To celebrate the release of Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6, my first anthology as editor, I am giving away Rivalry On A Sky Course free at smashwords. If you preorder Space Battles and send me your order number via email or here, I’ll send you a code to download Rivalry for free. Rivalry and my Space Battles story “The Hand Of God” are the only current short stories set in the universe of my Davi Rhii novels, The Worker Prince and The Returning (forthcoming this June). For info on Space Battles , Rivalry On A Sky Course and The Worker Prince, click the links below the pics.
The third story in Space Battles is the third anthology sale for Author Simon C. Larter. A construction worker by day, who describes himself better than I ever could as: “Flash fiction specialist and writer of short stories that range from depressing to violent and depressing. Not a poet. Novelist-in-the-making. Tragic aesthete and lover of martinis. A tad ornery, most days.” He’s also a respected expert (at least in his own mind) on Vodka, of which he is an unabashed fan. Larter’s other stories can be found in the anthologies Notes From The Undergroundand Short Story America, Volume 1. A husband and father based in New Jersey, Larter can be found on Twitter as @simonclarter, at Facebook or via his blog/website at www.simonclarter.com.
BTS: How did you find out about the Space Battles anthology and what made you decide to submit?
Simon C. Larter: I found out about the Space Battles anthology through some guy I met on Twitter and then at World Fantasy Convention in 2010. He turned out to be the editor. Win!
BTS: This is your first science fiction anthology sale, correct? Tell us a little about “Like So Much Refuse.” What’s it about? Where’d this particular idea come from?
SCL: Yes. “Like So Much Refuse” started out as a much longer story, but was mercilessly hacked down to meet the word count requirements of the antho. I’d wanted to tell a multiple-POV story that highlighted the senseless slaughter of war while avoiding the traditional “good” protagonist and “bad” antagonist trope. I lost a lot of dead bodies in the editing process, but still tried to maintain a kind of moral ambiguity when it came to the two main characters. Rarely is war about moral absolutes, and I wanted to explore that idea in a futuristic setting. Also, I just liked the idea of guerilla warfare in space.
BTS: How’d you get started as a writer?
SCL: I wrote for most of my life, up through high school, but got all practical in my first run of college and decided to get an engineering degree. (Something about being able to make a decent living really appealed to me, I guess.) It took a helluva long time, during which I wrote next to nothing, but I eventually got that degree. The last liberal arts class I took before graduating, though, was a fiction writing course. It lit the fire in me again, and I’ve been writing ever since.
BTS: Do you have plans to do any more with this universe?
SCL: Nah. This was a one-shot deal. The Outworlders are just going to fall to squabbling amongst themselves after the fall of the Confederation anyway, and how much fun is it to write about squabbles?
BTS: Where’d your love of SF come from?
SCL: I would read anything and everything as a child, if it looked even remotely like fantasy or science fiction. Probably the first sci-fi I ever read was Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, but I’ve devoured everything from Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia series to Tad Williams’ Otherland books since then. Anything that lets me escape into another world for a while is okay in my book.
BTS: What are your writing goals? Full time? Novelist? Short story writer? All of the above?
SCL: I’d love to supplement the dayjob income with novel sales, and the occasional short story or flash fiction publication. Writing full time, of course, would be the ideal, but I’d be happy with enough extra money to keep me in vacations and vodka. You know how it is.
BTS: What other projects do you have in the works that we can look forward to?
SCL: I’ve a spec-fic novella in the works for a friend’s micropress, and a noir novella that’s almost submission-ready. After those are loose in the world, it’s back to the full-length novels, with occasional forays into shorter fiction when the mood strikes me. Which I’m sure will be often. Apparently the ideas don’t stop just because you don’t have time to write them all. Why is that, anyway?
Here’s an excerpt from “Like So Much Refuse,” Simon’s thrilling adventure about a saboteur taking on an experienced Admiral and her crew:
Like So Much Refuse
Simon C. Larter
Engel left the airlock at a dead run and leaped outward, snapping his body rigid as he plunged into open space. He felt the vibration in his chest as he engaged the thrustpack, the shift in direction. Below him, the Galaxy gleamed dully in the light from the distant star at the center of the system. Its exhaust cones, black and mountainous, bulged from its aftsection: his destination. He triggered the thrusters again, briefly, then settled into the drop, the only sound in his ears the mild hiss of his rebreather and the crackle of the propaganda transmission from the distant command ship.
Behind him, his shuttle’s autopilot engaged—flames flared inEngel’s peripheral vision—and then shut off, the tiny Mark IV shorthopper drifting out and away from the planet’s
gravitational field and the starcruiser’s light guns. He’d watched
several of his comrades’ ships strobe space with their atoms as he
made his approach run. Damn amateurs, he thought. Who trained
them, anyway?
But now there was nothing for him to do but plummet planetward, watching as the Galaxy grew ever larger through the visor of his helmet. His jaw tightened as he let his gaze glide across the gun batteries and launch tubes ranked along the cruiser’s broad flanks. How many lives had those weapons snuffed out? How many friends had tasted vacuum because of them?
No more, he thought grimly. It ends tonight. If not me, another will make it through.
Explosions winked in the darkness like static sparks as the Galaxy’s flak guns opened fire in earnest. The city-sized exhaust cones loomed closer. Engel grinned.
*** “It’s nothing but small craft, sir,” the scanner tech said. He turned in his seat to regard the Admiral. “They come almost within flak range then peel off or go adrift. Most of them are short-hop, single-man shuttles, too. Not even interceptors.”
Admiral Johanna Stanche ran stiff fingers through her graying, close-cropped hair and glared at the tactical projection at the far end of the bridge. The threatening twinges that had been spiking the base of her skull for the past two hours were coalescing into a serious headache. She grimaced and kneaded the back of her neck. “Shuttles,” she repeated.
“Yes, sir. The light cruisers and corvettes are keeping well back.”
“They’re testing our defenses,” Commander Martin Vandermeer said. “Feeling us out.”
Stanche glanced toward him. A good man, she thought. Textbook leader, but terminally lacking in imagination. For a moment, she allowed herself to miss Marta’s sharp mind and ready grin, her quiet support. But Vice-Admiral Marta Janowik had been killed three months ago when the second to last remaining Confederation starcruiser had been blasted to particles by the betrayers’ fusion bombs, shredded and scattered like so much refuse. Now the Galaxy was the last symbol of a dying dream, she the dream’s last line of defense. Vandermeer’s stolid face was set in a scowl as he watched the shuttles drifting in the TAC, an image winking out every so often as the flak guns did their work. Beyond the swarm of small craft, hovering at the edge of scanner range, the larger ships crouched, spider-like, a promise of violence to come. And at the center of the projection, the lifeless bulk of planet Arturus K-384 spun slowly on its axis, the Galaxy a silver shard in its orbit.
“What’s the lower limit of our scanners?” the Admiral asked suddenly.
“Sir?”
“Minimum energy signature. Craft size. What’s the smallest thing they’re set to detect?”
The scanner tech turned to face her again. “Two meters, perhaps, sir? Energy sig about half a kilowatt.”
“Dammit,” Stanche muttered. Then, “Dial it down. Fifty centimeters and one hundred Watts. Do it now.” She turned to Vandermeer. “And scramble the Falcons. All of them. Set the scanners to rescue mode.”
“Admiral?”
“They’re jet-jockeying in, Vandermeer. Get those Falcons in the mix, now!”
The Commander saluted crisply and turned to bark orders into the nearest comm console. Stanche watched as the TAC image blurred, then resolved into sharper focus once more. She clenched her jaw. “There you are,” she said softly.
