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science fiction

Introducing Chronicle Worlds: Legacy Fleet

May 23, 2019 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

In the twenty-sixth century, mankind has discovered the secret of Chronicle Worlds Legacy Fleetinterstellar travel and colonized scores of worlds hundreds flight years from Earth. But in the 26th century, an alien race–a microbial collective known only as The Swarm–brutally attacked Earth and her colonies. Humanity barely survived and vowed to never let it happen again.

Now, 75 years later…it’s happening again. And Humanity has a lot to learn about the use of the word “never.” As the United Earth fleet loses its best and strongest ships to the Swarm onslaught, only the older Legacy Fleet ships and their experienced, driven commanders are up to the task of defending earth and her colonies.

This is the world of Legacy Fleet, a new anthology based on Nick Webb’s Legacy Fleet trilogy: Constitution, Warrior, and Victory, an amazingly popular  science fiction series. Into this universe comes Samuel Peralta, creator of the well-known Future Chronicles anthology series. Together, they’ve combined their writing talent and publishing experience to create a whole new treat: the Kindle World: Legacy Fleet series.

Links to this great work are here and in the sidebar. And it’s still at the launch price of .99 cents, but that won’t last forever. Enjoy!

Filed Under: Books, My projects, Publishing, Reader Advisory, Sci-Fi, Small press, Writing Tagged With: Future Chronicles, Legacy Fleet, science fiction, space opera, spaceships, speculative fiction

Introducing Chronicle Worlds: Feyland

June 29, 2016 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

Chronicle Worlds Feyland CoverImagine if you will, a world of the future. A world where rich kids are chipped to run automated houses and fly in grav-powered limos while poor kids watch their families dissolve into poor health and struggle to manage the bare necessities. The only thing that brings these groups together is the VirtuMax corporation, an entertainment giant. Its newest hit is an immersive VR high fantasy game that is both addictive and incredibly popular.

But in this world, the veil between fantasy and mundane reality is beginning to shatter and admit the resurgent realm of the Fey. And they are looking to borrow whatever they must from the mortal world to maintain their existence.

Welcome to the world of Chronicle Worlds: Feyland, the latest installment of Samuel Peralta’s insanely popular Future Chronicles anthology series, and the first of his new Chronicle Worlds titles.

Chronicle Worlds: Feyland brings stories from leading authors to the crossroads where individual imagination and gamer sensibility meets author Anthea Sharp’s USA Today best selling Feyland series of YA fantasy books.

Twelve authors contributed to this volume, and every one of them brought exceptional story telling and skills and gamer sensibilities with them into the project. A brief rundown of the work is as follows:

“MeadowRue,” by Joseph Robert Lewis takes the story of an existing Feyland character: a de facto sea hag who must deal with a human girl who has courage and honor on the brain; “The Skeptic” by Lindsay Edmunds, shows how seeking to quantify the impossible but true can bite you on the butt. “The Sword of Atui” by Eric Kent Edstrom felt like a particularly gruesome episode of Sword Art Online, complete with server hacks and apparent game master cameos. “The Huntsman and the Old Fox” by Brigid Collins reminded me of my own experience as a parent gaming with a gaggle of teens and tweens.

“Unicorn Magic,” by Roz Marshal manages to take the story of a girl’s love for her horse and make it both gripping and uplifting.

My own contribution, “The City of Iron and Light,” tells the story of Sabine Jade, a lonely teen who has no idea just how far down the rabbit hole goes…but harbors a burning need to find out.

“The Gossamer Shard” by Dave Adams, shows what the World of Tanks might be like if its players blundered into the Unseelie realm; “The Glitchy Goblin” by K.J. Colt is a dark little tale of broken promises and crushed dreams that will actually make you feel for the goblins (no small task). In comparison, “On Guard” by Deb Logan, is the essence of the short story form: compact, compelling, and utterly without wasted words.

The two final selections, “An Artist’s Instinct,” by Andrea Luhman, and “Brea’s Tale: Passage,” by Anthea Sharp, share a mystical quality of presence. Both tell a story of a young woman struggling to transform herself into something new, but take very different approaches in the hows and whys. Read both back to back and you’ll see what I mean. In fact, you should real this entire book in order, front to back. Leave nothing out. Trust me.

