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There are two Kickstarters now running that I'm involved with that you should all go out and support right now this second. :)

The first is Double Trouble: An Anthology of Two-Fisted Team-Ups, edited by Jonathan Maberry & Keith R.A. DeCandido, which features 15 (or 18, if we hit some stretch goals) stories that put some classic characters together. A bunch of Trek scribes are involved, including:
  • Rigel Ailur (Marian of Sherwood and Annie Oakley)
  • Kevin J. Anderson (Captain Nemo and Frankenstein's monster)
  • Derek Tyler Attico (Dracula, Jekyll & Hyde, and John Henry)
  • Diana Dru Botsford (Ernest Shackleton, Sacajawea, and Lemuel Gulliver)
  • Greg Cox (The Brain that Wouldn't Die and Night of the Living Dead)
  • Keith R.A. DeCandido (Ayesha, a.k.a. She Who Must Be Obeyed, and Engungun-oya)
  • David Mack (Prospero and Don Quixote de la Mancha)
  • David A. McIntee (Tang Sanzang, a.k.a. Tripitaka, and Emperor Taizong) *
  • Dayton Ward (Captain Battle and Blackout)
In addition, there are stories by Maurice Broaddus (Ace Harlem and the Conjure-Man), Jennifer Brody (Abraham Van Helsing, Athena, and the Medusa), Debbie Daughetee (Fantamah & Fury and Jane Trent, Science Sleuth) *, Delilah S. Dawson (Lord Ruthven and Lydia Bennet), Nancy Holder & Alan Philipson (Flaxman Low and Mezzanotte), James A. Moore (Moon Man and the Man in Black) *, James Reasoner (G-Man Dan Fowler and Stinger Seave), Ben H. Rome (Bastet, Fenrir, and Quetzalcoatl), and Scott Sigler (Doctor Moreau and Audrey II).

* Will only be in the anthology if we hit our first three stretch goals.

We're roughly 35% funded as I type this, and I really want this project to succeed, as it'll be tremendous fun to see all these team-ups.

=-=-=-=-=

The second is the eSpec Books Fantastic Novels Kickstarter, which is crowdfunding eSpec's next three releases, all of which are different flavors of fantasy.
  • Phoenix Precinct by Keith R.A. DeCandido, the latest in my mix of high fantasy and police procedural
  • Yeti Left Home by Aaron Rosenberg, a cryptid-in-the-city story
  • Esprit de Corpse by Ef Deal, a steampunk tale in 19th-century Paris
This one has already been funded, so you're guaranteed to get what you want if you pledge now.

Among the rewards in both of these are Tuckerizations, where you can have yourself be a character in one of the stories or novels!

Trek BBS doesn't allow links to crowdfunds, but if you click on any of my social media in my signature below, you'll find links for both of these fairly easily.
 
Regarding DOUBLE TROUBLE, I can report that I had way too much grisly fun writing my BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE/NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD mashup.

And I am very intrigued by what my fellow contributors are coming up with: Dr. Jekyll, Dracula . . . and John Henry? Maid Marian and Annie Oakley? Prospero and Don Quixote?

I really want to read these stories.
 
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Today’s the day! Tangent Knights 3: Gemini Ascendant, the epic conclusion to my tokusatsu-inspired full-cast audio drama trilogy from Graphic Audio, is now on sale as a download (with MP3 CD release to follow in mid-December).

https://www.graphicaudio.net/tangent-knights-3-gemini-ascendant.html

At the moment, it’s exclusively available at the above link, but it will soon become available at other audiobook sites such as Audible and Google Play. I’ll update links on my Tangent Knights page when the time comes. And I’ll update the page with annotations once I get a chance to listen to it myself and add the time codes.
tangent_knights_3_gemini_ascendant-1.jpg

I’m really happy that the complete trilogy is finally out, and I’m hoping I’ll get the chance to do a second "season" of Tangent Knights. But whether GraphicAudio asks for more depends on how well the first trilogy sells. So if you haven’t tried out Tangent Knights already, I hope you’ll give it a shot. Even people who aren’t fans of tokusatsu will find plenty of my usual hard science fiction concepts, worldbuilding, and humor, and feel I’ve rarely if ever written anything with such potent and compelling character drama, or such cosmic scope. I’m really proud of this series, and the folks at GraphicAudio are great to work with. So I’d really love the chance to continue expanding the Tangent Knights multiverse.
 
Last year was a slow period for my Patreon Original Fiction tier, but I’ve been preparing some new material that will let me keep it more active over the months ahead, and hopefully bring in some new subscribers or bring back some old ones.

