Urtaru, Book 1 in the Urtaru Chronicles Trilogy

I'm really excited that Amazon will be allowing Kindle book downloads to the iPhone. This is a whole new avenue of sales for my book. Please if you have the time, visit my book website http://web.mac.com/armenchakmakjian/Urtaru/Welcome.html and my blog http://mynamemeansflintstone.wordpress.com/

So being this quirky, religious, technology, semi-musical, Monty Python, Star Trek, Patrick McGoohan Prisoner, minority ethnic type, I've written the first book in trilogy. (You can read more about my plans for the sequel in one of the posts on this blog)

In my particular case, it's a book that throws together most of those things (I leave the Monty Python out). I based it roughly on the stories that my father told me about my grandfather who made his way through the Middle East and eventually to the US. It's a science fiction novel that pits the the space equivalent of the Russian, Persian and Turkish Empires, with a planet roughly equivalent to Armenia in the middle.

The first book takes my grandfather's character through a James Bond-esque set of situations with a "Gates of Vienna" type siege broken by something like Jan Sobieski and Knights Templar kind of mashup. There's an eschatological 3 generation prophecy and a couple of religions. I try to work inspiration from writers that are my heroes: Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Frank Herbert, David McCullough, Robertson Davies and Ulysses S. Grant. That last one might be a surprise, but if you've ever read Grant's memoirs, you know that it is the absolute best personal recollection of war of anyone since Julius Caesar.

Anyway, the true inspiration for this book were the stories my father told me all my life about my grandfather and specifically the ones that I forced him to tell me while he (my father) was dying from cancer. My grandfather was an exceptionally talented individual who seemed like a superhero in the family, even if he was never really James Bond.