Operation Damocles is Out!



The Battlecruiser Alamo and her newly assembled fleet answer a desperate summons from a long-lost enclave of humanity, besieged by the forces of the malevolent Xandari Empire. As they wage war among the ruins of an ancient alien civilization, Lieutenant-Captain Margaret Orlova and her crew face enemies within and without, battling fleets of enemy warships and facing the hidden assassins hiding in their own ranks. Can this latest challenge be overcome, or will this be the final end of the voyages of the Battlecruiser Alamo?

Some Cosmopunk Notes - Early Draft

The year is 2067. Forty years after the first landing on Mars, the beginning of a dream that turned into a terrible nightmare for those who followed that intrepid explorer. Civilization hasn't ended, though it hasn't been smooth sailing either. Rising sea levels wreaked a bloody toll on those nations unable to properly defend their coastlines; saving New York was touch-and-go, though Ho Chi Minh City and Shanghai were protected in time. (In the end, it was a choice between Miami and New York; the result was never in doubt, but emigre Floridians still protest regularly outside the New World Trade Centre.)

The South China Sea has replaced the Mediterranean as the focus of world trade, the collapsing nations of North Africa eventually coalescing into a misnamed Maghreb Union, a puppet state of the moribund European Federation. China is at the top of the heap, the closest thing this world has to a hyperpower, victory in the Second Sino-Russian War merely confirming what everyone already knew. Though the Indochinese Union and the Australasian Republic still wage an uncertain Cold War, they are overmatched, and know it, resorting to dirty tricks and intelligence coups in a bid to stay ahead of the game. China controls – effectively – Central Asia, Siberia, East Africa and Sri Lanka, their corporations owning what the government does not control.

The rest of the world struggles on. Europe never really recovered from the Second Great Depression, still less the Third, and propping up the remnants of North Africa and the Middle East has proven a major economic and sociological drain; British, Polish, German and French peacekeepers roam from Casablanca to Baghdad, and those garrisons will likely be there for the foreseeable future. (The European Union's evolution into the European Federation brought the seceded nations back into the fold, though the new model is far more of a loose confederation than a tight political union.) In America, the United States fared badly from the economic turmoil of the first half of the century, but maintains Great Power status, certainly in its hemisphere. India and Pakistan managed to decapitate each other in the Subcontinental War, the former collapsing into a collection of warlord states, the latter absorbed into the Chinese-dominated Central Asian Union.

Technology has progressed in leaps and bounds, but has stumbled many times along the way. The Internet crashed five times during the First Cyber War, the root cause of the Third Great Depression, and since then an emphasis on robust security has been at the heart of development. Computers aren't that much faster than they are today, but they're a lot more secure, and a lot more reliable. Most have at least one electronic contact lens in at one time, effectively giving them a permanent heads-up display, and the earbud phone is ubiquitous.

AIDS is gone, as is Alzheimer's, and most of the cancers have been cured. That's the good news. The race between bionics and regrowth ended in a victory for the prosthetics, at least for the present, though there are signs the pendulum is about to swing back again, according to the latest results from the Hanoi biotech labs. Life expectancy – at least among the well-off – is well over a century now. The bad news is that the toxic clouds over much of the world show no sign of dispersing, and the industrial wastelands have reduced many parts of the planet to lifelessness.

The exhaustion of oil stocks grounded a lot of airplanes, making them luxury prospects once again, though the opening up of the Titanian petrochemical fields is coming 'real soon now'. The world is run by fission, solar, wind and geothermal power, with experimental fusion plants run by most major governments. Paradoxically, this helped, and the environment is beginning to come back again, albeit slowly.

In space, no-one can hear you protest. Orbital space is a confusing collection of national and commercial space stations, dozens of them at the last count, to the point that there aren't very many automatic satellites any more; huge, man-tended platforms support the communication, navigation and observation needs, run by the Chinese, Europeans, Americans respectively. (Smaller platforms are operated by the Australasians, Brazilians and South Africans, purely due to a dislike of depending on the largesse of the major powers. A Russian platform was abandoned after the Sino-Russian War.) More than ten thousand people work in LEO, on a collection of industrial plants, refineries and hotels.

The idea that the typical space worker would be a highly-trained Ph.D. didn't last. Third World workers were far cheaper, and just as good at cleaning the gunk out of life support systems, or removing the mould from the walls of space stations. There are expert engineers, but most of them remain on Earth, leaving the grunt work to the cheaper, disposable laborers. There are a few spaceplane flights every day, from Vostochny, Kourou, Houston and Woomera, The BAE/Airbus Skylon is still the workhorse after thirty years, though the Tupolev-440, Boeing 910 and COMAC C999 spaceplanes are also well used. Kawasaki, Boeing and COMAC are reportedly working on next-generation models, expected into service soon.