But I think my favorite tale from this volume is “Tech Support” by James T. Wood. Consider: Ranjeet Nagar of Kochi, India is a young man with a strong work ethic and a family to support. He works as a tech support jock for VirtuMax, walking players of Feyland through their technical issues. Ranjeet is a compulsive puzzle solver and some of the wackier calls coming over the phone lately have got his creative juices running wild. But there are problems at work: his job is in danger of vanishing, the crazy calls describe things that cannot exist in the game, and Ranjeet cannot afford a proper VR set so he can’t even log into the game to see the weirdness for himself.

All that becomes irrelevant when Ranjeet finds a woman on the street being attacked by the same demons reported by players. Utterly disregarding his safety and prospects, Ranjeet enlists the help of a co-worker and his ex-fiance, who does have a full-D VR set and is an expert player, to track down the source of the incursions and set things right.

I think in several respects “Tech Support” is the most ambitious story in this set. It takes place entirely in India, flips the dominant theme of player vs game on its head, and manages to maintain a convincing level of engagement and suspense from the first sentence to the last.

That said–and the only thing really left to say here–is that at a launch price of .99 cents, and fifteen solid entries into the world of anthology fiction, Future Chronicles creator Samual Peralta and Feyland owner Anthea Sharp have created something genuinely new and compelling. Fans of gamerpunk, high fantasy, and science fiction will all have something to enjoy here.

Available Now

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Filed Under: Books, Free Press, Library Resources, My projects, Nerd Alert, Publishing, Reader Advisory, Sci-Fi, Small press, Writing Tagged With: anthologies, Chronicle Worlds Feyland, fantasy, Future Chronicles, gamerpunk, science fiction, shared universes, short fiction, short stories

Reader’s Advisory: Star Wars: Aftermath

September 22, 2015 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

 

Aftermath cover
Nothing ever ends
I don’t generally read Star Wars novels.

I read and loved Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and Brian Daley’s Han Solo at Star’s End decades ago because they were on the book store shelves and the shiny newness of the Star Wars films sparkled and glittered like the pyramids of Giza must have when they were completed. Plus, Foster had Vader, Luke, and Leia, and Daley had Han and Chewie, and both books added so much content to what at that time was a relatively narrow storyscape with enormous potential but little realization or growth.

Nearly forty years later, we stand at the other end of the spectrum. There is a shipping container full of stories dealing with the old school characters, the new school characters, their ancestors, their descendants, and so on. But I’m not really drawn to the novels as much as I was to those first releases. The stories are wonderful, but the shiny newness has long since worn off. I need a particular hook to pull a Star Wars (or  Star Trek) novel off the shelf and devote my time to it.

There have been two recently. The first was Death Star by James Luceno, a book I have literally been waiting for decades to read. The second was Aftermath by Chuck Wendig.

Disclosure: I’m a Wendig fan. I have been since I discovered Wendig’s Terrible Minds website. I own a bunch of his books on how to improve writing. I devoured Backbirds and Mockingbird in a few hours when they were still new. Under the Empyrean Sky is waiting for me on my Kindle account for a long enough break in my schedule for me to read the silly thing. So when I heard that he was doing the official (i.e., Disney-approved) book that told what happened after Return of the Jedi ended, I was on board.

I’ve read the book. I liked it. I don’t love it the way I loved Mind’s Eye and Star’s End. But I can’t quite figure out where the Wendig hate is coming from.

I’m not going to write a whole thing on the problems that established Star Wars fans have with Wendig. Author friend Will Swardstrom has already written one of those, and it’s excellent.

Still with me? Okay, here we go.

The Galactic Empire’s new and improved Death Star is gone, the Imperial Fleet is scattered across the galaxy, and Darth Vader and his master, Emperor Palpatine, are dead as well. The celebrations across Coruscant are in full force, and as one determined crowd of citizens manages to topple the statue of the emperor outside the senate, others pick up pieces of debris and start chucking them at nearby police. The incident escalates into a riot, police give way to stormtroopers, and the real shooting begins.

