The Cunning Blood [Hardcover]

Jeff Duntemann (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: ISFiC Press (November 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0975915622
• ISBN-13: 978-0975915622
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,173,279 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I am a writer, editor, technologist and contrarian living in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Although I have worked as a programmer, I've been in the publishing industry (both technical magazines and books) since 1985. I co-founded Coriolis Group Books in 1989, and since 2002 have been a partner in technology publisher Paraglyph Press. Most of my book-length work has been on computer technology. (See JEFF DUNTEMANN'S WI-FI GUIDE, ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE STEP BY STEP, and DEGUNKING EMAIL, SPAM, AND VIRUSES, as well as many more titles now out of print.)

In my loose moments I'm an amateur radio operator (now K7JPD), amateur astronomer, and SF writer. My first SF novel (THE CUNNING BLOOD) was published in November 2005, but I have been selling SF stories to magazines and anthologies for 30 years, and was on the final Hugo Awards ballot in 1981. As time allows I build and fly kites and gadget-hack with Meccano/Erector parts and radio tubes. I loathe sports, politics, and cruciferous vegetables, separately and in combination.

I am a relatively liberal Old Catholic (which means I belong to a non-Papal independent Catholic jurisdiction) and read a great deal on religion and spirituality. There's more to Catholicism than Rome, though we hide well. My wife Carol and I met in high school and have been married for 35 years. We live on the side of Cheyenne Mountain with four bichon frise dogs.

There's more about me on my Web sites: contrapositivediary.com (my blog) junkbox.com (tech projects) and duntemann.com, which is a quick index to all that I've published online.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Steampunk meets nanotech, December 5, 2005

By 

Chris Gerrib - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Cunning Blood (Hardcover)

Jeff Duntemann's first novel is a wild and entertaining ride - all the way to Hell and back! The bulk of the novel's action occurs on the planet Hell - a distant world settled by humans as a prison. The Earth authorities have developed and let out ("free range") self-replicating nanobots which attack any electrical circuit, destroying it within minutes. Earth assumes that, without electricity for computers, the colony will remain stuck with 19th century technology, and unable to threaten Earth.
Boy are they wrong! The colonists have been developing all sorts of non-electric technologies, such as pneumatic computers, to further their goal, namely, revenge on Earth. And that's where things get interesting. Although nanotechnology has been essentially banned on Earth, certain secret societies have been nurturing the technology, quite literally in their bloodstreams.
I found The Cunning Blood a great read, written by an observant person with a refreshing willingness to look at both sides of an issue. For instance, the society on Hell is organized on libertarian principles. But, thanks to some solid writing by Duntemann, we get to see the downsides to the libertarian ideal.
In short, this is a great read. I can't recommend it enough!

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best hard SF in years, December 17, 2005

By 

Mike (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cunning Blood (Hardcover)

I bought this book because I have Mr. Duntemann's Wi-Fi book, which was terrific. I picked it up at an SF con the night the publisher released it. I opened it to a random place and started reading. (This is one of my tests for good SF books.) I just couldn't stop, even though I didn't know everything about what was going on.

The central gimmick is an Earthlike prison planet where the "prison" is a bacteria-sized nanomachine that homes in on electrical conductors and chews the metal until the connection breaks. Electricity is therefore impossible there, along with computers and space travel, so the planet has developed all kinds of technologies that don't require electricity, like catalytic chemical lights, Sterling heat engines, hydraulic and other mechanical computers, and diesel engines. (I didn't know Diesel engines operate without electricity, but it's true.) They use steam engines as well, though I wouldn't call this a steampunk story. The engineers on Hell (the prison world) actually accomplish simple things with electricity by using liquid mercury running through thin hoses instead of wires! The book is full of cool ideas like that. The Hell civilization consists of hundreds of societies (with Greek letter names, like fraternities) that cooperate like city-states in Renaissance Europe, each one specializing in some aspect of civilization, like farming or building aircraft. The story focuses on a society that does nothing but R&D and eventually figures out how to make orbital spacecraft work without electricity.

