Carmen Loup is joining us today to talk about their omnibus, The Audacity. Here’s the publisher’s description:
May’s humdrum life is flung into hyperdrive when she’s rescued from an alien abduction by Xan, an alien with a fondness for ‘I Love Lucy’ who lives on The Audacity. But when Chaos incarnate decides to turn Earth into her personal sandbox, the Audacity and May’s new-found love of rocket racing are the only things that can stop her.
But even being wildly successful rocket racers isn’t enough for May and Xan when a tea-sipping robot arrests Xan, and Chaos steals the Sphere of Time. May must team up with Xan’s sister, Aimz (an adventure biologist) and her undead girlfriend to save Xan, the Audacity, and Time Itself.
Stranded without the Audacity on a tiny, frigid island, Xan and Aimz succumb to the Carmnian Scourge. As a last act, May must team up with old friends, enemies, and a haunted Big Mouth Billy Bass to find a cure before the goddess of Chaos enacts the final stage of her universe befuddling plan.
What’s Carmen’s favorite bit?
There’s a scene in The Audacity book 2 which combines several of my favorite tropes into one go. The setting is an abandoned underground alien theme park; the antagonist is an enormous, blind many-toothed sand-worm-thing; their only assets are a rust-bucket of an AMC Gremlin and an impossibly dull pocket knife; and there’s lots of slimy acidic goo involved to dissolve our main character’s clothes. What could be better?
The dialogue in that scene hints at May’s past, which she’s usually very tight-lipped about, and Xan’s excitement at getting a little hint of Deep May Lore is a lot of fun. He’s going through some dark stuff in that book, so he jumps at the chance to put the spotlight on her backstory for awhile.
Also, by the end of it, their clothing has dissolved and Xan is reduced to covering up with a tiny novelty flag that says “I Had Fun in the Pontoosa Adventure Hole” which always makes me chuckle. It becomes an inside joke between them, one of many.
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BIO:
Carmen Loup is a humorologist, illustrator of “Tarot in Space”, and creator of “The Audacity” sci-fi novel and comic book series. Loup is inspired by Douglas Adams, Ram Das, and Alan Watts to create psychedelic speculative fiction with a hopeful spin that shines through even ridiculously horrible situations.
