Category Archives: Alexandria Station

Stories in the universe of Javier Aritza, Doyle Iwakuma, Jessica Keller, Henri Baudin, and, of course, Suvi

Auberon now available for pre-order

After a lot of work, I am finally able to announce that the first novel in the Jessica Keller series is now available for pre-order on several sites (see links below).

Amazon
Kobo

The novel is entitled Auberon, and is the beginning of a series of novels that takes place in the Alexandria Station universe, roughly 1100 years after the story The Librarian. It is pure military space opera SF, dealing with the commander and crew of a Republic of Aquitaine Strike Carrier (RAN Auberon).

As you read this, I am about halfway through the sequel to Auberon, which is called Queen Of The Pirates. Its expected publication date is this fall.

For those of you keeping score at home, the third book for this initial trilogy (yes, I plan another one after the first) will be entitled Last Of The Immortals, and Suvi, your favorite AI Librarian, will make an appearance. A special guest-starring kind of appearance.

Once Queen Of The Pirates is done, I would like to go back and write some more about Javier Aritza, continuing that serialized story arc. Unfortunately, there is only one of me, and I still have to be a geek for living, but I’m writing as fast as I can.

Languages in the Future (or why I want a Bulgarian Fan Club)

I got asked the other day why I had Bulgarian as a language in The Science Officer. And in The Librarian. It’s a complicated question to answer, because it goes to the heart of what I see in science fiction, or rather, one of the things I see wrong. Many authors (myself occasionally included), use a single language and ethnicity for the names of their characters.

I live in a very international city, at least by American standards. I work at a high-tech job where the team members were born in nine different countries. People have names from their own cultures, many of which are extremely old.

Javier Aritza will be born in the year 7510 C.E. Doyle Iwakuma will be born in 12,263 C.E. Suvi becomes self-aware in 7426 C.E. (And yes, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, I have all of this in a spreadsheet and a document encyclopedia).

That’s five to ten millennia from now. A little over three millennia ago, Agamemnon’s forces stormed Troy. Two millennia, Roman Britain was a barbaric outpost on the far edge of the world.

So what will the future look like? I don’t know. I don’t have to know. (I hope, someday, centuries after I’m gone, I have some scholar reading this and laughing at me.) I look at where we are and contemplate where we will be going. In Javier’s time (as referenced by Doyle in The Librarian), these are the major trade languages in the galaxy: Kiswahili, Hindi, Mandarin, English, Arabic, Spanish, and Bulgarian. Kiswahili because of Doyle and his story. Most of the rest, because the languages that are dominant today, at the transformation between the past and the technological age, will probably be the languages that continue to dominate, in some form, as we explode out and explore the whole galaxy.

Which brings me to Bulgarian. I was asked at some point, what my measure of success was. That’s an even more fuzzy question. For me, off the cuff, I said “a Bulgarian Fan Club.” Not because that is a measure in and of itself, but because, if I have people translating my books into Bulgarian (a language I would have to pay a lot of money to do myself), then I have a serious fan base, world-wide. And because, little known outside their own space, Bulgarians have a very proud and successful tradition of good SF, most of which does not get translated into English (at least, that I am aware of. And I don’t read Bulgarian to enjoy it natively.)

So as I’m writing the future, Bulgarian takes on its own mythical quality. I could see them colonizing a dark corner of the galaxy, well away from everyone else, and happily living their lives. Later, when the Earth is destroyed (in 10,397 C.E., mark your calendars), and most of the galaxy falls into a dark age, those Bulgarian descendants keep plugging along.

When Doyle helps rebuild Suvi as Alexandria Station, and turns her into a Great Library, she helps spark a renaissance of culture and learning. In the process, those happy little Bulgarians will create a new Republic, called Aquitaine, and absorb Ballard and Suvi as they go. Because they are a meritocracy leavened with republicanism, the best and the brightest are elevated, regardless of birth, and join with a stable semi-aristocracy. In Jessica Keller’s first novel (Auberon, coming soon), the Republic is represented by what are called the Fifty Families. Those clans tend to have good Bulgarian names, because of where they are. But there are a tremendous spectrum of names that you will encounter.

For me, the writer, it comes down to a fantastically rich, random name generator website I found. You select a culture (or several), a gender, and hit go. It randomly spits back at you a name, with an explanation of what the name means. Because it is random, I get hit with exotic names that come from everywhere, especially if I pick non-adjacent ethnicities, like Japanese and Italian. And it reminds me that there might be a trillion humans alive in the age of Jessica Keller, scattered across hundreds of thousands of planets and stations. And love will follow humans, not cultures.

So I see this fantastic cross-pollination of cultures in the future. And I get to write about it. And hey, fans in Bulgaria: you figure out how to get me there, I will come. 🙂

20140215 – bw

Alexandria Station

When I started out with the science fiction, I had a couple of interesting characters in mind. Separate characters, living in their own worlds.

It was only later that they all got together and explained to me that they lived in the same universe. They were just spread out by time.

So I sat down the other day and figured out all the timelines.

The Science Officer series is about Javier and Suvi. And a few others.

Doyle finds Suvi thousands of years later, living in a lost temple of knowledge.

Jessica Keller (novel: Auberon) comes along about a thousand years after that.

For me, the fun of writing is the world-building aspect. Creating rich places for interesting characters to wander around in. I don’t go deep into explicit detail, but having all those words and pages of notes (LOTS of both) lets me insert tidbits of microsetting here and there as I go. And it builds up, like pearls growing slowly.

But now, I had to assemble a very long timeline, one that spanned a tremendously long amount of history, so I knew where everyone was in relationship to each other. Not that there is any time traveling in this universe, but because it’s useful for a character to be able to say that Shakespeare lived 11,000 years ago.

So I had this wonderful universe built. It filled in things, and caused me to think about some of the gaps in it and what happened. More universe building.

Then my publisher asked me what it’s called, since I am in the process of setting at least three major series in it, across the centuries.

I had no idea.

How could a single phrase cover everything from the beginnings of space flight to when the earth gets annihilated by bolide strike about midway, to the whole galaxy kinda having to reset itself when that war causes everything to collapse.

It currently runs up to the year 15,006 CE

But Suvi is the key. She knew Javier. She saved Javier’s life by flying a sensor remote during the book: Shipwreck, five thousand years prior to when Doyle rescues her. And she’ll meet Jessica eleven hundred years forward from that point when Jessica has to save her from the Fribourg Empire. Everything kind of rotates around Suvi, not because she’s a goddess, but because she was there.

She remembers being a starship named Mielikki. She will become a university orbiting Ballard in Doyle’s time. She will be there when Ballard turns from a powerhouse into a piddly little back-water in an unfashionable corner of the galaxy. She will be, in many ways, the narrator of history.

So it became clear what I needed to call this literary universe, to keep it separate from (at least) four other Science Fiction futures I plan on writing. Because they are all three very different places. And I have even worked out the little marketing logo/bug I will use to let the reader know that this is Suvi’s universe.

It will be called Alexandria Station. That is the place that Suvi will call home during Doyle’s lifetime and as well as Jessica’s.

I have other story arcs planned well before Javier (several places there, depending on my energy and time), and at least one well after Jessica.

I hope you will enjoy them all.