Beyond Earth, the Moon is home to a series of scientific outposts, more for prestige than any perceived need; the commercial possibilities had yet to pay out, despite a few failed attempts at Helium-3 mining, but a couple of dozen small bases are scattered across the lunar plain – Chinese, American, European, Japanese, Brazilian, Australian, Indochinese, the list goes on. At least as many abandoned bases exist, periodically scavenged for valuable parts, the subject of numerous lawsuits.

Mars failed. The first landing took place with much fanfare, a NASA astronaut taking the great leap to the surface from a commercial spacecraft, and ten years later, four outposts had been established, as well as settlements on Phobos and Deimos – from China in the former case, a consortium of private American, Russian and European companies in the other. For more than a decade, it became a billionaire's playground, those who won in the aftermath of the Second Great Depression, spending their fortunes on building their settlements, in many cases realizing a great dream. Or running from their creditors, escaping death sentences back home. (The reason for North Korean, Sudanese, Liberian and Panamanian settlements on the Red Planet.)

None of the colonies could become truly self-sufficient, and none of them were supported in the long term. One by one the wealthy lost their fortunes or drifted back to Earth, and all that remained were a few thousand forced settlers, struggling amid the ruins of their world. Most of them gathered in Nirvana City, the remains of the short-lived International Mars Base, taking everything they could with them, though a half-dozen others maintain desperate independence. The colony is doomed, population falling, kept going by occasional charity drops.

Phobos, however, was another story. China never really spent money on the surface of Mars, investing it instead on the moon, buying and closing the operations on Deimos at the first opportunity. It became a Special Economic Zone in 2040, the home of dozens of off-Earth corporations seeking to exploit the Asteroid Belt, or (at that time) support the Martian colonies. Thousands of people live on the moon, ranging from billionaires to paupers, the greatest free port in the solar system.

Out in the belt, prospecting companies, hundreds of them, extract the raw materials that keep Earth's industries running, elements now too expensive to mine on Earth, hurled in huge shipments to the processing plants in LEO for shipment to the surface. Platinum, Antimony, Iridium, and dozens of other metals fly down to Earth in twenty-ton loads, to the cargo spaceports scattered across the world. There were fortunes to be made, out in the void, but often they are lost as fast as they are created, the markets volatile on the slightest hint of a major new discovery – secrecy, in asteroid mining, is paramount.

Beyond? There's an abandoned space station around Venus, the aftermath of a five-year research project, now bought for cents on the dollar by a private consortium of investors for no-one-knows-what reason, and a functioning research facility on Mercury, run by a Siberian-Korean company (which means China, through a puppet, more than likely) working on potential resource extraction and power generation. Men have walked on Callisto and Titan, in the 2050s, European and Chinese expeditions respectively, and another expedition to Titan is on the way, gathering data for planned refineries on the surface – the bugbear of eco-terrorist groups, who have made many attempt to bring them down.

The first probe headed for Proxima Centauri ten years ago; it will be in flight for more than a century...

Farewell Lost Atlantis...

Well, now that 'Operation Damocles' is off to the beta readers – and I'll be honest, this one was tough – I can relax for a few days and work out some details on future projects. As soon as August rolls around, I'll be starting work on 'Interceptor', once I work out which book that is going to be! (I've got two plots for the book, both of which I intend to use – the real question is which one I go with first…) I know that 'Interceptor' is my August book, and 'Pyrrhic Victory', also known as Alamo 21, will be my book for September, though I hope to start it a little sooner than that.

Actually, I already know what I'm working on for the rest of the year; the 'Strike Commander' series will conclude in December with the fourth book, as yet untitled, and I've got Battlecruiser Alamo novels outlined as far as March, which takes me to Alamo 24. That's pretty much set in my head, but I need to start thinking about projects to work on next year, the twelve novel slots I have for 2017. Some of them, of course, will be Alamo, but I know I need some other series to fill in the gaps.

A while ago, I wrote an outline for a setting I called 'High Frontier', and I said at the time that it was a setting in search of a story. Now, I have the story, or at least the start of it, and I can begin to flesh out the details. Though naturally it is far too early for me to go into any specific notes on it, I can say that it is going to be rather different from the work I've been doing with the Alamo and Strike Commander series, far more Cyberpunk in tone – in fact my working title for the series is 'Cosmopunk', and I like that enough that it might well make it all the way to publication.