Between the ranks of light craft and the Galaxy, hundreds—perhaps thousands—of small, humanoid shapes were closing on the starcruiser, a diffuse, insidious wave.
“Recal the flak guns,” the Admiral said through her teeth. “Set the bursts to go off closer. I want those jumpers vaporized.”
The bridge snapped into activity as her orders were relayed. On the TAC, the slight, deadly shapes of the Falcon interceptors began to appear, streaking out of the launch bays to chart a course for the incoming enemy.
“Nice try, you sneaky bastards,” she said under her breath. “But not good enough.”
*** Engel kept his arms tucked tight to his sides as he plummeted toward the immense engine cowls at the rear of the cruiser—minimum cross-section. Since his first jetbursts, he’d avoided using the thrusters—minimum heat signature. With his right hand, he touched the sleek bulk of the microfusion bomb strapped to his thigh and grinned through gritted teeth—maximum damage.
The exhaust cones loomed large in his visor. The range numbers in his HUD spun down so fast they blurred. He turned his head briefly to watch pointillist flashes of strafe-fire rake through what he knew was the main drop zone. The kill rate there had to be staggering. He grimaced. “Requiem in pacem,” he murmured. “Poor bastards.” He watched for a moment longer, then turned back to regard his target. It expanded rapidly in front of him, a mountain of metal, coldwelded, beaten and hardened to withstand the rigors of deep space and warp travel. When the engines fired, the heat rippling from the metallic skin would be enough to flash-fry human blood at a distance of a quarter kilometer. But they were not firing now, and if all went well, they would fire only once more: to end it. The technology that had enabled the Confederation would be the means to its final destruction.
He engaged the thrusters, then executed a sustained burn that leadweighted his body and sent him surging sideways. The blackened edge of the exhaust cone shot past in his peripheral vision. Engel snapped his torso forward, jackknifing to switch directions, and cranked the thrustpack to full. The suddenness of the deceleration rattled his teeth and tunneled his vision, but when the burn finished, he was floating again, weightless, staring at a gigantic maw of blistered metal. He feathered the thrusters once more, pushing himself into the cavernous space. Tension he didn’t know he’d been retaining drained from his shoulders as he drifted forward; there were no strafing batteries in the exhausts. For the moment, he was safe—as safe as anyone could be while hovering in front of something that produced sun-hot gas and enough power to propel a million tons of metal death through space. The deep dark of the exhaust cone swallowed Engel. He was a glimmer, a speck against its immensity—a speck bearing death. The bomb at his hip seemed to pulse with potential.
*** The muted buzz of proximity alarms and penetration alerts was almost constant now, each one a spike in Admiral Stanche’s throbbing skull. On the TAC, the rain of small craft and jumpers continued, an unending wave of attackers. The Falcons were carving huge swaths of destruction through the attack, wiping out jumpers in their tens, hundreds, yet the assault continued.
And—more worrying—out beyond the thousand and one small craft, the corvettes and light cruisers were beginning to edge closer. It didn’t make sense, any way you cut it, she thought. The losses were staggering on their part. Did they really have so many lives to throw away? Even in the assault on the central planets they hadn’t wasted soldiers like this. It was a distraction; it had to be. So what was coming next?
“How many penetrations now?” she asked.
“One hundred and twelve,” Vandermeer responded without turning.
“All neutralized.”
“Check and recheck every error message in the system. Any other anomalies, I want to know about them.”
The techs bent again to their work. The Admiral wiped the moisture from the corners of her eyes with thumb and forefinger, wishing her headache would subside. But the meds that took the edge off also felt like they dulled her mind. She couldn’t afford that on a good day. This was not a good day.
She walked over to lean down next to Vandermeer. “It’s a covering maneuver,” she said, speaking for his ears alone. “Otherwise it’s just throwing away lives.”
He glanced sideways at her. “Yes, sir.”
“I get the feeling we’re not going to like what they’re trying to distract us from.”
“No, sir,” he said. Then, after a pause, “There’s some alerts from the aft beam injectors. Channel integrity monitors are showing a break or two. We get those regularly, though—those systems are touchy.” Stanche didn’t hesitate. “Run a full scan anyway, and get teams on the way there. Reroute the maintenance bots to those locations. I want their camera feeds piped here directly.”
Vandermeer saluted. The Admiral nodded a brief acknowledgement and returned to her station once more. Over a hundred hull penetrations, she thought. They were getting through. She was going to start losing people soon, if this went on—a further fraying of the Confederation’s last tattered shreds. And they had no choice left but to continue fighting. Every man and woman aboard knew what the PLM did with survivors. Every channel in the galaxy had broadcast the fate of the Constellation. She’d had friends on that ship.
“Nav,” she said, still staring at the TAC, “prep the mains. I want those engines hot and ready.” There was a surprise coming, she knew it. Perhaps it would be better if they didn’t stick around to find out what it was. Live to fight another day, she thought wearily.
*** The glow of melting metal hummed in Engel’s peripheral vision as he floated, weightless, near an injection port at the rear of the blast chamber. If he engaged the zoom lens on his helmetcam and squinted back the way he’d come, he could just see the tiny case of the microfusion bomb where it hung in the chamber’s center, anchored by several thousand meters of now-invisible fiber. The setup had been painstaking, but he’d taken more than the necessary time, checking and doublechecking the location, the connections. To come so far and fail due to a foolish mistake would be inexcusable. He turned back to watch the white-hot metal cool to red, the last shreds of his thermocord graying and flaking to dust.
A circular chunk of alloy loosened and drifted away from the exhaust cone wall. Engel batted it aside and leaned close, flicking his miniflood to life. A beam of light pierced the darkness, hazed by residual gas from the vaporized metal, and gleamed on the walls of the injection port beyond. He played the floodlight over the blank, metalloid walls for a moment, then reached forward and pulled himself through the hole.
Reaching for the second thermocord coiled at his waist, Engel laid it in place on the wall and retreated into the immense dark once more. White heat lit the tunnel and triggered the autodim on his visor. When it had subsided, he placed his palms on the melted metal edge of the hole and drifted into the port again. Now the miniflood illuminated a ragged, empty circle in the polished perfection of the injector—beyond it a near impenetrable tangle of ducts, wiring, coolant hoses. He slipped through the hole, twisting to avoid the thin traces of sensor wire, and reached for the floating disc of metal set loose by the thermocord burn through.
Turning, he replaced the disc in its hole and began to weld it back in place. Wouldn’t be a perfect repair, he thought, but Command had been clear: it only needed to hold for a few seconds. Once the subatomic stream hit the burn chamber, the bomb he’d planted would do its work in short order. The major portion of his job was complete.
And should the bombs fail to work as designed? There was always plan B.
Through the dark plastic of his visor he watched the spitting, sparking light of his welding arc trace its slow circle, a countdown clockface, measuring the minutes until the end of it all.
Continued in Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 which you can purchase here starting now (preorders end April 17).
The second story in Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 is by Gene Mederos. Born in Cuba and raised in Brooklyn, he wrote his first story in second grade. Mederos received a BFA in Theater from the University of Miami and has worked as an illustrator, graphic designer and various odd jobs including a seven year stretch at the The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in NewYork City. In 2007, he discovered filmmaking and currently teaches editing and filmmaking at the Santa Fe Community College. Most recent stories in print include the stories “Moons of Blood and Amber” in the Tangle XY anthology published by Blind Eye Press, and “A Touch of Frost” in the Space Horrors: Full-Throttle Space Tales #4 anthology published by Flying Pen Press. He can be found online at Facebook or via his website at http://lostsaints.com.
