Sparta resident's third book hits the stands

Second in science fiction series came out last week, By Monique Frigard SPARTA — Paul Malmont has successfully beamed his way up into the mothership of the science fiction genre with the publication of his third novel “The Astounding, the Amazing and the Unknown” (Simon & Schuster, July 5, 2011). Malmont, 45, has released the second book in a series following The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril (Simon & Schuster, 2006). He has also published another book between the two titled “Jack London in Paradise” (Simon & Schuster, 2008.) Malmont grew up traveling because his father was in the Army during his youth. Taiwan, Ohio and Pennsylvania were some of the places he inhabited. Though his locations changed, the one constant were pulp magazines and science fiction. “Growing up in the late 1960s and '70s I read a lot of pulp, fantasy and science fiction,” he said. “I loved the pulp fiction of the 1930s and 40s - the fantastic stuff that I think influenced a lot of people. I just loved that style.” When he was batting around ideas for a story, he said that it was the military that gave him a lead on the stories that eventually evolved into the book series. “The military did it for me. They hired a bunch of sci fi writers for weapons research during World War II,” he said. “As I researched this I just found it too good to pass up.” Malmont attended NYU and studied film. He married Audrey Herbst in 2000. They settled in Brooklyn and started a family. “For seven or eight years I worked in film production in New York. I worked on 'The Last Action Hero’ - a bomb - and the 'Bonfire of the Vanities’ - another bomb,” he laughed. “But I also worked on the 'Fisher King,’ a film that is still one of my personal favorites.” He eventually went into advertising and is currently the Creative Director at R/GA, a digital advertising agency. With such a busy life, one has to wonder where he finds the time to write and research the type of fact-based fiction books he creates. “With this book I wrote in the evenings and on weekends,” he said. “But I always found time to write. When the kids were younger I would get woken up pretty early, so I would write at five or six in the morning — whenever I could.” Malmont moved to Lake Mohawk about three years ago to be closer to his wife’s family. “We wanted to be closer to them...so we looked at Lake Mohawk and saw all these beautiful lake houses,” Malmont said. “It was the right time. We were really outgrowing the place in Brooklyn and we have two kids, so it just seemed like the right time and place.” Malmont’s children are now five and nine and the family enjoys playtime on their boat, like many Sparta residents. But the boat may not get as much use this summer since he has begun his book tour. He stops in New York City at the Mysterious Book Shop today (July 14), at Book Soup Sunday (July 17) in Los Angeles and will be part of a clinic at Comic Con at the San Diego Convention Center July 22. “I’m trying to be strategic about the tour, not just zigzagging the country,” he said. “But it will be fun to do Comic Con. Generally, the people who go to that are really into it, so for a day, I get to be the center of the universe.” Malmont is also one of the founders of Operation Warrior Library (OWL) along with Col. George Reynolds (ret.), which is beginning its summer book drive. It is a place for authors to donate books for our troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. OWL has delivered thousands of new books and audio books directly from authors and publishers to those serving overseas. For more information on Paul Malmont or Operation Warrior Library, go to www.paulmalmont.com.

What it’s about
At a crucial moment of the Second World War, a dying sailor from a German U-boat makes his way ashore on the east end of Long Island, not far from the site where the eccentric genius Nikola Tesla had built an electromagnetic transmitting tower a quarter century before. The last word on the expiring German’s lips: Wunderwaffe — wonder weapon. Baffled, the military calls up an unusual team to get to the bottom of the mystery. The “Kamikaze Group” is a ragtag collection of pulp science fiction writers, led by Robert Heinlein, installed at the Philadelphia Naval Yard to work on fanciful, but possibly feasible, wartime technology such as invisibility shields and death rays.
Heinlein, Sprague de Camp, and a young Isaac Asimov head to New York City, where another U.S. Navy officer, outsider L. Ron Hubbard, latches onto the investigation. With the help of The Shadow creator Walter Gibson, they begin to piece together the almost-forgotten story behind Tesla’s research (and suspicious death). But this band of imaginative eggheads doesn’t stop at intellectual pursuits — their mission to quell a real-life death ray takes them on a perilous physical adventure that leads through a tunnel built long ago to divert an underground river beneath art deco Manhattan, and into the heart of the global war. Taken from press release provided by Audrey Herbst.