The best technology in the story, however, are the nanocomputer AIs. The main nanocomputer character is called the Sangruse Device. ("Sang ruse" is French for "cunning blood.") It lives in human bloodstreams in the form of millions of tiny devices the size of blood cells. It talks to the human carrying it by tapping on the human's ear bones, and the human talks back by framing words without actually speaking them. Because nanotechnology is suppressed by Earth's global government (run by the Canadians!) secret societies build nanocomputers and carry them in their bloodstreams to keep from being discovered.

The main character, Peter Novilio, carries the Sangruse Device, which is extremely powerful and pretty paranoid. The book starts out a little like a buddy movie with one buddy inside the other, gathering intelligence for Canada. Then the Sangruse Device slowly begins to take charge, and treats Peter more like a disguise. There's treason and counterplots and an illicit colony of convicts attempting to re-establish American government on Earth.

I won't spoil the plot here, which is extremely complex and goes from one end of the book to the other at a dead run. The writing is fast and vivid, and doesn't bog down in long sections of dialog. It's mostly action, and when it isn't action it's SF idea-making at its best.

I can't recommend this book enough, especially if you grew up on Larry Niven and Robert Heinlein, like I did.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars That good ol' science fiction, January 10, 2006

By 

First_Lensman (Parking orbit, third rock) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cunning Blood (Hardcover)

This is a work of Science Fiction; it is certified 100% free of dragons, elves, dwarves, and swords with proper names.

Once upon a time... oh, drat, now they've got me talking like that. Start again... A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, there was a genre of speculative writing known as "Science Fiction." There were giants in those days: Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, Wells, Niven and Pournelle, Laumer, and many more. It was an active field, and in those, our younger days, our sense of wonder was never left wanting.

Then something happened. There was a disturbance in the Force. Perhaps it started around 1970 with the first Hobbit infestation. Or perhaps, in roughly the same era, the pestilence came riding a dragon. Whatever. What was once a broad field was whittled down to a few specialist publishing houses, and these houses being the commercial interests that they are, latched onto a formula that made money for them, and continued to publish more of the same. "Fantasy and Science Fiction" is as unlikely a pairing as "Tantric Poetry and Differential Equations."

Jeff Duntemann's "The Cunning Blood" comes as a welcome return to the old style of science fiction. Duntemann proposes a few altered ground rules, gives his machinery a shove, and sees where it leads. In this case, a future Earth, ruled by a pacifist, nanny-state Canadian hegemony, where any act of violence, from homicide to punching a guy in the nose in a barroom scuffle, results in a one-way trip to Hell, a penal colony planet. And nanodevices, of several species. These include a dumb but voracious variety in Hell's biosphere that attacks any conductor of electricity (and therefore is supposed to ensure that Hell remains technologically backward -- or so 1Earth's government assumes) and the Sangruse Device -- several generations of much smarter, networked nanodevices which flow through the bloodstreams of certain key individuals in the story in a symbiotic relationship, where the reader is never quite certain whether human or nanodevice is in charge. And he speculates how a society where electrical devices fail faster than the wiring harness of an English sports car in a rainstorm might nevertheless achieve a high level of technical development.

Any good story has conflict, and "The Cunning Blood" has conflict aplenty, on multiple levels: between Earth and its penal colony Hell, between various versions and mutations of the Sangruse Device, and between individual humans. There is enough intrigue, double-dealing, and characters with their own hidden agendas to make this a real page-turner. It isn't until we near the end of the book that we realize that the conflict between humans is a mere sideshow to something much larger.

I won't give away any more of the plot here. The other reviews already give a good taste of what's in store. But I will close with the following observation: books like this renew my faith that Science Fiction is still alive and well -- somewhere. I wasn't disappointed by this book, and I don't think you will be, either.