The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Hell Divers XII: Heroes (Hell Divers Series) by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

Episode Date: August 4, 2024

Hell Divers XII: Heroes (Hell Divers Series) by Nicholas Sansbury Smith https://amzn.to/4fAqJOu New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Nicholas Sansbury Smith throws the Divers into another action-packed adventure in the final installment of the Hell Divers series. Two final dives. One mission that will determine the fate of humanity—forever. The Forerunner has decimated the Vanguard Islands in a surprise attack from the Trident warship. King Kade Long—seeing no alternative—accepts a peace deal, committing to a perilous mission with X, the “Immortal,” to activate weather-modification reactors at the poles. But as Kade and X set off, the fragile peace is threatened by Gran Jefe’s one-man guerrilla war against the psychopathic knight, General Jack. Meanwhile, halfway across the world, Michael and his family begin to settle into their new life in the Canary Islands, only to discover that it’s not the sanctuary they believed it was. Diving into the most inhospitable territory yet, the Hell Divers face horrific monsters bred for a single purpose: to keep them out at any cost. Their only hope of defeating the monsters and restoring the planet is for enemies to unite behind the Immortal and finally work together. But with blood being shed back home, these heroes may have nothing left to save. In Hell Divers XII: Heroes, beloved characters will confront their fates in a desperate bid to resurrect the world, though not all will live to see the dawn of a new era. About the author Nicholas Sansbury Smith is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than forty novels with two million copies sold. Before his writing career, he served at Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management, a background that inspired many of his story concepts. A two time Ironman triathlete, he enjoys running, biking, and hiking. Nicholas also loves traveling, especially to his cabin in Northern Minnesota where he weaves his tales. He lives in Iowa with his wonderful wife and their son and daughter.

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which is in the sky. We have an amazing multi-book author on the show. You've likely heard of him. His new book is out called Hell divers the series finale it's hell divers 12 heroes by nicholas sansbury smith and it's out august 6th 2024 oh my god we're in august it's august 1st today isn't it i'm not ready i'm still in January, damn it. His series has been amazing. It has received, it has done over 1.2 million copies sold.

It has over 130,000, or 138,000 book reviews across all platforms, including 37,000 on Audible alone. New York Times and USA Best Selling Series named Audible Top 100 Series of All Time. That's pretty darn good. times and USA bestselling series named audible top 100 series of all time. That's pretty darn good. 2016 Indy Ford review named it the gold winner for best science fiction, 2016 audible science fiction, best of 2016 and narrated by the iconic award-winning audio book narrator. R C Bray.

I guess he steals a little bit of your thunder there, Nicholas. He is the New York times USA bestselling author of the hell diver series,, the Orb series, the Tracker series, the Extinction series, the Sons of War series, and the new E-Day series. He worked for Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management in disaster mitigation before switching careers to focus on storytelling. Welcome to the show. How are you, Nicholas? Thank you. I'm great. I'm great. There you go. That's quite the impressive resume you got there. Yeah, I've done quite a few things before I started writing, but the career stint that I did here with Homeland Security in Iowa, that I think really inspired a lot of my writing. I think readers can see that because I'm mostly focused on post-apocalyptic fiction. Helldivers is set 250 years in the future

after a nuclear war kind of devastates the planets. And the Helldivers are men and women that keep the airships in the sky. That's where humanity lives now. You know, it's been, I've been writing this series since, technically since 2014. They started publishing in 2016

with Blackstone Publishing. And you mentioned my narrator, R.C. Bray. He's fantastic. He's the guy behind The Martian that you probably saw on the big screen. He's just a fantastic legend voice actor. And I'm very lucky to have him voice the series for so long. How many books do you say you have in all the different series that you run? You can kind of see him back here if i'm pointing correctly i'm not at my main office so they're not all here but i have 45 i think that are actually published and then i have a

couple that are in the pipeline i usually do three to four books a year i've slowed down a little recently had a couple kids and i'll down yeah definitely that'll definitely slow you down well it's wonderful to have you we have a lot of the authors on that are multi-book authors that are prolific like you where you just you put out a lot of stuff what's it.com that people can find you on the interwebs nicholas sansbury smith that's my full name so just type that in that's how you find my books too on amazon or wherever you like to purchase them. There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview.

What's inside the new book? Well, the new book kind of is the end point of this long adventure that the main character, Xavier Rodriguez, has been on for these 12 books. And when I wrote the first one, it was supposed to be a standalone and it kind of leaves the reader hanging literally with Xavier in the sky. These, these are, these are paratroopers essentially hell divers are.

