“PEOPLE OF THE EARTH, YOU WILL HEAR ME.”

Hope y’all enjoyed the cliffhanger that was the end of Shadow of the Star Dragon. I certainly had a lot of fun writing those books.

In just a few days, the series will reach culmination with Trial of the Star Dragon, out late in the evening August 9 (Seattle time, your world may differ).

I miss pulpy science fiction like they use to right in the old days. Granted, it tended to be middle-aged, CIS, white, and male, but the ideas that drove them were fun, if you could imagine getting beyond the limitations of bad writers. Plus, I grew up in a world where Nichelle Nichols and George Takei had already taken us beyond those old tropes, and into a place where anything was possible

Star Wars would come along shortly and kind of mess that all up, with again all-white heroes, but that’s just Joseph Campbell drawn to the logical conclusion.

In the Star Dragon books, I wanted to explore some really big themes.

Imagine a stable galactic culture 50,000 years old, for example. Or beings so powerful in the Chaa that they can be mistaken for gods. Or a place where people live in terrible fear that the belligerent space orcs would break out and overrun the entire galaxy. (Face it, humans are not ready for First Contact. Any smart alien species will lock their doors when they fly by our planet.)

But at the same time, Gareth and Royston represent some of the finer elements of what we could become, given time and patience. Gareth gave up his very humanity in order to stop Marc. And he knows he can never return to Earth or see Pippa again.

That does things to a man.

Royston started off with a simple theory that he could not easily disprove. With the help of rock and roll music, he became even more dangerous than Gareth, possibly threatening the entirety of creation itself and causing the Chaa to return to stop him.

And then the Gods of the Accord have to return. They bring with them Judgment Day, with the intent of simply eradicating humans forever, lest they somehow slip out again and threaten the Accord of Souls.

So, yeah, no big thing, right?

If any of you have ever read Christopher Rowley’s War for Eternity and The Black Ship (part of the Fenrille books) then you will see threads of similarity. A bad writer steals from someone else. A good writer steals from everybody else. But those books had an impact on me when I was younger, because he went big.

BIG.

Rowley gave me an understanding that the canvas I painted on was only limited by my imagination, rather than some silly rules about genre and trope.

So I went big. And had a lot of fun.

We end the current series here, with Trial of the Star Dragon, because how much bigger can it get? (Trick question. I can get really stupid, if enough people demand it. Y’all gotta tell me what you think.)

So August 9/10 it will be live. Get your copy now and prepare to stay up all night reading it.

🙂