Shaman Fiction

Daniel Mahan, the legendary Shaman of the Barliona game world, has served his sentence in virtual reality. Eleven months of adventures and battles in exchange for eight years in prison isn't a bad trade-off. And yet Barliona refuses to relinquish its grip on the Shaman so easily, erasing the boundary between his two realities. It turns out that it's not so simple to leave the capsule - the Way must be completed....

A product of the latest technologies, Barliona is a virtual world brimming with fun and entertainment. The government has become the guarantor for the in-game currency, allowing its free circulation. As a result the population floods Barliona in pursuit of easy money. It doesn't take long for the game developers to discover a source of free labor: real-world prison convicts. While their bodies are locked in special auto-maintenance virtual capsules, the prisoners' minds are released into Barliona's virtual mines.

Barliona: a virtual world jam-packed with monsters, battles - and, predictably, players. Millions of them come to Barliona, looking forward to the things they can't get in real life: elves and magic, dragons and princesses, and unforgettable combat. The game has become so popular that players now choose to spend months online without returning home. In Barliona, anything goes: You can assault fellow players, level up, become a mythical hero, a wizard, or a legendary thief.

The virtual world of Barliona is a place of rest and entertainment - but not for everyone. It has become a survival arena for Daniel Mahan after he was sentenced to eight years in its virtual jail. Mahan has been through it all: the back-breaking work in the mines, betrayal by other prisoners, and finally, the retrial which has released him into Barliona's common world. What more could one want? Mahan could have kept a low profile and enjoyed relative freedom while serving the rest of his time.

What can a game clan accomplish without a castle? The answer is obvious: nothing. Therefore, the main objective of any leader in a game world is to acquire a base of operations. Finding himself in exactly this position, High Shaman Mahan, leader of the Legends of Barliona, accepts an offer from the Emperor and the Dark Lord to vanquish the army of Phantoms that has inhabited Altameda, the phantom castle.

Located deep in the Canadian wilderness, Snowfields Academy is the premiere school for equestrians from around the globe. With only a handful of students admitted every year, only riders who have the potential to win world-class tournaments are invited to attend. Shaman, a stallion new to Snowfields, has proven to be too much for the school. He’s too wild, too dangerous, and too unpredictable for even the most experienced riders on campus. Unexpectedly, the one person who can calm him is the girl least likely to become a student at Snowfields.

Mahan's ready for new adventures - just as the gaming world of Barliona thought it was about to reenter its old comfortable rut. The winds of the Dark Forest have finally died down; Altameda has recognized its new owner while Geranika is nursing new schemes of global destruction. Would Mahan be happy with this predictable old life? We think not!

Not long ago, Daniel Mahan, known to everyone as Shaman Mahan, thought that he had taken his sixth and final step in the Barliona gameworld. Yet life has other ideas. The Corporation decides to resurrect the Lord of Shadow and his entire host. The Corporation's CEO personally pushes the reset button. Geranika and his Dragon of Shadow spring back to life as, meanwhile, the Corporation makes an offer the Shaman can't refuse.

Dr. Robert Judson Cole travels from his ravaged Scotland homeland, through the operating rooms of Boston, to the cabins of frontier Illinois. In the wilderness he befriends the starving remnants of the Sauk tribe, who have fled their reservation. In the process, he absorbs their culture and learns native remedies that enrich the classical medical education he received at Edinburgh University. He marries a remarkable settler woman he had saved from illness.

Captain Pausert just can’t catch a break! First, he became the mortal enemy of his fiancée, his home planet, the Empire - and even the Worm World, the darkest threat to mankind in all of space. All because he helped rescue three slave children from their masters. Of course, these three young women were the universally feared Witches of Karres - but how was he to know that?! And after he defeated the Worm World (with the help of the witches, of course), the Empress herself had sent him on a secret mission to stop a nanite plague that was raging across the galaxy. 