The empire is dead. Long live the empire.

Wedge Antilles jumps his starhopper into the Akiva system, followed and captured by Admiral Rae Sloane. Sloane has other ships with her Star Destroyer task force, including the Ravager, the last Super Star Destroyer in operating condition. Sloane’s plan is to gather other high-ranking imperials–politicians, bankers, merchants, and officers–to her, and band together to form the backbone of the new and improved Galactic Empire.

But a lot is happening on Akiva. Bounty Hunter Jas Emari is looking to fulfill contracts on the same banker that Sloane is working on. Ex-Imperial Loyalty Officer Sinjir Rath Velus is looking to keep his head down–he’s painfully aware that his side lost–but neither of them can avoid Akiva’s worst loan shark, Surat Nuat. Rebel fighter pilot Norra Wexley is finally home after three years of battle–including the over Endor–to gather her son, Temmin, and escape to calmer placed. But Temmin has plans of his own which do not include leaving the planet he calls home. And Surat Nuat has plans of his own for Temmin and they don’t include Norra or her new friends.

Wedge is missed and Admiral “It’s a Trap!” Ackbar knows where he was last seen. While Akiva’s surface lends itself to politics, gang wars, treachery, wild high-speed escapes, and acts bravery, the space above it becomes the point of contention between Sloane’s and Ackbar’s space fleets.

Meanwhile, hell breaks loose throughout the galaxy as survivors of the decades-long civil war realize that the conflict hasn’t ended for them as much as it has entered a new phase. A longer and more dangerous phase. The imperials struggle to maintain a semblance of control as the politicians on Coruscant tries to re-establish the senate and turn the New Republic into an official galactic government.

Aftermath is a rare book in that it openly and immediately acknowledges that the Empire and the New Republic are really two sides of the same coin. Empire and republic are two words that refer to roughly the same thing: power and organization. The connotations are abstract: rule by force, versus rule by self-determination. Control itself is beyond question. But the films, old and new, gloss over the infrastructure, the nuts and bolts that keep the galaxy revolving on its axis except when our heroes blunder into them. It’s easy to assume that the Star Wars universe begins and ends with awesome space battles. It’s a lot more work to imagine the millions of pilots, engineers, miners, industrialists, bankers, soldiers, laborers, etc., whose time, energy and investment made those space battles possible or influenced their outcome. And we all knew the rebels would win because that was the story the George Lucas wanted to tell. Wendig’s narrative is far more ambiguous.

The frame that’s used here is almost apocalyptic: the people in charge are are dead, but the machine cranks on. All the trappings of the official economy are still in order. The factories build parts for ships and weapons that still come off assembly lines, letters of credit still clear banks, construction firms still lobby for contracts, and the legerdemain of politics continues unabated. Below that is the shadow economy, composed of bounty hunters, mercenaries, information brokers, pirates, informants, and outright criminals. The thing that Wendig remembers is that both sides needed all these elements to keep their part of the conflict alive. In that respect, little has changed except the stakes and the players.

Beyond that, Aftermath is very much the first work of an extended story. Wendig is setting up future conflict and continuity, showing us the shape of his story arc, and this arc is wide indeed. It has many moving parts, all of which carry considerable history with them as they appear on stage.

I’m looking forward to seeing what he does with it.

 

Filed Under: Books, Reader Advisory, Sci-Fi, Writing Tagged With: Reader's Advisory, science fiction, Star Wars

Reader’s Advisory: The Immortality Chronicles

September 4, 2015 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

It’s a deceptively simple bit of wordcraft: you take the word “mortal,” stick a two letter prefix on it, and you get a word which raises a dizzying variety of possibility. Mortality is every bit as metaphysical a concept as the human race has managed to conceive. What is it to be alive? What does it mean to die? And what does it really mean to be immortal?

Immortality Chronicles Cover
Who Wants to Live Forever?

