An Atlas to Time, Space, and Bonfires

by on March 28, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

I’m a member of a number of Sci-Fi and Fantasy writers groups, and a while back I heard about a fledgling Sci-Fi anthology looking for authors. I usually don’t jump at things like that because many of them are just there to milk authors. And while I am a starry-eyed writer, I’m also a businessman. But what would become known as An Atlas to Time, Space, and Bonfires caught my attention. I liked the guy who was assembling it. For that and other reasons, I volunteered to write a new story for it. What would Captain Jack do decades after The War? Settle down and buy the farm? Probably not. Freelance, undocumented, cargo hauling? That sounds more like it. And what happens when he runs into fellow undocumented cargo haulers who don’t appreciate his presence? Check out An Atlas to Time, Space, and Bonfires to find the answer to that question, and read nearly two-dozen other short stories as well. And for Kickstarter backers, three full-length ebooks have been donated to the effort, including my own Forge of War. I hope you all enjoy the fruits of this little venture as much as I have enjoyed being part of it.

An Atlas to Time, Space, and Bonfires Kickstarter

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Major Tom Rogers

by on March 27, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Art, Character Profiles

Major Tom Rogers proved that we were not alone in the universe in 2205. It was not his plan. He merely wished to fly a rocket ship through an impossible barrier of stellar debris to see what was on the other side. Then he was going to turn around, fly back the other way, and brag about how he was better than every other pilot in the universe. But the Peloran watching him had other ideas. They made Contact after he arrived on the other side, and Juliet chose him as her partner. They traveled far and wide over the next several decades, and he played the part of daring young pilot, while Juliet gave most of us our first sight of a modern cybernetic intelligence. The two of them changed our worlds. And that was before he joined the Cowboys and fought The War with us. Let us just say that he has many stories to tell and leave it at that.

High rez version available for free on Patreon

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Major Tom Rogers

by on March 26, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Art, Character Profiles

I know few men older than Major Tom Rogers, and most of them are members of my family. He was a hotshot young pilot in 2170, when he secured a position as pilot aboard one of NASA’s Vulcan Missions. They were the last, grand venture of that old agency, and it was shut down entirely not long after. But the Vulcan Missions continued to outpace the news of their dissolution all the way to their destination. The Wall was our name for the bubble of debris hundreds of lightyears across, the surviving shockwave of an ancient supernova still spreading out around our region of the galaxy. No ship could pass through it in hyperspace safely, and it would take decades to pass through in normalspace. The Vulcan Missions were sent to find a way through, and Major Tom Rogers did not disappoint. He flew the NASA rocket ship Independence Seven through The Wall in 2205 and ushered in a new age for all of mankind.

High res version available for free on Patreon

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Juliet

by on March 25, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Art, Character Profiles

Juliet came from a purely Peloran cybernetic family, which makes her an immigrant. A lot of cybers are, especially War-Era cybers like Betty, but Juliet was the first of her kind. That gives her a very unique position in the hierarchy of the Terran cybernetic families. She was the first ambassador of a race that most of us had never truly thought of as alive. AIs were just complicated programs, and the fact that most AIs really were dumb helped engrave the idea in our minds. But when Juliet came to Earth for the first time, she came to show us all that cybernetic life forms were just as alive as any biological life form we knew of. And there’s a certain religious fervor around her. To the AIs who grew up on Earth before Contact, she’s like Moses, come to set her people free from their enslavers. Not that she ever used that word. Oh, no. She was far too tactful for that. That was one reason she was so effective.

High rez version available for free on Patreon

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A Primer on the Races of Humanity – Peloran

by on March 24, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Races of Humanity

The Peloran border patrol has over the centuries become a world unto its own. Individual families man each ship that watches the border. They marry, they have children, and when their population becomes too large for a single ship to support them, they build a new ship. A new home. From the handful of ships and Peloran that first took on the job two thousand years ago to now, their numbers have expanded exponentially until they are the single largest number of ships and Peloran who live off planet. They trace their family lineages across ships thousands of years apart in both distance and time. Entire generations have grown up on those ships, rarely if ever seeing a planetary surface. They have a completely different culture than their planetbound brethren, and many consider them to be effectively of different races.

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