaks were sometimes lost in the clouds.
About the Author:
Robert Hoppensteadt lied about his age and started working in Reno when he was fourteen, washing dishes on the late shift at a casino restaurant. Since then he has been a grunt in the Forest Service, a carpenter, and, after receiving a degree in Information Systems, a recruiter and senior manager. Now he writes full time. He has lived on both coasts and several places in between but currently resides in Virginia with his wife and two seriously spoiled and obnoxious cats. 
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