Samuel Peralta decided to find out. His latest addition to his Future Chronicles series is out today, titled (no surprise) The Immortality Chronicles. It’s a staggeringly diverse collection of short works about the concept of life-without-death.

Many of these stories focus on an individual who’s rendered non-dying, but some apply the concept more broadly: D.K. Cassidy’s “Room 42,” and Thomas Robbins’ “Eternity Today” are riffs on the entire human race’s sudden conversion to undying status. E.E. Giorgi’s heart-wrenching story “The House on the Cliff” tells of a man made immortal by means of his own cancer cells. “Legacy,” by David Bruns, describes a driven CEO’s effort to live forever by replacing himself with bionic parts over the course of centuries. “Rememorations,” by Paul B. Kohler limits his protagonist’s immortal status to his ability to pay for it–and his willingness to forget pieces of his past. And John Gregory Hancock’s “The Antares Cigar Shoppe” stood out for the old school A.E. Van Vogt vibe that it brought to the table.

But the award for Most Unintentionally Horrifying Story About Immortality has to go to Gareth Foy, who penned “The Essence of Jaime’s Father.” This piece manages to be the most abstract yet gut-wrenching bit of work in this volume, and I’m not entirely sure how Foy pulled it off. I’m not even sure he intended to do this. All I know is that this story opened up a pit of despair in my soul that I generally only feel when engaged in Facebook discussions about religion and foreign policy.

In a nutshell,  Jaime is a young man experiencing the beginning of Earth’ death throes, as the sun expands to swallow the inner solar system. Science has bought the Earth a few extra thousand years, but red giants are inevitable and physics is a harsh mistress.  His father, however, has an answer: convert humanity to beings of pure energy and let them wander the universe until time itself grinds to a halt. Jaime and billions of others are looking forward to this, but Jaime’s father has decided not to go through with the transition. Not because he’s afraid of his project’s implications, but because he feels the need to stay behind to let those who fear a permanent existence know that death is still possible in that state. Eventually we learn that Jaime’s old man has already done this countless times, and has lived through countless versions of the universe.

That’s where I started freaking out. Of the great stories in this collection, Foy’s is the only one that addresses the utter tedium of watching the universe roll out, expand, breed life, destroy life, and collapse, over and over again. Worse, every time the cycle resets, it’s the same universe unrolling in the same way, right down to the people who are born (and die), and the order in which they appear and vanish back to the dust whence they came. It’s like being trapped in a drive-in movie theater with the same four double-features forever. Sure, it’ll take a while to memorize every line of every film, but eventually you’re going to want to slit your wrists, except you can’t because you’re made of pure energy.  (It works out in the end, but…Gah!)

The collection is available on Amazon and the proceeds go to First Book, a not-for-profit that has supplied over 130 million books to kids in the U.S. and Canada. As a librarian, I can think of no higher cause. And if you’re on Facebook, you can click here for an invite to the Immortality Chronicles launch party which starts tonight at 5.30pm EST.

 
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Filed Under: Books, Publishing, Reader Advisory, Sci-Fi, Science, Small press, Writing Tagged With: fiction, fucutre chronicles, immortality chronicles, science fiction

And Now, A Singularity!

August 25, 2015 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

Singularity 2

 

Legacy Human CoverThe Legacy Human by Susan Kay Quinn

What would you give to live forever? Seventeen-year-old Elijah Brighton wants to become an ascender—a post-Singularity human/machine hybrid—after all, they’re smarter, more enlightened, more compassionate, and above all, achingly beautiful. But Eli is a legacy human, preserved and cherished for his unaltered genetic code, just like the rainforest he paints. When a fugue state possesses him and creates great art, Eli miraculously lands a sponsor for the creative Olympics. If he could just master the fugue, he could take the gold and win the right to ascend, bringing everything he’s yearned for within reach… including his beautiful ascender patron. But once Eli arrives at the Games, he finds the ascenders are playing games of their own. Everything he knows about the ascenders and the legacies they keep starts to unravel… until he’s running for his life and wondering who he truly is.