BTS: How did you find out about the Space Battles anthology and what made you decide to submit?
Gene Mederos: I was in the Space Horrors anthology and I like the imprint, it hearkens back to yesteryear.
BTS: Tell us a little about “The Thirteens.” What’s it about? Where’d this particular idea come from?
GM: At the core, the story is about tolerance for diversity, even toleration for the intolerant. It’s an old Sci-Fi trope, that the only thing that will unite warring parties is a bigger, badder alien or even the unknown. As for the inspiration, I have friends from the extreme left to the extreme right, politically, so it wasn’t hard to craft the mindsets for the characters.
BTS: You’ve contributed to multiple anthologies in the Full Throttle Space Tales series. Are they tied to this story in any way?
GM: They nominally take place in the same universe, one where physics is not as abridged as on Star Trek and Star Wars, but faster than light travel is available, and about two hundred years in the future.
BTS: How’d you come to be involved with this series?
GM: My friend Trent Zelazny put me in touch with David Lee Summers who was putting together the Space Horrors anthology. It’s all about who you know…
BTS: How’d you get started as a writer?
GM: I’ve always loved stories, and am always telling stories. It was a natural progression to start writing stories to share with others that way.
BTS: Where’d your interest in SFF come from?
GM: Comic books, the original Lost in Space and Star Trek, and the first musty hard cover edition of Dune I found at the local library.
BTS: Do you have plans to do any more with this universe?
GM: Yes, as a vehicle, or a common canvas, not necessarily with any of the characters already seen in print, but cameos are fun.
BTS: What other projects do you have in the works that we can look forward to?
GM: I have lots in the works, lol, most writers do. I’ve submitted a story to Bad Ass Fairies 4 which I hope they’ll publish, and am hunkering down to write an extreme planet story for another anthology, and I have the requisite novels. But I believe mastery of the short story form is a prerequisite to a good novel, so I consider myself still in training.
Here’s an excerpt from “The Thirteens,” Gene’s exciting story from Space Battles:
The Thirteens
Gene Mederos
Nestled deeply in the foam mattress of the semi-luxurious hotelsuite her rank afforded her, Captain Andromeda Sax was sound asleepwhen her com went off. The double pulse told her it was somethingimportant enough to warrant a secure connection. Even less than halfawake her hand automatically flew to the spot on her jaw below herright ear. She pressed the small stud embedded there under her skin.
“Go ahead.”
“Captain, a bogey has entered the system,” the officer of the watchon board her ship, La Espada de la Libertad, informed her. That could have been anywhere from four to six hours ago,depending on which of the outer system beacons had first detected the incoming ship and transmitted the alert. A bogey was a ship thatdid not, or could not, transmit a valid ID code. It could be a smuggler,a legitimate freighter with a screwy comp—or it could be theenemy. Sax allowed herself a small smile; after all, there was no one around to see it.
“Recall the crew, priority one.” That gave the crew ten minutes to get back aboard the ship. She spared one last glance at her room. Aquarii Station was on the frontier, but it still managed to offer most of the comforts of the more cosmopolitan stations of the home-worlds. Accommodations on La Espada were much more austere. She smiled again. Five minutes later she strode onto the bridge. She hadn’t really had time to dress, just comb her short-cropped jet-black hair and throw on her officer’s greatcoat, but the voluminous garment covered her from neck to ankles. And if anyone noticed she was wearing slippers instead of boots, they wouldn’t dare comment on it. The guards at the door snapped to attention. The crew on the bridge was all in uniform and seated at their stations. She always kept a full watch on duty while the rest of the crew took liberty.
“Inform the stationmaster we are launching to investigate,” she instructed the com officer, then requested the general hail. “Emergency separation from Aquarii station in T-minus four minutes.” That was sure to make the stragglers scramble, for anyone left behind would have to fend for themselves out of their own pocket. Stations were notorious for separating crew from their coin, and the community service often imposed to pay off a debt was the most odious of station maintenance work. Some of the crew would not return, for the ship had its own share of odious duties as well as providing a greater chance of getting killed. She’d deal with any of those persons when she returned. She never thought ‘if’.
“Release hook-ups,” she ordered on the mark.
“Hook-ups released,” the officer at conn replied. She heard the usual chorus of clicks as everyone strapped themselves in.
La Espada was now completely on its own power, air and water. Sax strapped herself into her chair.
“Cast off.”
The station’s magnetic clamps released the ship and she imagined the hiss of air as the powerful propellant tanks pushed them away from the station and felt the familiar tug as the gravity provided by the station’s rotation gave way to the gravity generated by the ship’s sudden acceleration. She felt the weight ease an instant before the conn announced they were standing clear of the station.
“Full sail,” she ordered. The most insane and courageous members of her crew were the riggers. At her command they jetted out in EVA suits along the masts and struts to unfurl the giant micro-thin solar sails. The riggers claimed watching the golden sails catch the rays of the sun was akin to a religious experience. She’d never seen the phenomenon herself, but figured it must be quite a sight if it could induce one to hurl oneself into the void to see it.
Acceleration under sail would increase slowly, but surely.
“Begin rotation,” she ordered.
“Beginning rotation,” the engineering deck replied on the ship-wide hail, the only warning the crew would get that up and down had to be taken into account again. The sound of the engines that rotated the cylindrical ship within its frame of struts and masts starting up did not need to be imagined. It reverberated and shook throughout the ship. Fortunately, once the ship began to spin at speed, inertia was maintained by magnetic induction and the engines would be almost silent.
The captain felt herself sink ever so slightly into the cushioning. A thought, via implant and wireless transmission, was all it took to make the chair turn slightly on its horizontal axis. She, like the crew, enjoyed the automated, computer guided functions on the ship while she could. During battle, with the comp taken offline, everything had to be done manually. The navigator’s station came into view and with it the senior nav officer, Poole. This was the one crewmember she would never leave behind. As she understood it, the ship ran on numbers, and this was the man who crunched them when the comp was down. Poole raised his head from his displays, as if he could feel her scrutiny like a sensorite. Like all the human beings from his planet, Cygni-I, his skin had a slight blue cast and his hair was colorless. These obvious and innocuous signs of the genetic modifications undertaken by his ancestors to survive on their relatively oxygenpoor world were all that the Purists needed to hate Poole’s kind. Sax thought them fools. If anything, the Cygni were far more dangerous for what they had done to their minds.
“Have you correlated a course, Mr. Poole?”
“Yes, captain.”
“Let’s have it then.”
Immediately, a heads up display appeared before her, La Espada’s course outlined against the current layout of the system in a bright certain blue. Lines shaded from yellow to green showed the most probable courses of the bogey, extrapolated second by second as more sensor data came in from the beacons arrayed throughout the system. She was pleased to see that the most probable vectors would intercept with her ship well above the plane of the ecliptic, where there would be plenty of fighting room, if necessary. She knew that the universe was more empty space than matter, but to her the Aquarii system had always seemed cluttered with asteroids, comets and other debris.
Debris that could damage her ship.
She willed La Espada to go faster, and closed her eyes to imagine the nonexistent creaking of the rigging and masts as light pushed the solar sails out against the star’s pull on the ship. She’d been on a sailing ship once, on the oceans of Maravilla, before the Associated Worlds lost the Lalande system to the Purists. Someday, she meant to win that world back. But since the faster than light engine could not be used anywhere near a star’s gravity well, the ship could go faster only as they got farther from the star. She could order a burn, and kick the ship up to her full speed of a hundred kilometers per second, roughly a third the speed of light. But if she were headed for battle, she would be wise to reserve all the fuel in the tanks for maneuvers.