First up, it’s a brand new Troubleshooter story, “Legacy Hero” – a sequel to “Conventional Powers” from the Sept/Oct 2019 issue of Analog, reprinted on Patreon back in 2020. While my previous Troubleshooter stories on Patreon have been character vignettes peripheral to or expanding on parts of Only Superhuman, “Legacy Hero” is the full-fledged next installment in the Troubleshooter series, a nearly 10,000-word novelette focusing on Ekundayo DeMarais, the new Troubleshooter Corps recruit and Emerald Blair’s love interest from “Conventional Powers,” on Ekundayo’s first official Troubleshooter mission, with Emry tagging along as the Watson to her Holmes.

That’s right – “Legacy Hero” is a murder mystery, in keeping with its new protagonist’s role as a detective. When the newest Troubleshooter inherits the legacy identity of Lodestar from the Corps’s director, she also inherits the one cold case that the original Lodestar, Sol System’s greatest detective, never managed to solve: a brazen murder committed by one of three men who shared a common, impenetrable costumed identity as brutal enforcers for a police state, and who have closed ranks for six years to conceal the real killer. Can Lodestar and the Green Blaze find the one clue that will finally crack their sinister shell game?

“Legacy Hero” is available to Patreon subscribers at $10/month, and both the story and its annotations are be available at the $12 Behind the Scenes tier. And I’ll have more new Troubleshooter content over the year ahead!
 
The latest novel in my epic fantasy/police procedure series, Phoenix Precinct, is now on sale from the noble folks at eSpec Books!

Ordering links can be found on my blog: https://decandido.wordpress.com/2023/03/04/phoenix-precinct-now-officially-on-sale/

Here's the back-cover copy:

Humans and elves, dwarves and gnomes, wizards and warriors all live and do business in the thriving, overcrowded port city of Cliff's End, to say nothing of the tourists and travelers who arrive by land and sea, passing through the metropolis on matters of business or pleasure—or on quests. The hard-working, under-appreciated officers of the Cliff's End Castle Guard work day and night to maintain law and order as best they can.

A fire in the neighboring city-state of Barlin has resulted in hundreds of refugees pouring into Cliff's End, forcing the creation of a new neighborhood—Albinton, which everyone calls "New Barlin"—and a new police precinct—Phoenix Precinct. Violence against the refugees is on the rise. Lieutenants Danthres Tresyllione and Torin ban Wyvald are called to the latest act of brutality, which has resulted in a vicious murder. But what appears to be a simple hate crime turns out to be far more complicated, as Danthres and Torin's investigation leads them to corruption in the Castle Guard—and in the castle itself!

An all-new adventure of the Cliff's End Castle Guard!

"Dungeons and Dragnet... As a take-off of the standard crime drama, Dragon Precinct succeeds nicely. Dressed in sword-and-sorcery trappings, the clichés of the genre are given a fresh twist."
—The Journal of the Lincoln Heights Literary Society Authors and Editors

"This energetic romp is light on the surface, but it tackles the issue of xenophobia head-on with surprising grace."
—Publishers Weekly
 
Available for preorder: Sherlock Holmes: Cases by Candlelight Volume 2, part of the long-running "Watson Chronicles" series by Christopher D Abbott. This collection of four novelettes featuring the world's greatest detective includes contributions by Trek scribes Michael Jan Friedman (Death in Winter), Aaron Rosenberg (Collective Hindsight), and Keith R.A. DeCandido (Articles of the Federation), as well as by Chris.

My tale will be entitled "The Thick Blue Line," and will have Holmes hired by a most unexpected source....

Preorder link, and more about the book, can be found on my blog: https://decandido.wordpress.com/2022/11/01/im-part-of-sherlock-holmes-cases-by-candlelight/
 
This week, I officially unveiled the cover art and blurb for my next stand-alone action thriller - Dark Horizon.

Dark-Horizon_Final2.jpg


A fatal crash on a rain-slick road and a brutal murder in an English village set off a deadly chain of events, leading from stormy skies over the Mediterranean Sea to an explosive confrontation on a remote desert airstrip…

Only a handful of people know the reason why Kate Hood left the military in disgrace; now a contract pilot for a private jet company, she’s looking for a second chance and a better life…
But to keep her secrets, she must take a last-minute assignment to fly a covert cargo out of the country to a non-extradition nation, with no questions asked…
The cargo is a prisoner who may be the key to a violent terrorist conspiracy – but he swears he is an innocent man, wrongly accused of crimes he played no part in…
And as Kate races through the night, on the ground a team of ruthless assassins are hunting the people she cares about, threatening their lives to force the pilot to divert the aircraft…
But is the endgame to liberate the captive – or kill him?
Trapped at the heart of an escalating crisis, Kate and her mysterious passenger must navigate the conflicting agendas of enemies and allies alike, on a flight into danger that neither of them may survive…

The novel will be available in hardback and eBook editions from Welbeck from May 25th, and an audiobook is in the works. Pre-orders are at this link!
 
