"The Ishtar Deception"

James L. Cambias is a writer, a game designer, and the cofounder of Zygote Games. He has been nominated for the James Tiptree Jr. Award and the 2001 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Cambias applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Ishtar Deception, and shared the following:

Page 69 of The Ishtar Deception might seem like an odd digression. It's part of a chapter-length flashback, taking place five millennia before the main action of the book. A group of shady characters are crossing the surface of Venus in an armored crawler, hoping to salvage some valuable ancient technology nobody else knows about. None of them trusts the others, and they're arguing about how much the prize could be worth and how much each of them should get. Superficially, none of this has much to do with the rest of the novel, which has a different cast of characters, and takes place thousands of years later in a completely different location on Venus — which has been completely transformed in the meantime.

So, no, readers would not get an accurate idea of what the book is about. But my page 69 is not irrelevant, either. Readers who have read all of my "Billion Worlds" stories might know my narrator Daslakh's personal history, but I wanted to give new readers a chance to learn about it. In the flashback we see Daslakh (under a different name) behaving pretty badly, giving the reader some understanding of why present-day Daslakh feels guilty about it. Also, some of the actions taken millennia earlier turn out to be of critical importance.

The section also lets me show how the planet Venus itself has changed between the two eras. In the flashback section Venus is basically the real planet as we understand it: a crushingly dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide, temperatures on the surface hot enough to melt lead, sulfuric acid clouds, and winds of deadly power.

Whereas by the time of the main narrative, Venus has been "cryoformed" by means of a giant sunshade, in order to freeze out all the carbon dioxide. The air is pure nitrogen — not breathable, but a lot more pleasant than "natural" Venus atmosphere. The temperature is about as cold as the surface of Mars. People can and do go out on the surface of future Venus with nothing more than oxygen tanks and warm clothing. It's more tolerable for humans and machines. As a result Venus has become tremendously important to the economy of the Solar System, which is what draws spies and secret agents like my protagonist Sabbath Okada there. He's initially investigating a suspicious death in the giant city of Ishtar, but that leads to a bigger plot, and . . . well, let's just say that in a novel called The Ishtar Deception, you should assume nothing is as it seems.

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--Marshal Zeringue