So this last book kind of sets up the, the end of, uh, in showdown between x and this weather technology that's supposed to restore the planet so i won't say what happens but he finally makes it to the one place that can bring back the world um so and he's he's there with his dog miles who the characters who readers really have taken a liking to. There's quite a few characters that didn't make it to the end of the series. The few that have, I think, are

the beloved ones like X and Magnolia. She's a hell diver. And then Ted, who becomes a sunlight character to X. And so, yeah, they're all at the ends and excited to see what readers think of this last chapter in the main storyline. There you go. So why do they call them Helldivers for those who aren't familiar with the series? So, yeah, I get this question a lot because there's other IPs out there with the name Helldivers, including the video game, which just became super popular again. Helldivers are men and women that skydive into these storms that are ravaging the planet after this nuclear war and they retrieve parts and they scavenge and

they look for habitable zones and then they return to these to these airships and they help keep the airships in in the air until the idea is until they can find a habitable place. Of course, all of this is explained in the series and whether they actually find habitable places, which they do, but I called them hell divers because of the bombers during world war two

called hell divers. That's where I kind of came up with the name. And I really liked the idea of naming them after those bombers. Oh, there you go. Hell divers. Sounds like my first 10 marriages. No, I'm just kidding. I don't know what that means. There you go. So tell us a little bit about you. People like to hear about the author early on. How did you grow up? What influenced you? When did you finally find you had this knack for writing? I've always kind of liked or enjoyed writing. I have a twin brother. He is an artist.

When we were little kids, I'd be writing stories and he'd be illustrating stories. And I went to school at the University of Iowa for a degree in political science and then Drake University for a master's in public policy. And I'd always worked for the government in my earlier career. I ended up at Iowa Homeland Security working in disaster mitigation, doing a lot of planning work, seeing with all the ways that all the things that threaten Iowa, which surprisingly, there's quite a bit. And then of course, all the threats to the country. I worked with FEMA quite a bit as well. And I started writing for fun back then again, and decided to self-publish a book, a post-apocalyptic novel. The first one

didn't really do a whole lot, but then I got serious about self-publishing and learning how to market and learning how Amazon works. And my second book did really well. It went viral. It was about an alien invasion and got an agent and got a three book deal with Simon & Schuster and then started publishing more and more and left my job at Iowa Homeland Security. And I've written about 50 books since then in the past 10 years. So I used to do a lot of triathlons. I did a couple Ironmans. And recently, I've started a family. We have two kids now married live in Iowa. And I've slowed the writing down a little bit, but I still love it. I don't know why I'm so obsessed with these post-apocalyptic stories, but it's what I like to read, too.

So I always tell people that, you know, the best stories are usually the ones that you want to read yourself. So write what you like. And that's kind of what I've done. And it's worked well because, fortunately for me, it's a popular genre and it's stayed popular. Yeah, science fiction. I grew up reading a lot of science fiction yeah alan dean foster was like it's such a prolific thing in my era so i read a lot of science fiction stuff of course you know there's a great movie star wars and all that sort

of stuff what do you feel has made this series so endearing to readers i mean it seems to be very beloved yeah i think again i, I'll say that my narrator has brought it to life in a way that I think people have really, really enjoyed. I can give you some examples of things that he did that I would never have thought about. So a lot of the time you think a narrator just has a powerful, great voice that's able to bring these characters to life in a way that people love well rc bray he actually does some interesting stuff so in in hell divers it's 250 years in the future so if you think about that that's that's quite a long time from now if you think 250 years in the past people spoke differently

obviously there was no social media technology was there just wasn't anything right so i think he when he started reading these books and i i never talked to him about any of this stuff, he did it all on his own, but he would pronounce words incorrectly, even that I wrote correctly in the text. So like Miami or something, he'd call it, I can't remember exactly how he called, what he called Miami, Miami, or, but there's all these different words that he's used that he's mispronounced and just brought the narrative to life in a way that is different than i think other narrators have done for some of my other work and they're all excellent in their own way but rc ray just really kind of thinks outside the box and and tells hell divers in this i mean

he he planted himself in this universe and as a character almost so that that's part of it. I think a big part of it is also the characters. Xavier Rodriguez, he's called Immortal by the end of the series. I've given him a couple nicknames, but people really seem to love him and his dog Miles. And there's multiple other characters too. Other thing that I did I think that people liked and didn't like is kind of what I liked and didn't like about The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones. I killed quite a few people off and no one was ever really safe.