It would take a little under thirty hours for the ships to meet, and there was much to be done. “Steady as she goes,” she ordered Poole as she turned her chair to line up with the exit from the bridge. This brought Augusto Lo into view. His bronze-brown skin was a few shades lighter than the captain’s, his eyes and tousled hair darker. He was actually earth-born, yet had rejected the Purist philosophy and immigrated to an Associate world as a youth. He was slouched at his usual station at the rear of the bridge, his eyes half closed, his head resting on his fist, his other hand fiddling idly with the buckles on his disheveled jumpsuit. To all appearances he was oblivious to what was going on around him. But it was all an act. The captain knew that the ‘State Liaison Officer’ never missed a thing that happened on the ship. So she wasn’t the least bit surprised when he came up behind her in the corridor as she waited for the lift. The guards wouldn’t stop him from coming after her like that, after all, they ultimately answered to him.
“Odd, isn’t it?”
She raised an eyebrow in reply.
“If I’m not mistaken, that bogey is following the same trajectory as the last Purist ship that attacked this system.”
The captain nodded. “Yes, I’d noticed that.”
“But that approach gives you, the defender, the weather gauge. The bogey has to expend fuel to fight the same solar wind that La Espada has at her back, filling our sails, leaving it less fuel to maneuver. These were decisive factors in our victory against the last incursion.” Again, the captain raised her brow.
“And your superior skill at command and tactics, of course,” he amended with a small grin. Sax smiled in return, more because of his use of the archaic term ‘weather gauge’ than his sardonic compliment. “Everything means something,” he said in return.
“Then figure it out,” she said, after pausing for a moment to visualize her deck number.
Lo nodded. “Nice slippers,” she heard him say as the lift doors closed.
An hour before intercept the captain was touring her ship as she was wont to do before a battle. And she had no doubt that there would be a battle—the bogey’s course was lining up exactly with the last Purist ship’s incursion. A statistical impossibility, Poole had assured her. So this ship was using the last ship’s comp data, possibly retrieved from the latter’s logs, which would have been downloaded into a locator beacon before the ship went into battle. It made no sense to her, but then, she thought the whole Purist agenda made little sense. She entered the rigger’s loft in the core of the ship. Since the ship rotated around the core, there was no gravity in the long, cold cylinder. It was the perfect place to store cargo, house the ship’s engines and, of course, the riggers.
A rigger spotted her and snapped to attention, his elongated prehensile toes grasping a length of cable to steady himself. He was blond and blue-eyed, not too bad looking, with a crooked nose and a wry twist to his mouth that suggested he was always smiling. He was tall and thin, his arms and legs of equal length, with all twenty digits being equally dexterous. His name was Jaller. He’d served on her ship for the past four years and she knew him to be brave, loyal, and kind. And even though the rigger’s section of the core was only partially heated, he was naked, as was their wont. Diversity. The idea and the reality that the Purists condemned as unnatural.
She drifted among the riggers, male and females both, for no few minutes, praising their courage, thanking them for their service and exhorting them to battle. Despite her duty uniform and her boots, she still managed to skillfully make her way in Zero G among the giant web of cables that the riggers called home. Their ancestors had destroyed their world in a paroxysm of industrialization that had seen the world laid waste in just six generations after colonization. The riggers had been forced to evacuate onto space stations and ships and had during the centuries of the sundering, when all of humanity’s worlds had lost contact with each other and faster than light travel had been abandoned, modified themselves to live in micro-gravity. Members of no fewer than five of the existing seven modified human races served on her ship and of the remaining two, the Aquarii had inadvertently made themselves highly susceptible to space sickness and the folk of Twobit were devout pacifist.
Her last stop on her tour was always the medical deck. Doctor Stures was a sensorite, his people hailed from the dust-cloaked planet of Gliese 876, Umbra. The world was metal poor and had erratic magnetic fields so technology had been difficult to maintain.
Without much artificial illumination, the people of that world had modified their other senses to compensate for the gloom. His skin was blue-black with raised oblong bumps that ran from his hairline to his jaw. She knew them to be receptors, allowing the doctor to feel minute changes in temperature, in air pressure and displacement, even vibrations. His eyes were hidden behind a band of dark glass, to protect them from the ship’s bright illumination. He greeted her in his usual way.
“Ah, Captain, in excellent health I see.” And by see he actually meant by smell, by feeling her body temperature and by hearing her heart beat in her chest. “All is in readiness for the coming battle.” She had expected no less. His people were sensitive by nature and design, but they were also pragmatists. He wasn’t one of those medical officers who questioned the need for battle.
“We don’t know that the bogey is hostile—” she began to say.
“Pshaw,” the doctor interjected. A liberty he could take here, on his deck. “From what I’ve heard, how could it be anything else?”
“Indeed,” the captain said, raising her brow. News travelled fast on a ship. She believed the ancient term was ‘scuttlebutt’. Satisfied that her ship was in order, she headed for the bridge.
As the captain stepped onto the bridge, the ship’s executive officer, Commander Ortencia, saluted and left. The XO’s station during battle was located close to the core, half the ship’s length from the bridge, a hopefully safe distance from anything that might happen to or on the bridge. The commander would monitor all activities on the bridge from there and issue orders in support of the captain’s activities during battle. In exchange, Major Drummond, the Captain of the Guard, took a station on the bridge. When ships sailed on oceans his troops would have been called marines.
“We are coming to transmission and targeting range,” Poole said.
“Furl sails, retract masts,” she ordered the riggers. “Advise the ship and begin viral transmission,” she ordered the com officer. She waited until all decks had acknowledged.
“Take the computer network offline, Mr. Poole.”
A few seconds later she saw the board at the Armscomp station light up.
“Bogey firing missiles!”
Continued in Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 which you can purchase here starting now (preorders end April 17).
BTS: How did you find out about the Space Battles anthology and what made you decide to submit?
Anna Paradox: I’ve been following the Full Throttle Space Tales series from the beginning. It has had a remarkably high percentage of stories I enjoy reading. So when I heard about Space Battles, I thought, there’s a theme I can do something with, and I was glad to submit a story.
BTS: Tell us a little about “Between The Rocks.” What’s it about? Where’d this particular idea come from?
AP: I’ve been thinking a lot about how people will expand into the solar system. There’s a lot of room out there—room enough for a variety of different approaches to colonization. Like the immigrants to the U.S., some may go seeking freedom they can’t have at home. “Between the Rocks” tells of one group fighting to preserve their homes and families built by hard work on an asteroid from another group that sees what they have and decides to steal it.
BTS: You’ve contributed to several anthologies in the Full Throttle Space Tales series. Are they tied to this story in any way?
AP: My stories all loosely fit into a future where humans are expanding into space. None of them share any characters. In my Space Pirates story, we’ve colonized the Moon. In the Space Horrors story, we make regular trips to Mars. In “Between the Rocks,” we are starting to colonize the asteroids and outer moons. My story in Space Sirens is set in the furthest future, since we’ve reached other solar systems and established trade with other intelligent species.
BTS: How’d you come to be involved with this series?
AP: I had the good fortune to share a panel at Coppercon with David Lee Summers, and he told me about the first anthology, Space Pirates. I was pleased to submit a story, and even happier to have it accepted!
BTS: How’d you get started as a writer?
