Exiles of Earth...

For a while now, I’ve had the feeling that I’ve been holding back a little, that I needed to try and push myself harder with my writing, go to places I haven’t been before. The last couple of series I’ve done, ‘Starcruiser Polaris’ and ‘Lincoln’s War’ both consisted of relatively short novels, averaging sixty thousand words, a length I was getting comfortable with. I had originally planned for the next science-fiction series to be on the same lines, a selection of short novels, before realizing that would have been a mistake. It’s time for something different, and I think it is time for me to find another gear. It’s time for something epic.

I’ve spoken before about my desire to move into new genres, and in a sense, I think I’m doing that, whilst staying in military science-fiction. After finishing ‘Only the Brave’ I took a few weeks to hit the books, and I’ve come up with a new four-book series, titled ‘Exiles of Earth’, each of which will be upwards of a hundred thousand words. A grander, epic saga that I’ve done before, based in as realistic a universe as I can manage – the science is pretty ‘hard’, with the exception of the hyperdrive, but there’s the old saying that you can always get away with one implausibility.

In a strange way, this is almost an alternate universe to the ‘Battlecruiser Alamo’ setting, in that I started with some of the same premises. It’s set in the mid-22nd century, though I’m not being too specific on the dates from the reader’s perspective, two centuries after the collapse of civilization on Earth, through a combination of the ‘Last World War’ – a nuclear war fought between America, Russia, China, Europe – and the ‘Ecocaust’, which is pretty self-explantory. In this case – civilization is gone, and aside from a few enclaves, it isn’t coming back.

What survived were the long-shot space colonies, falling into two categories. The ‘Tyrants of Mars’ – billionaires who fled the destruction of civilization on Earth and established their own fiefdoms on the Red Planet, eventually evolving into the ‘Commonwealth of Mars’, run by and for the ‘Fifty Families’, descendants of the original ruling caste. National governments set up colonies at Callisto, Titan, Triton – most of which ended up as a Triton-dominated ‘Outer Planets Coalition’, essentially a technocratic-communist state. (Callisto, the ‘last democracy’ fell to the Martians thirty years ago.) A cold, and at times not-so-cold war is being waged between the Commonwealth and the Coalition. (The Lunar Colonies failed – too many refugees, too many disputes brought with them from Earth. The few survivors were evacuated a few decades ago.)

As for deeper space, interstellar travel is possible, but time consuming, and there are effectively no interstellar colonies. (Well, that are known of…) There just isn’t any motivation to settle them. Mars, Triton and the other worlds were settled out of sheer desperation, an attempt to escape the fighting on Earth. Where there are valuable resources, they are found – ultra-rare elements at Proxima, chemical compounds at Sirius B – and a few more minor resource spots as well, of marginal profitability. Humanity’s space adventure is starting to wind down, everything slowly regressing. (The ‘Decline and Fall of the Martian Colonies’ might have been a good title for the series, actually.)

The core of the book is the discovery of a lost starship, missing for centuries, and the race between the Commonwealth and the Coalition to get their first, resulting in the dispatch of an old scout cruiser, Endurance – though all is far from well on board, with enemy agents, rebels, disgruntled officers and cast-off crewmen sent on a mission deemed high-risk – and given that the title of the first book is ‘Rebellion’… The three leading characters this time are Lieutenant Jack Mitchell, a transport commander dragged back into the Interplanetary Guard as, effectively, ‘Sailing Master’, Doctor Catherine Thiou, a young historian who makes the breakthrough of the century and has to deal with the consequences of her actions, and Dayani da Silva, engineer and protest leader, dragged deeper into the rebellion after being forced onto the mission.

Right now, I’m a little over 30,000 words into this book, coming up to the one-third mark, and it’s going pretty well so far. I’m confident that I should have this book finished and on sale by August 20th at the latest, hopefully a little sooner than that, with monthly releases thereafter…