The Legacy Human is the first in Susan Kaye Quinn’s new young adult science fiction series that explores the intersection of mind, body, and soul in a post-Singularity world… and how technology will challenge us to remember what it means to be human.

Amazon

Praise for The Legacy Human

“This book is Hunger Games (without the violence or controversy) meets Divergent.”

“This story is so intense I felt I couldn’t get a proper breath.”

“Science fiction with philosophical depth!”

 

 

Duality BridgeThe Duality Bridge

What does it mean to be human? Elijah Brighton is the face of the Human Resistance Movement. He’s the Olympic-level painter who refused an offer of immortality from the ascenders—the human/machine hybrids who run the world—in solidarity with the legacy humans who will never get a chance to live forever. Too bad it’s all a complicated web of lies. Worse, Eli’s not even entirely human. Few know about the ascenders’ genetic experiments that left him… different. Fewer know about the unearthly fugue state that creates his transcendent art—as well as a bridge that lets him speak to the dead. But the Resistance is the one place he can hide from the ascender who knows everything the fugue can do. Because if Marcus finds him, he’ll either use Eli for his own nefarious purposes… or destroy him once and for all. The Duality Bridge is the second book in the Singularity series and the sequel to The Legacy Human. This thrilling new young adult science fiction series explores the intersection of mind, body, and soul in a post-Singularity world.

Amazon

 

SusanAuthor Susan Kay Quinn

Susan Kaye Quinn is the author of the Singularity Series, the bestselling Mindjack Trilogy, and the Debt Collector serial, as well as other speculative fiction novels and short stories. Her work has appeared in the Synchronic anthology, the Telepath Chronicles, the AI Chronicles, and has been optioned for Virtual Reality by Immersive Entertainment. Former rocket scientist, now she invents mind powers, dabbles in steampunk, and dreams of the Singularity. Mostly she sits around in her PJs in awe that she gets to write full time.

Website * Facebook * Twitter

 

legacy human

 

$25 Blog Tour giveaway

$25 Blog Tour Giveaway

$25 Amazon eGift Card or Paypal Cash

Ends 9/6/15

Open only to those who can legally enter, receive and use an Amazon.com eGift Card or Paypal Cash. Winning Entry will be verified prior to prize being awarded. No purchase necessary. You must be 18 or older to enter or have your parent enter for you. The winner will be chosen by rafflecopter and announced here as well as emailed and will have 48 hours to respond or a new winner will be chosen. This giveaway is in no way associated with Facebook, Twitter, Rafflecopter or any other entity unless otherwise specified. The number of eligible entries received determines the odds of winning. Giveaway was organized by Kathy from I Am A Reader and sponsored by the author. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Filed Under: Books, Nerd Alert, News & Announcements, Publishing, Reader Advisory, Sci-Fi, Small press, Writing Tagged With: Indy Publishing, science fiction, Singularity, writing

Last Chance for WEIRD Things

May 20, 2015 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

Remember last week when I told you about the Apocalypse Weird fund raiser?

Of course you do. You came here and read about it. Maybe you even clicked on the campaign link and donated. And you did these things because you care about brave new ideas in the world of fiction and about my willingness to be part of it.

So here we are, with 13 hours to go before Indiegogo closes the campaign, tallies up the numbers and your change to be part of something new and awesome disappears.

But . . .

If the campaign makes its goal, then Indiegogo will keep the clock running. That’s added time to donate in exchange for outstanding perks, a heartfelt “Thank you!”, and maybe some mention of the project and books to friends who like to read books about the world ending in wacky and outlandish ways.

So this is it, The Big Push. As I write this the campaign is 66% funded. Another $3,421 puts us over the edge and allows the process to continue, giving you access to perks long after the clock stops as well as many more months of outstanding books.

But for now, the clock is ticking . . .

 

awcountdown
Donation Clock of Doom Awaits!

 

[books_custom size=”150″ type=”random” custom_sort=”publisher” custom_sort_value=”Wonderment Media Incorporated”]

Filed Under: Books, My projects, Nerd Alert, Sci-Fi, Small press, Writing Tagged With: Apocalypse Weird, crowdfunding, science fiction

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