In outline, this is a six book series set in the middle of this century, around fifty years from now, and the science will be as accurate as I can possibly make it. Alamo has, I am forced to admit, got a little softer as the books went on, though I've still tried to preserve the realistic feel. The Cosmopunk series is intended as my 'hard science-fiction epic', with settings ranging from the Pacific Coast of the Siberian Republic, to the fleshpots of Singapore, the wastelands of the Martian Colonial Districts, and the remote scientific station on Mercury.

Some of this is based on, shall we say, concerns I have about some of the directions that space exploration and colonization are proceeding. I'm a huge booster of spaceflight, as I think I've made clear, and I definitely think that 'commercial space' is the way forward, but that doesn't mean I'm not reserving the right to be critical in some areas. Mars One, for example, sets serious alarm bells ringing in my head. I don't actually think that the project will happen in its current form, but let's step into the future, say thirty years or so.

It's 2046. The first landing on Mars, a joint project of a consortium of space-industrial corporations, took place twenty years ago, and visits have been semi-frequent since then. There are American, Chinese and Russo-European outposts, run by their respective government. Unfortunately, there are also the independent colonies, and they are faring less well. More than a few people have claimed a desire to 'retire on Mars', and some of them are actually doing it; now that the cost of setting up a Mars Base has dropped to ten figures, it's within the range of possibility. That North Korean settlement up by the pole raised eyebrows, the Kim heir fleeing the collapse of his government and any possible jurisdiction. (He died shortly after landing in mysterious circumstances, but if anything, that made things worse.)

Fast forward ten years. The national colonies are gone, their work abandoned as interest moved elsewhere, though a space facility on Phobos has become the Gateway to the Asteroids. The independent colonies...well, some of the wealthy went home while they could. A few of them even took their employees with them. Others found that their fortunes vanished, either because of changing economic circumstances or governments deciding that those multi-billion-dollar assets were worth taking. Not as if a Martian Court is going to protest, after all. Ten years on from that, and you have a collection of failing colonies, slowly fading, the cost of rescue or even support politically impossible to meet. Periodically, one charity or another sends supplies to stave off the inevitable.

That's the world of 'Farewell Lost Atlantis', the first in the 'Cosmopunk' series. 'A Thousand Shattered Hells' takes place in the Asteroid Belt, 'Lord of the Quantum Underworld' on the Moon, and 'Cold Shadows on the Sun' at Mercury. That leaves two others, and I think Phobos and Venus are possible, or possibly Titan, instead. This series is forming nicely in my head, and I think it's going to be the big effort of 2017, starting in February with the final book released in December. That's the current plan, anyway. Now all I have to do is write it.

Book Review: The Terran Privateer

I've been a fan of Glynn Stewart's work for some time now, so I jumped at the chance to read an advance copy of this book. Just from the description, I thought this would be a book I would enjoy, and within a couple of chapters that was readily confirmed. To get it out of the way, the short version of this review is simple – buy this book. You'll enjoy it, I guarantee.

As usual, I won't give any spoilers, but I will say that this book is both engaging and gripping, and that I read it in a single sitting over the course of an evening. Creating a new universe, and making the reader care about the characters can often be a challenge, but not here; I was rooting for the heroes from the start of the book – though the enemies are nuanced sufficiently that you are interested by their story as well, that there is obviously more going on than initially meets the eye.

There's an old saying. Everyone is the hero of his own story. One of the bugbears of adventure fiction – and I've seen this often in military science-fiction, I admit – is that it is too tempting just to make the bad guys, well, bad, without any nuance, any explanation. It's rare enough that you find a single person who simply wishes to be 'evil', with no redeeming features at all. Impossible to think of a society, a culture, a civilization along those lines. Terran Privateer, just as with the Avalon series, discusses the motivations of the villains with every bit as much interest as the heroes. It isn't enough to simply have a fight – you have to understand why people fight. Whether they have a sociological imperative to conquest, or whether there is something deeper going on.

To get back to the point; the action is as fast-paced as ever, the characters deep and intricate, and this is very definitely more than your run-of-the-mill military science-fiction novel. There is definitely room for sequels set in this universe, and I'd certainly read them with relish, though the book is entirely self-contained in terms of plot. As I said at the beginning of this post – buy it.

Link: https://www.amazon.com/Terran-Privateer-Duchy-Terra-Book-ebook/dp/B01I3GNS2O