TANGENT KNIGHTS 3: GEMINI ASCENDANT annotations are now up!

I got my author copy of Tangent Knights 3: Gemini Ascendant, the conclusion of my audiobook trilogy from GraphicAudio, so I was able to listen and add timings to my annotations, which are now up on the site.

You can find the direct link to them on the info page here:

https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/home-page/original-fiction/tangent-knights/#Gemini

There’s also a new link to an index page giving a listing of all the Tangent Knights’ multiple forms and their respective powers and weapons, with spoilers for the whole trilogy. This was something I made for myself to help me keep track of it all, but now that the whole trilogy is out, I’m sharing it publicly.

TANGENT KNIGHTS 2: TEMPEST TOSSED annotations are up!

It’s a couple of months late, I know, but I’ve finally gotten around to posting the annotations for Tangent Knights 2: Tempest Tossed. I’ve also updated the main TK page with credits for Book 2, and you can find those and the annotations link on that page here:

https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/home-page/original-fiction/tangent-knights/#Tempest

I’ve also done something I should’ve done a long time ago: created index pages for the ongoing Mission: Impossible reviews and Godzilla/Gamera/kaiju reviews I’ve done here on Written Worlds over the years, in the same format as the Patreon review index I made a while back. The M:I reviews are still apparently quite popular and still attract comments years later, so hopefully the indices will make it easier for interested readers to search through them. The indices are the site menu at the top, in the Reviews tab under “Written Worlds Blog.”

New Troubleshooter vignette on Patreon

I’ve been neglecting my Fiction tier on Patreon lately due to other work, but I’ve finally put up something new, continuing my commemoration of the 10th anniversary of Only Superhuman, my first original novel. “Origin Stories: Homecoming” started as a deleted scene from the original, longer draft of Only Superhuman, depicting the moment when Emerald Blair decided to enlist in the Troubleshooter Corps, a decision she only described in retrospect in the final novel. But the scene by itself was a bit thin, so I ended up fleshing it out into a whole story. It doesn’t really warrant annotations, but I do have a short page of story notes up on the Behind the Scenes tier.

Meanwhile, since even I was having trouble searching for older posts on my Patreon, I went through the whole backlog and put together a Patreon Fiction Index here on my main site. Between that and the Patreon Review Index, it should now be easier to find anything on my Patreon. I’m hoping that seeing everything I have to offer there will inspire some of you to subscribe, at least long enough to read the backlog.

As I say on the index pages, Patreon supporters help provide me with a small but steady income, which is valuable to me given the irregular nature of my writing work. I just had a worrisome week when my payment for a writing project was delayed and I wasn’t sure it would come in time to pay my bills; it ended up arriving just in the nick of time. I’m now out of the woods for at least the next few months, but my work opportunities beyond my immediate next project are uncertain. So any additional cushion I can get is very much appreciated.

TANGENT KNIGHTS 1: CAPRICE OF FATE annotations are up!

Tangent Knights 1: Caprice of Fate

I’ve finally found the time to finish up my annotations for Tangent Knights 1: Caprice of Fate, so now listeners to the audio novel can read up on all the physics and technology ideas and the tokusatsu in-jokes and allusions behind the story, as well as insights into my creative process. I also discovered that a paragraph got accidentally deleted from the general discussion on the main series page, so that the following paragraph was unclear without it. Fortunately, WordPress saves earlier drafts of its pages, so I was able to restore it. You can read the full discussion and find the annotations link on the main Tangent Knights page. (The annotations contain numerous spoilers, so I don’t want to link to them directly.)

I admit I put off listening to the audiobook for fear of disappointment, but it proved unfounded (as I intellectually knew it probably would, since GraphicAudio did well in their adaptations of Only Superhuman and Spider-Man: Drowned in Thunder). The final result works quite well and captures the feel and style I was going for about as well as I could’ve expected. I particularly want to call out Elaine Yuko Qualter, who rose well to the challenge of playing the very energetic lead character Cory Kagami; John Kielty, whose voice is in just the right range I imagined for Alex Reading but even classier; and Tony Nam, whose voice is an even more perfect fit for Branton Tseng than what I was able to imagine.

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Incidentally, I realized something while I listened to the audiobook. My goal with Tangent Knights was to approach the trilogy as if it were effectively a complete season of a tokusatsu series (or meta-series, I guess, since they reboot with a new story and characters every year) — using modern Kamen Rider in particular as my template, as it frequently employs complex narratives that evolve the status quo through multiple escalating stages, which was well suited to the trilogy format. But I always figured that a mere three books would necessarily be rather shorter than a full toku season, since those run nearly year-round with typically about 50 episodes per series, give or take. So it would have the structure of a season in a more compressed form — or so I thought.