So I've gotten a lot of grief about it. And frankly, it's hard to write some of those deaths because I've spent so much time writing in this universe. It feels sort of real to me. So I think those are kind of the big things also it's just a kind of a unique concept too there's not a whole lot else like that and that was really the my intention when i wrote this series or when i wrote the first book and my agent pitched it to all these publishers i wanted to come up with something different and at time, you've probably heard of Hugh Howey and wool, which is a big show now on Apple TV. Yeah, there was a very popular sub genre and post apocalyptic about

people living in bunkers and wool was the top story out there still probably is. And I started thinking, what if people are living in the sky living in airships. And so that kind of started the idea. And then I came up with the hell divers. And then I came so that kind of started the idea and then i came up with the hell divers and then i came up with kind of what the what these storms are like and why this isn't just a normal well i shouldn't say normal but this isn't just a nuclear annihilation type book this is nuclear warheads on crack 100 times more powerful than anything that we have right now so theoretically you know some some of the science behind this book is i think also kind of interesting with the the way the creatures how i find the creatures but the last thing i'll say on why i think that the series

was took off is because a lot of the things i'm talking about i don't reveal right away there's a lot of mystery behind it so i think it kept people wanting to know more about how the world ended and that's what i'm working on right now i'm working on a prequel that i really took some convincing from my publisher to get me to do this because i felt like it could give away so much of this mystery but then again I decided you know this might be a good way to bring new readers into to see this world so yeah a lot of different reasons but most of them worked and you know that's what you do as an author you try new things and sometimes things work sometimes they don't for helldivers a lot of

the things worked and I think people enjoyed it so i'm really happy about that i think it's pretty cool because like you think about it and yeah most post-apocalyptic sort of nuclear thing is well we go underground and we just survive in the ground and i imagine it's got to be hard to survive in the ground plus you need lots of water i imagine with hell divers you can get water from the atmosphere or something or maybe you know something like that i don't't know. Yeah, they have, I actually have water treatment plants on their ships. And when I was researching these ships back in, it was 10 years ago, the military was really starting to introduce like prototypes that, that are, are, they're not in use yet, but I'm sure you've probably seen in the news or just online these massive airships that the military is wanting to build.

And now there's even like cruise ships that they're talking about doing as airships. And so that's really what, when I'm talking about these massive airships in my book, that's what they are. I mean, they're cities, they're floating cities, essentially. Floating cities. You got to love it. That makes sense, though, because, you know, and then, of course, you're above the, maybe the atmosphere of the storms and stuff. So, you know, if you're down on the ground, I mean, it seems like some of that radiation will get down there somehow or whatever.

So that makes sense. I like the premise of it. It certainly puts it in a different place than most people do. So it gives the uniqueness. So it's definitely popular. What do you see the future of the series or the future of what you're going to be writing about? You said you have a few different projects and works. Yeah.

I did a side story that I just finished. It's about one of the society civilizations that's kind of been hiding on the ground for 250 years. And they are in the habitable zone is what what i called it um and i'm working on this prequel and then i i have a bunch of ongoing series i'm working on a new concept that's sci-fi it's like grumpy old men in space kind of it's like this is the pitch like i'm trying to do some stuff that's more humor related you mentioned star wars earlier the newest series i've done is called galaxy and flames and it's kind of my star wars i guess you'd say where you have

very interesting odd alien crews and just it's more fun based a lot of my older stuff especially hell divers is is darker it's post-apocalyptic i like to try new things and i kind of took a little bit of a break from post-apocalyptic when i had my my my wife and i had our daughter three years ago i think becoming a dad kind of made me like shift a little bit from the post-apocalyptic genre but i'm now getting back into it and i have another series called the map that I've been working on. That's just purely based in reality. It would be kind of like, what's this? There's quite a few EMP novels out there, and I've written one of those before, and this would be similar to that. It'd be based in reality. Utilizing my background in Homeland Security, I'd try to make it as realistic as possible.