In this novella set in the World of the Five Gods and four years after the events in Penric's Demon, Penric is a divine of the Bastard's Order as well as a sorcerer and scholar, living in the palace where the Princess-Archdivine holds court. His scholarly work is interrupted when the Archdivine agrees to send Penric, in his role as sorcerer, to accompany a "Locator" of the Father's Order, assigned to capture Inglis, a runaway shaman charged with the murder of his best friend.

Marius Winter doesn't walk the road of the shaman-warrior alone. He has powerful allies in the Other Realms and in ordinary reality. His spirit guides are a Lakota war-chief and medicine man, First in Front; Tigre, a powerful feminine spirit who appears as a white tiger; and Burt, a spirit raven who channels an old Jewish bookie from the Bronx. Now, Marius is targeted by a powerful sorcerer. In the battle for the souls of his friends and lover, he must storm the gates of the underworld and fight through the Seven Demi-Demons of Hell to the deepest dungeons to confront Belial himself.

After a rancher finds 10 mutilated bodies at an archaeological dig site on the Navajo Reservation, both Captain Begay of the Navajo Tribal Police and Special Agent Palmer of the FBI become involved...but the case leads Palmer back up to Colorado where five more mutilated bodies and Stella's vehicle have been discovered at a burning cabin. Cole, Stella, and David escape the cabin, heading south. Stella believes David is a natural-born shaman, and knows their only hope of David ever defeating the Ancient Enemy is to find a reclusive shaman named Joe Blackhorn who can help train David.

The stories in this collection were first published in Analog, a science fiction magazine, between 1990 and 2011. They feature the adventures of eccentric kilt-wearing anthropologist, archaeologist, and xenologist Rhys Llewellyn and his able assistants, Yoshi Umeki and Roderick Halfax. Given my fascination with archaeology, first contact…and all things Scottish, I suppose these stories were inevitable.

Otto is Richard Krugg's only son and heir to the Shaman's gift. Otto doesn't want it. He wants to be a fisherman. When company policies force unwelcome changes onto his life and threaten even the security of the village, Otto discovers that being a shaman isn't optional. Jimmy Pirano is caught between the devil and the deep green sea when new production quotas are handed down from corporate headquarters. Locked into a century of existing practice, Jimmy is forced to find new ways to fish....

A women of the Tohono O'otam tribe has been savagely - and ritually - murdered in Wyoming, outside the jurisdictions of Granite Creek, Colorado, Police Chief Scott Parris and Ute tribal policeman Charlie Moon. But a brutal, unprovoked assault by the suspected killer on one of Parris's detectives - and the dark, unsettling visions of Charlie's shaman aunt, Daisy Perika - are pulling two dedicated lawmen and an aging Native American mystic into the hunt.

After he was killed and unceremoniously dumped into what he thought was a digital world, life has thrown Frank one curve after another. Now, he is starting to have questions about what is real and what isn't. He will have to walk his way between the worlds of adventurers and monsters, both of whom want things from him. His feelings run amok as he tries to figure out what hybrid intelligences dream about. Hopefully, along the way he can figure out what is happening, and learn to resist integration into the system by a mysterious AI (...which may not even be an AI at all).

When Jimmy Pirano gets called to the home office, his sister, Angela, gets stuck with sorting out the mess he leaves behind. Otto Krugg must find a way to continue after his losses. Can he find happiness on the other end of the South Coast?

When Otto Krugg's daughter follows in his footsteps, he's faced with the task of changing a century-long rule that will force her to make decisions no one should have to make. When Jimmy Pirano gets tasked with enforcing that rule - no matter what - he goes down the rabbit hole to try to find out who established the rule...and why they can't let it go.

After a bait and switch, Frank ends up transformed into an HI. That's a hybrid intelligence: part AI, part organic. He finds himself at the mercy of the system fulfilling the role of an ogre shaman meant to create fun opportunities for the purely organic players. Except not everything is what it seems to be. The very system may not be what he thinks it is. Breaches into the game world prove there are other forces at work. This game may be more of an isekai.