But it just struck me that the audiobook for Caprice of Fate is a little over seven hours long. That means I can expect the complete trilogy to have about 21 hours of content, probably. Your typical toku episode is maybe 24 minutes long not counting commercials, so 21 times 60 minutes, divided by 24 minutes, gives the equivalent of 52.5 episodes!

Of course, that 24 minutes includes main and (often) end titles and recaps, so the amount of story per episode is more like 21-22 minutes. Canceling that out, and then some, is the extent to which an audio novel, even a fully dramatized one, is told through narration, which slows things down significantly compared to live action. So the total amount of story being told is still probably somewhat less than a full toku season. But it’s a nice surprise that the total run time of the trilogy will be roughly equivalent to a full season. It means I came closer to my goal than I thought I had.

TANGENT KNIGHTS discussion page now up

I’ve just published a discussion page here on Written Worlds for my new Tangent Knights audiobook series, starting with Book 1, Caprice of Fate:

Tangent Knights

It includes non-spoiler discussion of my creative process and inspirations behind the series. Even though it’s a pastiche of Japanese tokusatsu superhero shows, I built it largely by cannibalizing and remixing elements from some old superhero concepts I shelved decades ago.

I don’t yet know when I might have spoiler annotations up, since I’m busy writing Book 3, and I don’t yet have a copy of the finished audio to refer to. Stay tuned.

The Hub in hardcopy!

Since I’m a little less broke these days, I finally did something I’ve wanted to do for years, namely to buy a few author copies of the trade paperback editions of Hub Space: Tales from the Greater Galaxy and Crimes of the Hub. Of course, I’ve had copies of the e-book editions since they came out, but since the TPBs are print-on-demand, I had to buy them, albeit at an author discount. Here’s what they look like:

Unfortunately, it seems that Hub Space was just a bit too short to qualify for spine text, as seen in the side view of my now-complete original fiction brag shelf:

So I have the satisfaction of finally having hardcopies of all my original books, but I don’t get to see all their titles lined up. Oh, well.

Anyway, since I now have the hardcopies to refer to, I’ve updated my annotations for the books with page numbers for the print edition:

Hub Space Annotations

Crimes of the Hub Annotations

By the way, when I say “complete,” I only mean up to the present. I still hope to do more Hub stories in the future, though I haven’t had time to focus on them lately. I already have an idea for a climax for the series, but I’m not sure how many more stories I want to do before I get there.

Arachne annotations update

I’ve now got all my author copies of Arachne’s Crime, Arachne’s Exile, and The Arachne Omnibus containing both of them plus the print debut of “Comfort Zones” and reprints of “The Weight of Silence” and “Among the Wild Cybers of Cybele.” Since it was the print debut of “Comfort Zones,” I realized I should add the story’s annotations (previously posted on my Patreon) to my Arachne Saga page here, with page numbers for the omnibus version. While I was at it, I added parenthetical page numbers for the omnibus to my annotations for Crime and Exile. All the annotations can be accessed from the main page here:

https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/the-arachne-saga/

Arachne’s Crime

Arachne’s Exile

The Arachne Omnibus

Arachne notes are now up!

I just did that major website update I promised yesterday. Here’s the main Arachne page:

The Arachne Saga

There, you’ll find ordering links, discussion, links to old blog posts about the writing process, as well as links to the annotations and worldbuilding notes for the novel. These include a new gallery page:

Aliens of the Arachne-Troubleshooter Universe

This page contains concept sketches and notes for all the alien species that appear in Arachne’s Crime and Arachne’s Exile, as well as the two species featured in my ATU story “Twilight’s Captives.” I figured I should have a central ATU-aliens page that I could expand on in the future. I initially planned to hold off on revealing the Exile species until the book came out (though I already previewed them for my Patreon subscribers several months ago), but I figured it might be out in a few weeks anyway, and revealing the aliens’ appearance doesn’t really give away any major plot spoilers. If anything, hopefully it will spark curiosity about these species and their roles in the novel.

As a teaser, here’s the height comparison chart I whipped up from my pencil sketches and a free downloadable height-chart template I found online, doing some quick-and-dirty coloring or tinting on the black-and-white sketches:

Height chart for species from ARACHNE’S CRIME (top) and ARACHNE’S EXILE (bottom). Green Blaze (1.67 m) included for scale.

As you can see, it’s a diverse galaxy out there, and humans are fairly small in the grand scheme of things, in more ways than one. Also, aliens usually face left for some reason.

I also did an update to my main Original Fiction index page, streamlining its layout so that it’s mainly just links to the more detailed book and series pages, and organizing it into distinct sections for the ATU, the Hub Universe, and miscellaneous short fiction. I’ve been meaning to do that for quite some time, but I needed to wait until I had at least one Arachne novel cover.

HIGHER FRONTIER annotations are up!