There you go. There wouldn't be any monsters or sci-fi involved. There you go. I like the grumpy old men premise i have this and you know that probably if if i don't know enough time had passed jack lemon and walter math i probably would have eventually done that grumpy old men in space yeah as clones or something something weird i don't know there's there's they have ai now you could probably do that on yeah so the sci-fi genre has changed a lot since you and i probably were reading as kids like i read a lot of the classics and you know still have those things are still popular but a lot of what sci-fi has gone to now is these lit rpg books have you heard of lit rpg

at all no no like ready player one you probably heard okay we had ready player one on the show no hold on we didn't that was a different book we had one that was similar to it on recently yeah yeah it's a it's a hugely popular genre it's basically video games and books and i uh i can't explain it all myself my my nephew's staying with us right now we're at our cabin and he's playing fortnight and all this stuff i'm seeing i don't understand any of it but it's so popular in in books yeah in fact they're doing movies out of videos i mean that was like halo was recently on amazon i think it was or netflix or one of the places and i was like i mean people i mean people really when you have

that sort of fan base for you know halo had the game had such a fan base for so many decades. I'm still waiting for Modern Warfare 3, I guess. Yeah. Maybe they'll be going for Destiny, the movie. I know that was a big fan base. I'm not sure how much people care anymore. But yeah, some of these different venues, I mean, you might as well make them. I think there's been a few other genres for it.

But, you know, maybe there's a future video game. I'd love to see this in the movies. That'd be a great thing to watch. I think being in the sky makes it all so unique and so cool. It is. It also makes it super expensive to make. I've been working with, and his company is Arid Productions, are they're making borderlands right now which is a video game they're turning that into a movie he did uncharted is i think that's what it was

mark walbert he's done quite a few movies he was also i think he was the see the the producer of the first iron man so i've been working with these guys for a couple years on the hell divers concept and it's right now it's kind of there's a script being put together and so this is possible that it could become a movie at some point but it is it's pretty hard to get a book made into a movie when it would have a huge budget like this i'm hopeful though there's been so much talk about the hell divers movie you guys have such a huge following across social media final thoughts as we go out to pitch people on the book and get them to pick it up and all that good stuff well i would say that if you're a listener which i know there's a lot of people that

love audio now this is i think the first book is actually free on amazon on audible plus right now so you can get into the series with just an audible account and see if you like it and then you can binge it for 12 books if you really do it's it's a fast-paced mysterious suspenseful story there is humor in it i think i've tried to add everything possible to keep readers engaged over these 12 books and so the one really cool thing about it is i i normally like i'm pretty critical of my work usually but i will say i do believe that each book gets better than the last so it's i've always spent the helldiver series has always been a series that i've written one per year instead of trying to pump them out

real fast always taking time to try to make this the best story possible and i believe that it is the best story that i've that i'm capable of telling. And I really think people that like post-apocalyptic fiction will enjoy it. And you can't go wrong with the audio. There's also some really beautiful hardcovers that Blackstone Publishing has put out and wanted to say thank you to them as well. They set up this talk and they've been a great partner, great publisher. They started off in audio and now they're doing everything. Yeah. I mean, they're doing everything so i mean they're booking a lot of great people with us they signed over a lot of folks oh cool and so you know we we interview a lot of great authors i think they're i think they're stealing all the authors from

everybody the way they're yeah they they've gotten some really big authors and that i've been with them since 2014 i did my first audio books with them and then hell divers was the first multi-format book i did with them in 2016. I remember when they first started booking us because Simon Schuster, Penguin Random House, and all the big houses. And they're a big house now, I guess. They always book with us. And I was like, who's Blackstone Publishing? But good for them.

I mean, they're taking names. They are. They have a lot of their great authors on the show. In fact, we almost get more from them now. We get a lot of romantic comedies from Simon Schuster and Penguin Random House, but we need more toxic politics because for a while there, we were getting lots of good stuff from the prior administration, but scandals and woes and everything else.

But now it's been really boring. We need President Biden to do more scandalous stuff, I suppose. Anyway, fun is fun. So please come back for your future books we'd love to have you we have the tom connolly people on all the time i think there's one next week and they're on like for you know we they're multi-book authors like yourself they're on just about every four months that's cool yeah for projects so we'd love to have you again so thank you very much give us your.com so people can find you on the internet. Yeah, it's nicholassansburysmith.com. There you go.

Hell Divers 12, Heroes, out August 6, 2024. Thanks to our audience for tuning in. Thanks for Nicholas for being here. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschristmas, linkedin.com, 4chesschristmas, chrismas1, the TikTokity, all those crazy places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other.

Stay safe. We'll see you next time. Thank you.