A bit of a peripheral connection, but this seems like the best spot to share the observation.

Ezra Klein had a column about the recent advances in AI and machine learning and their potential implications. At one point, he mentioned that a better model for imagining how this technology is working in the near- to long-term isn't sci-fi, but fantasy. These things aren't being programmed in a traditional sense, they're being conjured and building themselves without human intervention, and there's really no way to tell what exactly is going to be "summoned" by an ML algorithm until you run it.

Since moving to the Bay Area in 2018, I have tried to spend time regularly with the people working on A.I. I don’t know that I can convey just how weird that culture is. And I don’t mean that dismissively; I mean it descriptively. It is a community that is living with an altered sense of time and consequence. They are creating a power that they do not understand at a pace they often cannot believe.
...
We typically reach for science fiction stories when thinking about A.I. I’ve come to believe the apt metaphors lurk in fantasy novels and occult texts. As my colleague Ross Douthat wrote, this is an act of summoning. The coders casting these spells have no idea what will stumble through the portal. What is oddest, in my conversations with them, is that they speak of this freely. These are not naifs who believe their call can be heard only by angels. They believe they might summon demons. They are calling anyway.
Click to expand...

This rather reminded me of David Mack's Dark Arts books, with demons being called up to perform some task or another, but constantly trying to fulfill their own bizarre drives unless they were given explicit orders and strict limitations. It's sort of like the most spectacular of the chat-bot failures of recent months, Bing, where it could easily "forget" it's initial pre-prompting and start acting in unintended ways that were based on its own alien logic based on deducing a system how words are supposed to fit together based on trillions of examples it analyzed and matched, but presented to its human users as behavior humans would recognize as manipulative, bordering on the sociopathic.

Anyway, a new, disturbing subtext for those novels.
 
Starting today on my Patreon site, I’m publishing a 5-part serial, Guardian Angel, focusing on Only Superhuman supporting character Koyama Hikari/Troubleshooter Tenshi. In hopes of attracting new readers, I’m offering Chapter 1 to all Patreon subscribers at the $1 level and above, while the remaining four monthly installments will be at the usual $10 Original Fiction level. As usual, the story comes with annotations at the $12 Behind the Scenes tier. Here are the links:

GUARDIAN ANGEL Chapter 1: “The Angel and the Panther”

GUARDIAN ANGEL Chapter 1 annotations

Guardian Angel is actually the self-contained B plot of a planned second Troubleshooter novel (still untitled), but since I’d run out of original material to post on Patreon, I decided to write and publish it as a standalone serial, thereby getting half the novel out of the way while keeping my Patreon alive a while longer. The story picks up a lingering thread from Only Superhuman, but everything the reader needs to know is explained within the serial.

Kari/Tenshi is a character I’ve always been fond of and wanted to do more with, and I felt the tragic backstory I gave her in Only Superhuman was rich with potential. However, now that I’m much more familiar with Japanese culture from my years of watching tokusatsu and other Japanese TV/film, I find that my portrayal of Kari in OS feels a bit naive in retrospect, based on somewhat cliched archetypes (a Japanese heroine who’s an expert martial artist from a Yakuza background) and some inaccurate assumptions. So I wrote Guardian Angel to flesh out Kari and her cultural heritage with (hopefully) more dimension, depth, and authenticity. I even tried to capture Japanese phrasings and idioms as best I could in the scenes where characters speak or think in Japanese, “translated” into English for the readers’ benefit. Thanks to Yumiko Bendlin for consulting on Japanese language and cultural elements, and thanks to Keith R.A. DeCandido and Yoshiko Lane for getting me in touch with her.

The serial is also an opportunity to pay homage to Japanese superhero fiction, much as I’ve done in my Tangent Knights audio novel series. Tangent Knights was an attempt to do for tokusatsu superheroes what Only Superhuman had done for American superhero fiction, to homage it and justify it within a scientifically plausible setting (although TK is for a young adult audience and above, while the Troubleshooter series is for mature readers). It seemed natural enough to use Tenshi as a vehicle for bringing the same kind of homage into the Troubleshooter universe.