AP: I started writing stories in grade school. One early piece was a satire about the sad state of the food in the school cafeteria. I’ve continued to write short stories ever since. I wrote one novel after college, and another for Nanowrimo in 2002 or 2003. My first sales were poker articles. Then I sold a story to Julie Czerneda for her anthology Polaris. Science fiction is where my writer’s heart yearns to play. However, most of my working time goes to helping other people write and, for the moment, to graduate school.
BTS: Do you have plans to do any more with this universe?
AP: I have several novels outlined, and a couple of them belong in this universe. To me, this looks like the shape of the future I’d want to live in. The best long run goal I can think of for humanity is to play so that future generations can have more choices. That means giving us more places to live as well as taking care of this planet—to me it makes no more sense to foul our nest than to never leave it. So if I have no reason to make a different assumption, my stories tend to fit in this universe.
BTS: What other projects do you have in the works that we can look forward to?
AP: The novel that I’m most excited about now is called A Game of Christmas. Just when humanity has worked out how to stop violence against each other—including some fairly draconian laws against any depiction of using force against another human, such as most of our current movies and video games—we are attacked by aliens who have no such compunctions. That leaves our only defense in the hands of a loose coalition of underground gamers and weapon collectors. I hope to reorganize my time so that I can have it out in 2014. Goodness, how time flies!
Here’s an excerpt from Anna’s fast paced action story “Between The Rocks” which opens the Space Battles anthology:
Between the Rocks
Anna Paradox
“I can’t wait to get home,” Xiao said, taking off his helmet.
We were all thinking it. Home was Old Lumpy, an asteroid hauled into Jupiter orbit and refining fuel for passing ships. In a decade of habitation, we’d slowly built ourselves comforts like hot showers and hydroponics parks. With our hold full of ore from another, less welcoming rock, it would be good to go wash the grit off ourselves and cook a few hot meals.
“Give me a flight check, then, and we’ll be on our way,” I said.
“Yes, Ma’am,” said Xiao with a wide grin.
Four of us ran The Courtly Vizier. Despite the tony name, our ship was little more than a utility truck in space. We alternated scoop runs on Jupiter’s atmosphere with mineral runs to other local rocks, to supply the refinery on Old Lumpy. Faster, sleeker ships bought our fuel to venture farther out in the solar system. The Viz turned slowly and accelerated like a peashooter-propelled iceberg, and quarters were tight, but she’d been built to last. I gave her bulkhead an affectionate pat when we’d completed the flight check and lifted off for home. With Xiao handling the engines, and Jackson keeping his eyes on the monitor, I had time to revise my letter to Earth. It wasn’t going well. If I sounded too needy, we might get dregs, and if I didn’t make our case, we might get nothing at all—either could be a disaster. I’d just about decided to join Nogal where she was taking her sleep shift in the two-bunk closet we called the cabin when Jackson spoke up.
“That’s odd. Grandpa isn’t answering the hail.”
I glanced over to where he sat fiddling with the radio tuning. “Loose wire?”
He shook his head. “I can read the buoys fine. Although…” He flipped quickly through the frequencies. “Only the sunward buoys are responding. The leeward ones—I’m not getting anything from them.”
We had four buoys each leading and trailing the ore processing center in Jupiter orbit. They gave us early warning of storms below and visitors above. To have four go out at once—felt like more than chance.
“Xiao, ease her down. Let’s come in quietly. We’ll get a look when we come around Jupiter.”
I rose above my seat as Xiao cut the engines. The Courtly Vizier continued over the horizon of Jupiter on momentum. I strained forward against my restraining straps.
“Jackson, get me a magnified view of Old Lumpy.”
How many times had I returned home? This time, something had changed. The monitor view zoomed in on the asteroid that held our friends, our families, our food supply, and everything we needed to refine our fuel and water … a black streak crossed the rise where the communications tower should have gleamed.
“Helmets! Now!” I thumbed the intercom. “Stasia! Suit up! We have an emergency.”
“What is that?” asked Xiao.
I pulled my helmet to me, started buckling it on. “It looks like a burn. I can think of a handful of ways that could happen, and for all of them, I want your helmet on. Move it, Len!”
Jackson finished sealing his helmet to his suit first. He left monitor one on Old Lumpy, and on the other two began scans of the region. Once I was sealed up, I tapped into the suit-to-suit system. “Nogal, are you suited?”
“Getting there, Captain.” She sounded sleepy.
“Make it fast. Communications are down with home. We may have trouble.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Jackson, do you see anything moving out there?”
“Nothing yet. Scanning.”
Xiao hovered his hands over the engine controls. “Captain, what happened? Was there a fuel explosion?”
“That … would be the most positive possibility. I don’t think it’s likely though. Jackson, check my thinking. What do you make of that black streak?”
“Like someone deliberately turned their engines on our communications tower.”
“And that would be the worst possibility.” The black mark tapered at each end. I could now make out the silvery slag that had been the comm tower—fortunately unmanned—right in the center of the mark.
“But I think that’s it.”
Between us and home lay a few dozen large rocks. Big enough to hide a ship? Would they know where we were coming from? Jackson studied war, played battle games. I’d watched him arranging the ships on the screen, maneuvering for position against a computer opponent. “Which way will they expect us to dodge?” He hesitated a moment. “New players tend to dodge straight right or left. Up has tactical advantages, since we’re in Jupiter’s gravity well. I’m not sure how much he’s thought about this.”
“Who would do this?” asked Xiao.
“Take us towards eight o’clock, full burn on my mark. Mark in thirty seconds.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Nogal, are you suited and strapped in back there?”
Her voice came back over the suit system, no longer sleepy. “Yes, all connected, Captain.”
“Good.” I watched the timer count down the seconds. “Mark, Xiao. Now!”
The Viz shuddered as the engines pumped directly to full. The acceleration pressed me into the seat, and I slid slightly to the right. Only a little. The Viz was born on Luna, and our max acceleration was three times Earth gravity. We could direct at most half of that laterally. The rest was forward motion only. Fortunately, we had plenty of fuel. We’d made it a habit since the refinery went live.
Xiao’s question still hung in the air. “Who? As far as I know, there’s only a handful of ships nearby, and none of them have a reason for this.”
“Right,” said Jackson. “The Feds have three cruisers—and they’d send a diplomat if they had a problem with us. Our last customer headed outward three weeks ago.”
“Aliens?” asked Xiao.
“This isn’t what I’d hope for first contact,” I said. “Keep your mind on your driving, Xiao, and we may know who soon.”
Jackson flipped a rotating series of images onto the monitors.
I watched them go by. Xiao held our course. I thought about our options. We had no guns. There were a couple small explosives we used to loosen ore from asteroids. Our drive glowed brightly behind us—and we could shift it thirty degrees to any side over the course of a few seconds. We had a cargo hold full of ore. Unless they’d stay put long enough for us to apply our jackhammer and shovels to their hull, that was it.
Another image flipped away from the monitor. Then it flipped back.
“Do you see that, Captain?” asked Jackson.
I stared at the image. “What do you see?”
“That glint, underneath the asteroid, to the right.”
Then I spotted it—something shiny and metallic revealed where the rough contours of the asteroid left a gap.
Continued in Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 which you can purchase here starting now (preorders end April 17).
Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 can now be purchased here starting now (preorders end April 17).
Red Alert! Red Alert!
