I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the CONQUIST by Dirk Strasser Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

About The Book:

Author: Dirk Strasser

Pub. Date: September 1, 2024

Publisher: Roundfire Books

Formats: Paperback, eBook

Pages: 360

Find it: Goodreads, https://books2read.com/Conquist

Get 50% off the Conquist e-book here by following the steps below:

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HURRY! THE OFFER ENDS ON OCTOBER 31st, 2024! 

Capitán Cristóbal de Varga’s drive for glory and gold in 1538 Peru leads him and his army of conquistadors into a New World that refuses to be conquered. He is a man torn by life-long obsessions and knows this is his last campaign. What he doesn’t know is that his Incan allies led by the princess Sarpay have their own furtive plans to make sure he never finds the golden city of Vilcabamba. He also doesn’t know that Héctor Valiente, the freed African slave he appointed as his lieutenant, has found a portal that will lead them all into a world that will challenge his deepest beliefs. And what he can’t possibly know is that this world will trap him in a war between two eternal enemies, leading him to question everything he has devoted his life to – his command, his Incan princess, his honor, his God. In the end, he faces the ultimate dilemma: how is it possible to battle your own obsessions . . . to conquer yourself?

Reviews:

Finalist Aurealis Award Best Fantasy Novel

“An original and riveting read from start to finish, An action/adventure fantasy novel raised to an impressive level of literary excellence by the storytelling talents of Dirk Strasser as a novelist, Conquist is an extraordinary and unreservedly recommended pick.” —Midwest Book Review

“Conquist is the perfect fever dream of conquistadors, magic, and portals, alongside conflict, drama, and gold-mad lunatics.” —SFF Insiders

“Strasser tells a riveting odyssey of conquest, magic, and redemption that fans of historical fantasy will devour.” —Aurealis

“The combination of history and fantasy, along with the rich, thought-provoking, character development, made Conquist a memorable experience. Conquist is well worth the read.” —Literaria Luminaria

Excerpt:

Chapter 1 
​El diario de Cristóbal de Varga

We conquistadors suffer from a disease whose symptom is an insatiable thirst for gold. Unlike other fevers, ours cause those innocent of infection to die. I know this, yet I still write these words in the fervent hope that my name will echo with Francisco Pizarro and Hernán Cortés.

On the eve of All Souls in the year of Our Lord 1538, I, Cristóbal de Varga, humble servant of His Imperial Majesty Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, led my six hundred conquistadors through an entrada into a new world.
​
But that is not when my tale truly began. Was it when I first felt the bright ache for the riches of New Spain as I stood on the banks of Seville’s Guadalquivir River and saw the square-rigged galleon sails swell in the gusting wind? Or was it the day my family lost the last of its noble pretenses and was overcome by grinding poverty with the death of my father? Or perhaps it began when I gained my commission from His Majesty King Charles V. No, I know when my tale took flight. It began when I first tasted the acrid sweetness of conquest, the day I fully experienced the florid symptoms of the conquistador’s disease. It was the day many innocents perished in the grip of our contagion. The day we sacked Machu Picchu.

About Dirk Strasser:

Dirk Strasser’s fantasy trilogy The Books of Ascension (Zenith, Equinox and Eclipse) was published in German (Heyne Verlag) and English (Pan Macmillan), and his short stories have been translated into several European languages. ‘The Doppelgänger Effect’ appeared in the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology, Dreaming Down Under (Tor). Dirk was born in Germany but has lived most of his life in Australia. He works in educational publishing, has trekked the Inca trail to Machu Picchu, and studied Renaissance history.

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Giveaway Details:

2 winners will receive a finished copy of CONQUIST, US Only.

Ends November 19^th, midnight EST.

Is histasy the next big thing in fantasy?

Dirk Strasser

During the Glasgow Science Fiction Worldcon I attended a historical fantasy panel. I was particularly interested in this subgenre because my own historical fantasy Conquist was due for publication a few weeks later. I also attended a panel on the mashing up of genres. Almost all the discussion at the mash-up panel was about the momentum of romantic fantasy, and one of the reasons suggested for its growing success was because of the catchy name for the subgenre: romantasy.

It struck me that for historical fantasy to have its moment in the sun, it needed its own name, and to me the obvious name was histasy. So, what is the current state of histasy? Is it selling? Is it winning awards? Publishers and booksellers love comparisons (if you like Book A, you’ll like Book B), so as part of my marketing research for Conquist, I looked into the histasy phenomenon and came up with a few surprises, the bigone being that histasy seems to be on the rise.

When I was writing Conquist I certainly wasn’t trying to anticipate a trend. I just wrote the sort of fantasy that I would like to read. However, I’m happy to catch a wave if there’s one on the way. Let’s start with the massive Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, spanning 18th century Scotland, France and America, nine books and counting with some candidates for the longest fantasy novels ever written, plus a long-running Netflix series. Yes, Outlander is technically ahistorical romance fantasy or histromantasy, but let’s not drill down into subsubgenres.

Then there’s the New York Times best-selling author R F Kuang’s Babel which won the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, the British Book Award, Blackwell’s Book of the Year for Fiction, and would have had a good chance of winning the Hugo Award if it hadn’t been disqualified by Chinese state censorship. It’s set in an alternative-reality 1830s Englandwhere Britain’s supremacy is driven by the use of magical silver bars that derive their power from words in different languages that have similar—but not identical—meaning.

V E Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue follows a young French woman in 1714 who makes a Faustian bargain for immortality which curses her to be forgotten by everyone she meets. It was on the New York Times Best Seller list for 37 consecutive weeks and is scheduled for a film adaptation.

While most histasies until now have tended to focus on British and Western European history from the Middle Ages up to the nineteenth century, there is wealth of unexplored eras and geographic areas open to discovery by the subgenre. My own novel Conquist is set in 1538 Peru at the time of the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, where an army of conquistadors enter a portal and invade a new (fantasy) world in the search for gold and glory with a mission to convert the beings they find there to Christianity.

The only histasy I’m aware of set in the same time period as Conquist with Spanish main characters is the recently published The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo, who is best known for her YA fantasy Shadow and Bone books, which were made into a stunning Netflix series. The Familiar, is set against the backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition, and like The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, has a diabolical Faustian bargain at its heart.

Since Inca characters also feature in Conquist, I’ll mention Civilizations by French writer Laurent Binet, another histasythat I’ve read recently, which asks the question: What if the Inca conquered Europe? The novel won the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française and the English translation was awarded the Sidewise Award for Alternate History.

So, if like me, you’re into both history and fantasy, there’s agrowing body of histasy making waves in publishing. Why not catch a few of the waves yourself and see what it’s all about?