My hope is that this serial will generate enough interest to bring in more subscribers for my Patreon. The more readers I gain, the more motivated I’ll be to write more content in the future. So please consider giving this first chapter a try by signing on at the $1 level or above.
 
I have a new short story coming out today, my first in Amazing Stories Magazine! "Though Worlds Divide Us" is my second story in the “Braneworlds” continuity begun in my self-published Patreon story “What Slender Threads,” involving interdimensional travel among parallel worlds that are not quite alternate Earths, inhabited by beings that are not quite humans. “Worlds” is a tight character-driven story set generations later, focusing on a proud Mars colonist who isn’t happy about the impact of easy multiverse travel.

The story is now on Amazing Stories' Patreon site at the $1 level and above: https://www.patreon.com/posts/though-worlds-us-80497954 The story will become available for free on their main website, AmazingStories.com, from April 10 onward.
 
As promised, “Though Worlds Divide Us,” my flash fiction debut story in Amazing Stories, which premiered on the magazine’s Patreon site last week, is now available for free on the main Amazing Stories site:

https://amazingstories.com/2023/04/though-worlds-divide-us-by-christopher-l-bennett-free-story/

The link includes both the print version of the story and an audio version read by a text-to-speech program (which mispronounces the main character’s Yoruba surname, saying “ah-yo-deal” instead of “ah-yo-deh-leh”).

I have some story notes up on my Original Short Fiction page, though there isn’t enough material in this very short story to warrant a separate spoiler annotation page.
 
Sorry to spam the thread, but I've got a lot of news this week.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact has just posted the cover for the May/June 2023 issue releasing next week, featuring my epic new tale “Aleyara’s Descent”!


To quote their Facebook page, “An excellent novelette from Christopher L Bennett leads the issue with incredible world-building.”

This is the first time in my 25 years as a contributor that I’ve gotten a cover painting devoted to my story. It’s a great honor. (At least I think it’s the first time. I got the cover-story byline for “Hubpoint of No Return” in the May/June 2018 issue, but I think the cover was generic space art, though it could be loosely interpreted as a representation of the space station from the story.)

I have my own artwork for the featured aliens, the Biauru, which I’ll be posting soon. But the cover artist here, who worked solely from my descriptions in the text, came impressively close to what I had in mind. I was actually kind of concerned about that, but it turned out well. I can even recognize which scene in the story it’s depicting.

I’m really excited that “Aleyara’s Descent” is finally seeing print. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever written, a grand adventure in the early history of an alien planet — a hard science fiction tale with the feel of epic fantasy. The issue goes on sale starting next week, and you can subscribe at www.analogsf.com.
 
As promised last week, the May/June issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact featuring my epic new novelette “Aleyara’s Descent” is now on sale! Here’s the description from their site: “When an encounter with a ghost suggests to young Aleyara that there may be a world beyond the one told of in her species’ stories about their arboreal home, she and a band of friends set out to discover the truth, but their biggest challenge may yet be waiting for them even if they can make it home . . .”

They’ve included a hefty free excerpt of the novelette — the first nine scenes, in fact — as an enticement, so you can get a pretty good sense of it here:

Read an extended excerpt of “Aleyara’s Descent” (Edit: link fixed)

You can order print or digital subscriptions here: https://www.analogsf.com/order-now/

As usual, I’ve put up some supplementary material on my site. The main discussion page is here, including a link to the spoiler annotations. I’ve also added description and sketches of the Biauru to my “Aliens of the Arachne-Troubleshooter Universe” page.

I’m really thrilled that this story is finally out there! I hope my readers like the Biauru as much as I do.

(Edit) The magazine’s blog, The Astounding Analog Companion, has posted a Q&A interview I did about the story:

https://theastoundinganalogcompanion.com/2023/04/20/qa-with-christopher-l-bennett-3/
 
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Coming next month to a Kickstarter near you: a collection of interlinked stories set in the Visionary universe. Not only did I edit this book, I also contributed an SF noir story set in the far future:

https://mailchi.mp/visionarycomics/...io_hmoIqxOTm6GZJp7Jeg5Aa3uZE5zV7TVP_bKAI5wBp8

And here's the description of my story: "Transfer of Power":

Transfer of Power
Story by special guest author and editor of Visions, Greg Cox
In the far future, when humanity has spread to the stars and established interstellar civilizations, conflicts of power still remain. On one world, a peaceful transfer of power is about to face a challenge never expected and hard to believe. Greg Cox delivers a fascinating future world with future world problems.
 
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