This is not a drill…
Anna Paradox’s “Between The Rocks”: The Courtly Vizier, a
utility truck, renders aid to a colony ship but when they return to their
asteroid home from supply runs to mines on Old Lumpy from Jupiter’s
atmosphere, the colony ship they once helped attacks them. But the
situation is not what it seems, and strange circumstances are at hand.
David Lee Summers’ “Jump Point Blockade”: While pirating a mine
on an asteroid, Captain Ellison Firebrandt and the crew of the Legacy
find themselves forced into battle by Captain Stewart of the New New
Jersey, serving as shields against the Alpha Comas at a jump point to
Rd’dyggia. But instead of obeying Captain Steward, Firebrandt has
plans of his own.
Jean Johnson’s “Joystick War”: Scavenging a storage bunker for
salvage, Scott Grayson and Rrenn F’sauu stumble onto mint condition
Targeting Drone A.I.’s, joystick controlled combat suits and can’t resist
taking them for a test run. Then an old enemy, the Salik turn up, and
instead of joy rides, they’re fighting for their lives and their people…
Mike Resnick & Brad Torgersen’s “Guard Dog”: Watchfleet sentinel
Chang leads a lonely life of extended, dream-filled sleeps in between
frenetic, life-or-death battles. The Sortu had almost defeated humanity
and the lives of everyone, including his wife and son, depend on men
like him. Then, called to battle again, he finds himself up against the last
opponent he’d ever expected…
These and more stories await inside…
All personnel,
report to battle stations!
FULL Table Of Contents
9 Introduction – Bryan Thomas Schmidt
13 Acknowledgements
15 Dedication
17 Between the Rocks – Anna Paradox
29 The Thirteens – Gene Mederos
45 Like So Much Refuse – Simon C. Larter
61 Jump Point Blockade – David Lee Summers
73 First Contact – Patrick Hester
83 Isis – Dana Bell
95 The Book of Enoch – Matthew Cook
113 The Joystick War – Jean Johnson
133 Never Look Back – Grace Bridges
147 The Gammi Experiment – Sarah Hendrix
161 Space Battle of the Bands – C.J. Henderson
175 A Battle for Parantwer – Anthony Cardno
187 With All Due Respect – Johne Cook
209 Final Defense – Selene O’Rourke
219 Bait and Switch – Jaleta Clegg
227 The Hand of God (A Davi Rhii Story) – Bryan Thomas Schmidt
245 Guard Dog – Mike Resnick and Brad R. Torgersen
255 About the Authors
Bryan Thomas Schmidt is the author of the space opera novels The Worker Prince, a Barnes & Noble Book Clubs Year’s Best SF Releases of 2011 Honorable Mention, and The Returning, the collection The North Star Serial, Part 1, and has several short stories forthcoming in anthologies and magazines. His children’s book 102 More Hilarious Dinosaur Jokes For Kids from Delabarre Publishing along with the anthology Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 which he edited for Flying Pen Press, headlined by Mike Resnick. As a freelance editor, he’s edited a novel for author Ellen C. Maze (Rabbit: Legacy), a historical book for Leon C. Metz (The Shooters, John Wesley Hardin, The Border), and is now editing Decipher Inc’s WARS tie-in books for Grail Quest Books. He’s also the host of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Chatevery Wednesday at 9 pm EST on Twitter, where he interviews people like Mike Resnick, AC Crispin, Kevin J. Anderson and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. A frequent contributor to Adventures In SF Publishing, Grasping For The Wind and SFSignal, he can be found online as @BryanThomasS on Twitter or via his website. Bryan is an affiliate member of the SFWA.
It’s been done. All too many times, if you listen to some. The story is world famous, well known. Many know its details by heart. Yet it’s compelling and you have an idea you know is different—one no one’s done before. So how do you keep it fresh? Adapting a well-known story for fiction has many challenges, but above them all is the issue of freshness, avoiding predictability.
There are some techniques which work well to invigorate the retelling:
1) Use the original story as character history/backstory so the parallels are interesting but you don’t have to follow it to the letter—In The Worker Prince, my debut novel, because my characters are colonists to space from Earth and Protestants, they share the religious history of Christianity so the Moses story, which inspired mine, is prehistory. Some parallels from that story occur, when a prince discovers he was born a slave and helps the slaves fight for freedom, for example. But having established that as prehistory, I was able to depart quite a bit from biblical elements like the plagues, miracles, and parting of the Red Sea to tell a different, although familiar story. The inspiration remains the same but the story takes new and interesting twists.
2) Change the timeline (order)– What if the events are the same but they don’t happen in the same order? Sometimes the order of events is not vital to the story and you can make new twists and turns just be changing the order of events and, thus, how those various events affect each other. It can lead to new conflicts and new undercurrents which didn’t exist in the original story and make it more interesting for those familiar with the story on which yours is based.
3) Identify the core elements and throw away less important ones—In The Worker Prince I did exactly this: keeping the idea of one people enslaving another under a ruthless dictator, a prince secretly adopted from slaves, ideological conflict, and injustice but dumping things like the Red Sea, years of exile in a desert, plagues, etc. It kept the story familiar and grounded in the tropes of the original while allowing me to take it in totally different and surprising directions. Some scenes and events are vital for the story to remain familiar. The same can be said of key characters. Others can be thrown away or reinvented to keep things original and unique in your telling.
4) Reverse roles, species or genders of characters—What if your hero in the original story was male but in your story becomes female? What if a human character becomes alien or animal? What about a robot? What about other characters? Can your sidekick become the love interest? What if your antagonist becomes a relative instead of a social acquaintance? What if the characters take on bigger roles and multiple functions they didn’t have in the original? The differences between genders, species, etc. can then be exploited for new aspects of your story and new twists and turns different from the original in fun ways.
5) Change the setting—Setting your story in a culture and context far removed from the original can provide interesting opportunities. I set The Worker Prince in distant space far from Earth with different aliens and plant species, etc. It allowed me to have technology and related problems totally foreign to the original Moses story and made for a more fun and interesting telling for me as storyteller and for readers. The same can be true of resetting the story in a different decade or era from the one in which it originally occurred. Imagine, if you will, a steampunk Cinderella or Sherlock Holmes in the 24th Century. All kinds of possibilities present themselves.
All of these suggestions are about making the story your own. If you can find ways to do that, you can create a fresh experience and telling while utilizing powerful elements of the familiarity and themes of the original story. Grounding your story in a well-known tale, definitely has advantages. But a little creative rethinking can make it even more powerful and draw in an audience of people it might not otherwise appeal to. It’s fun to work from a familiar foundation and structure. Especially if you love the story, it can stimulate the imagination. But if everyone knows the twists and turns and outcome of your story, why should they want to read it? I hope these suggestions give you ideas how the old can become new and fresh in the retelling.
Bryan Thomas Schmidt is the author of the space opera novelsThe Worker Prince—which received Honorable Mention on Barnes & Noble Book Club’s Best Science Fiction Releases of 2011—and The Returning, both from the space opera series Saga Of Davi Rhii. He also wrote the collection The North Star Serial, and short stories published in Tales Of The Talisman and the anthologies Of Fur And Fire and Wandering Weeds: Tales Of Rabid Vegetation, amongst others. A freelance professional editor and proofreader, he’s edited books for authors like Leon C. Metz, David Brown and Ellen C. Maze. He’s also the host of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Chatevery Wednesday at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Twitter (#sffwrtcht), where he interviews people like Mike Resnick, A.C. Crispin, Kevin J. Anderson and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. He can be found online as @BryanThomasS on Twitter or via his website: www.bryanthomasschmidt.net. Excerpts from The Worker Prince can be found on his blog.
One of the highest compliments I’ve gotten on my debut novel, The Worker Prince, and I’ve heard it over and over, is that it “feels like reading Star Wars: A New Hope.” This was very deliberate on my part, and I referred a lot in writing it to Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy and Kevin J. Anderson’s Jedi Academy books. It’s a challenge to capture the feel without going too far into imitation. And while watching the films repeatedly and reading tie-in books is definitely essential, I also think there are other factors which must be present to lend the right aura. Here are the 8 I’ve identified:
1) Your story must have an epic scope. Both Star Wars and The Worker Prince are stories about a quest of good vs. evil, to win justice over evil and save the universe, or at least their part of it. This is epic and requires bigness: big baddees, big ships, big planets and world, big stakes, big heroes, etc. You can’t really do it well staying inside an Enterprise or just on a single planet. There has to be a larger picture and bigger feel to capture it. Despite the different key focus of each movie or book, all encompass this epic scope of good vs. evil.
2) Larger than life characters. You need characters we can relate to, yes. Who can’t relate to the young farm boy with big dreams of a more exciting life somewhere else? Both Luke Skywalker and Davi Rhii (protagonist of The Worker Prince) share that trait. And thus, the first segments of both trilogies are coming of age tales about their quest to become men and men with a purpose. Han Solo and Leia are larger than life. Leia may be a petite figure but her attitude far outsizes her physical body. Han Solo is edgy. He comes off as dangerous and unpredictable, but, as we get to know him, he has a morality not so different from our other heroes, and, above all, he wants good to win. Chewbacca is another obvious example, as is Darth Vader. Both are feared on sight for similar and different reasons. And both are formidable foes. One possesses a kind, giving heart. The other is selfish and cruel. But neither does it half way. Vader takes his cruelty to the extreme just as Chewbacca takes his kindness to extremes with his loyalty and dedication to his friends. I gave Davi Rhii some companions who have trait like this. None of them is a copy or exactly identical to any Star Wars character. I was careful about this. Davi’s love interest, Tela, is a pilot, a slave, but she has Leia’s sass, values and strength of will. His companions Yao, a tall alien, and Farien, a shorter, bulker, edgier human, compete and banter with Davi throughout their adventures much like Luke, Han and Leia do. And the bad guy, Xalivar, is definitely a dark lord, even though he and Vader approach it very differently. The anti-heroes are not dominant in these worlds. Luke is pretty clear cut in his goodness as is Leia. Han teeters on the edge but he comes out good overall in the end. The same is true of characters in my saga. There are very clear cut bad and good characters, not a lot left up to reader interpretation.
3) Adrenaline filled, relentless action. High stakes require a sense of fast pace and constant jeopardy for your characters. They can never be totally at ease or seem to get ahead without something new and dangerous knocking them off course. The action scenes are intense, with real danger, and the character’s witty banter adds to both the urgency and tension while also infusing much needed humor at times. Zahn and Anderson’s action scenes were particular important to me in writing the many action sequences of The Worker Prince, because I wanted to capture this style. I also had to make sure the action only lets up for short periods. The story always had to keep its sense that the heroes’ lives were on the line.
4) An overarching ideology with which characters must wrestle and which they must interpret in living according to their own understandings. In Star Wars, this is called “The Force.” In The Worker Prince, I used a conflict of religions. Not only do all characters good and evil wrestle with what these belief systems mean for them and how to interpret them in their lives (in both stories), but so do the two major opposing forces: The Empire and The Rebels in Star Wars, The Borali Alliance and the Vertullians in The Worker Prince. Some characters, like Han and Farien, are indifferent and don’t really hold much credence to the ideologies. They live by their own code of morality, even if they share some of the larger ideology’s values. Other characters honor the ideology for living good lives, serving others, like Luke, the Jedi, Leia, Davi Rhii. Vader, Xalivar and the baddies, however, turn that ideology into a force for evil. Vader playing with the dark side, and Xalivar persecuting anyone who doesn’t share the traditional birthright and ideology of his Boralian people.
5) Rapport/banter. I already mentioned how much this adds to action scenes but it adds to character in general. Good guys banter. It’s part of their rapport. And good guys banter with bad guys as well. Much of this occurs with humor. Humor humanizes the characters, lessens the tension at the right moments, and endears the characters to the audience. It’s fun, too. Banter is difficult to write without dipping into silliness. Star Wars has certainly been accused of it, at times. And I’d imagine The Worker Prince will get a few criticisms, too. But audiences love it. C-3PO and R2D2 aren’t popular for their looks. It’s their heart and personality, so often expressed through banter, which won audiences over. There’s a reason action movies are known for quotable lines. They may be silly but they sure are memorable. The key is to find proper balance and not take it too far one way or the other.
6) Cool gadgets and vehicles. Lightsabers, blasters, landspeeders, X-Wings, Tie Fighters, The Millennium Falcon–these are characters as much as the people in Star Wars. In The Worker Prince, we have blasters, datapads, Skitters, Floaters, air taxis, VS28 fighters and more. All these ships become huge parts of the world and how it operates. And they play essential roles in the characters’ abilities to survive and triumph over adversity. Can you imagine the stories without these things?
7) A Sense Of Wonder And Discovery. It’s no accident that Star Wars: A New Hope is a coming of age tale. It’s about Luke’s self-discovery and we discover it along with him: his world, his abilities, his future, etc. Davi Rhii takes a similar journey in The Worker Prince. Both approach the world, as young people often do, with wonder and curiosity that’s contageous. And they also share a drive to discover how to make the world better and how to be better men. The second stories, Empire Strikes Back and The Returning, change focus a bit. In Empire, it’s more of Han and Leia’s story. Their relationship, their beliefs, are central in focus as they are chased around the galaxy by the Empire and threatened time and again, fighting side by side for their lives. Luke’s still present and discovering who he is, but his journey is a bit more thoughtful this time around and less adrenaline packed at times. In The Returning, Davi, Yao and Farien find their lives on the line from very early on until the very end. They are involved in most of the book’s huge action scenes and there’s almost one per chapter, some many pages long. Davi is being chased by those who want to kill him, and, at the same time, he and his friends are chasing answers to who’s killing Vertullians and who’s threatening the peace. At the same time, Davi is discovering how to be a good mate to Tela and he and Tela are both rediscovering relationships with their long lost fathers. Aron’s new role on the Council as the first Vertullian to serve in leadership brings many challenges of discovery, and so does Miri’s adjustment from royalty to civilian life. In Return Of The Jedi, Luke’s quest comes center stage again as he tries to discover the truth about Vader’s claim to be his father and what that means. He also struggles to confront Vader and the Empire and end the chase once and for all. Leia and Han’s relationship continues to develop and the Rebels continue fighting the Empire, but the focus is still different from Empire. I am still writing The Exodus, my third book, so I’m not sure how it all will wind up, but this story has chase elements and also people stepping up, like Luke, for final confrontations, including Davi and Xalivar, Davi and Bordox, and Tarkanius taking charge in his leadership role. Throughout, the discoveries impact the characters with a profound sense of change and continued wonder at the bigness of their worlds.
8 ) Emphasis on Character and plot, not science. Both Star Wars and The Worker Prince are space opera and space fantasy. They have elements of science, but the science is not hard science and often wouldn’t hold up to scientific law. In both cases, there are some elements of true science, perhaps, but mostly the tales are driven by the characters and the plot, not the science. The characters and their journeys are the heart and what draws us in and makes us care; what entertains us and captures us. There’s never a sense of some infodump teaching science nor is there a sense of it teaching philosophy or religion. The ideologies are present as part of the world, but they are not for our indoctrination but for our understanding of what drives the characters and frames their understandings of the world.
For me, these 8 elements are at the core of why stories like Star Wars have the feel they do. Reading The Worker Prince, even if you notice the feel, they’re still very different. I do pay tribute to the former’s influence, of course, but the story is original and stands on its own. And I think anyone trying to capture a similar feel would do well to keep these elements in mind. Yes, they can be traced back to old fashioned pulp stories, in many cases. What do you think? Did I miss anything? I’d love to hear comments.
For what it’s worth…
Bryan Thomas Schmidt is the author of the space opera novel The Worker Prince, a Barnes & Noble Book Clubs Year’s Best SF Releases of 2011 Honorable Mention, the collection The North Star Serial, Part 1, and has several short stories forthcoming in anthologies and magazines. His second novel, The Returning, is forthcoming from Diminished Media Group in 2012 along with his book 102 More Hilarious Dinosaur Jokes For Kids from Delabarre Publishing and the anthology Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 which he edited for Flying Pen Press, headlined by Mike Resnick. As a freelance editor, he’s edited a novel for author Ellen C. Maze (Rabbit: Legacy), a historical book for Leon C. Metz (The Shooters, John Wesley Hardin, The Border), and is now editing Decipher Inc’s WARS tie-in books for Grail Quest Books. He’s also the host of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Chatevery Wednesday at 9 pm EST on Twitter, where he interviews people like Mike Resnick, AC Crispin, Kevin J. Anderson and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. A frequent contributor to Adventures In SF Publishing, Grasping For The Wind and SF Signal, he can be found online as @BryanThomasS on Twitter or via his website. Excerpts from The Worker Prince can be found on his blog. Bryan is an affiliate member of the SFWA.
Star Wars/Forgotten Realms author Paul S. Kemp has this to say about my next novel The Returning: “The Returning blends themes of faith with classic space opera tropes and the result is a page-turning story that takes off like a rocket.”
Here’s more info, including the previous blurb, and I expect a cover image in the next two weeks:
“The Returning has romance, assassins, tension, both modern and classic science fiction notions, and very smooth writing. What more could you want? Bryan Thomas Schmidt keeps improving. As good as The Worker Prince was, The Returning is better.” – Mike Resnick
“A fun space opera romp, complete w/ intrigues, treachery, dastardly villains, and flawed but moral heroes.” Howard Andrew Jones (Pathfinder: Plague Of Shadows, The Desert Of Souls) on THE RETURNING
Sequel to The Worker Prince, The Returning is forthcoming this June. Book 2 in the Saga Of Davi Rhii, the back cover copy reads as follows:
The Vertullians are free and have full citizenship but that doesn’t mean they’re accepted. Now someone is sending assassins to kill and terrorize them and it’s riling up old enmity all over again. The new High Lord Councilor, Tarkanius, Lord Aron, and Captain Davi Rhii find themselves fighting all over again to preserve the unity of the Borali Alliance, while forces from within and without work against them in an attempt to tear it apart.
Meanwhile, Davi and Tela are struggling to keep their romance alive in the midst of busy lives filled with drama and stress and Miri’s adjusting to her new status as a non-royal. The action packed, emotional, exciting Davi Rhii story continues.
Although it’s not out until June, you can preorder The Returning today for $10.11 at Barnes & Noble (31% off the cover price).
Today, I finished and uploaded my first ebook to Barnes & Noble and Amazon. A prequel short story to The Worker Prince, Rivalry On A Sky Course tells the tale of Davi Rhii and his friends, Yao Brahma and Farien Noa, at the Borali Military Academy when a fellow cadet starts a rivalry with Davi and challenges him during the Sky Course star fighter race. Mitch Bentley graciously did the cover. The book is available on Goodreads as well. $.99 at all three. I hope you enjoy it.
“I found myself thinking of stories that I read during my (misspent) youth, including Heinlein juveniles and the Jason January tales, as well as Star Trek and Star Wars.” — Redstone SF on “The Worker Prince” series
Cassa Fire, Space Opera, Dancing Lemur Press, 2012. Tpb/ebook $15.95/$4.99
An enjoyable read with well drawn leads that takes a while to suck you in but ultimately rises above its faults to provide a compelling and enjoyable read. I have not read book 1 in this series. So let me say some of my quibbles with it may well not be shared by those who have.
The action was well written and Cavanaugh uses some invented SFnal ideas here, including mental powers for two races, one limited to men, the other expanded by the entry of women. The developing relationship between the humans and Tgren as a result of this development makes for interesting drama and asks interesting questions. It also provides good fodder for further storylines.
His worldbuilding is very solid. The starships are well thought out and created well. You can definitely feel an 80s SF influence, Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in particular, although I suppose Star Wars and Star Trek could be found in it as well.
The prose itself is solid. Cavanaugh is quite good at weaving description and dialogue and keeping things moving well. He handles multiple POV characters well and does a good job transitioning between scenes and chapters.
Action scenes are well written and handled and have appropriate pacing and tension, avoiding the silly dialogue which sometimes ensues.
Now for the quibbles:
First, the story didn’t hook me until Chapter 4. In part, I felt there wasn’t much going on at the beginning. The real action didn’t take place until later on. There were a number of passages with routine day to day character routines which I could have done without that slowed down the pace as well. The worldbuilding is solid but I wish the writer had found a way to get us into it with a bit more excitement. The result is a dragging pace until chapter 4 when it picks up more and more as it moves toward the middle and end.
Second, other than Byron and his love interest, I didn’t find the other characters very well drawn. They didn’t seem to have arcs of their own. Perhaps they were from book 1 and developed more fully there, but I think he could have added a bit more development in them to make it more interesting. The uncle of the love interest, however, does change a bit in his attitude, which was a nicely handled touch. I just would have liked to have seen more with other supporting characters for a richer, fuller canvass.
Third, because the story doesn’t have as much action as I expected from the cover (my fault not his but the cover did set expectations somewhat), I’d compare this more to a storyline from Star Trek:TNG or a thoughtful TOS episode than I would to something more action packed like Star Wars or Buck Rogers or even BSG in storyline/plot. I would have liked a bit more action. This last note, admittedly, is personal preference and not the writer’s fault. There’s just rich potential in the ships, characters and world for some really good action. Perhaps book 1 provides more of that. I do intend to read it.
Ultimately, I am giving this four stars because I think despite any flaws it’s well worth your time. Don’t let the pacing keep you from digging in. The SF ideas, cultures, and world are well developed and interesting. I would look forward to more stories. I do hope next round he’ll give us more action. And I hope he’ll develop some of the other characters as well. Regardless, if you like old fashioned space opera, this is a family friendly fun read. Recommended.
Bryan Thomas Schmidt is the author of the space opera novelThe Worker Prince, a Barnes & Noble Best SF Releases of 2011 Honorable Mention, the collection The North Star Serial, Part 1, and has several short stories forthcoming in anthologies and magazines. His second novel, The Returning, is forthcoming from Diminished Media Group in 2012. He’s also the host of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Chatevery Wednesday at 9 pm EST on Twitter, where he interviews people like Mike Resnick, AC Crispin, Kevin J. Anderson and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. A frequent contributor to Adventures In SF Publishing, Grasping For The Wind and SF Signal, he can be found online as @BryanThomasS on Twitter or via his website. Excerpts from The Worker Prince can be found on his blog. Bryan is an affiliate member of the SFWA.
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