It’s been over a week since The Higher Frontier came out, so I figured I might as well go ahead and post the annotations (beware of spoilers):

https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/home-page/star-trek-fiction/tos-ex-machina/tos-the-higher-frontier-annotations/

Also, just a reminder that I’ve started a Patreon page where I’ll be posting reviews and original short fiction:

https://www.patreon.com/christopherlbennett

I hope those of you who enjoy The Higher Frontier will consider signing up for at least the $1/month “tip” level. If enough of you did so, it would help me a lot while costing you very little. Although if you sign up for the higher levels, you’ll get original content in return.

Also, please remember to rate or review the book on Amazon, Goodreads, and the like, no matter where you bought it. The more reviews a book gets, the more it’s boosted in Amazon’s search algorithms.

“Conventional Powers” annotations are up!

I just remembered I hadn’t gotten around to posting the annotations for my new Green Blaze story “Conventional Powers” in the September/October 2019 issue of Analog, so here they are (beware spoilers at the link):

“Conventional Powers” Annotations

Included in the annotations is a rough sketch of the Ceres Sheaf, the cluster of habitats in Ceres orbit that form the Cerean States, as established in Only Superhuman and featured in “Conventional Powers” as the main setting. I guess I’ll reproduce it here for people who haven’t read the story yet:

Illustration by the author

The O’Neill cylinder and Bernal sphere habitats that make it up are probably more widely spaced than shown, to make room for sun mirrors, heat radiators, and the like. The connecting scaffolds described in the story are not shown in the sketch. But the general idea is that the Sheaf consists of formerly separate habitats that were brought together and physically connected after they became politically unified, and the Band is an ongoing construction project that would more than double the complex’s living space (when complete, it’d have the equivalent of 36 cylinders’ volume while the Sheaf contains 28 cylinders and 24 spheres). Although the Band’s rotation around the central axis means that it has much wider stretches of flat ground with open air in the upper halves (in toward the rotational axis) and multiple underground levels in the lower halves (outward from the axis). The separate slabs of the Band are being built two at a time in diametrically opposed pairs to maintain rotational balance during construction, and as of 2108 it’s less than half-completed, as described in Only Superhuman.

Author copies and annotations

My author copies of Galaxy’s Edge #39 have arrived!

Here they are next to my “brag shelf” of Analog issues for size comparison. Normally I keep one copy on the brag shelf and one with my overall collection of SF magazines, but Galaxy’s Edge is too tall to fit on that shelf, so I have to keep them both here.

And here’s the opening page, on paper and everything! It’s great to have a short story in a print magazine again, my first one other than Analog (and Esli for the Russian reprints of the first two Hub stories from Analog).

Right now (July 2019), you can read the entire issue on the Galaxy’s Edge site. But that’ll only be until the next issue comes out in September. If you want something you can keep, or if you read this after September, you can buy the issue in print from:

• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble

And digitally from:

• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble
• Kobo

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In other news, the annotations to “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of” are now up, and can be accessed (for now) from either the Original Short Fiction page or the (newly renamed) Only Superhuman/Troubleshooters page, though the latter will be the long-term “home” for Troubleshooter story discussion.

I also decided to move the book-cover slide show on my front page down below my author bio so it wouldn’t obscure the drop-down menus so much. It still covers up the last couple of items on the Star Trek drop-down menu, but they can still be seen clearly from any other page on the site. I also rearranged the Trek menu to put the Short Fiction page at the top, since the second-level drop-down links for short-story annotations were getting hard to reach that low on the page. I also put the other Trek links into a somewhat more logical order on the menu, instead of the sort of reverse-chronological thing I was somewhat using before (which I guess evolved because I was putting the newest stuff on top for easy access).

Site updates and news

Okay, first off, I’ve been informed that the official publication date for Footprints in the Stars has been moved up from October to today. The collection made its debut at Shore Leave last week, but for technical reasons it was necessary to delay its official publication date in order to achieve something that has now ceased to be an issue, so there’s no longer any reason not to release it right away. So I’ve updated the home page to reflect that. It looks like it might take a bit of time for the online vendors to catch up and update their sites, though.

In the meantime, the book’s editor Danielle Ackley-McPhail wants its contributing authors to let reviewers, librarians, and bookstore owners know that Footprints in the Stars (#FootprintsInTheStars) is available for review on #NetGalley from now through July 31 (she told me to use those “hashtag” thingies, though I don’t really know if that makes any difference on WordPress). The link is:

https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/book/168979

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I’ve also now put up spoiler annotations for Crimes of the Hub and “The Melody Lingers” (beware spoilers at the links). The Crimes annotations replace my annotation pages for the three individual stories (which are mostly the same with a few minor changes), but it contains links to the original pages for archival purposes (and those pages are still at their original URLs).

I previously reported that the Green Blaze story “Conventional Powers” will be in the September/October 2019 issue of Analog, and I’ve found that it goes on sale August 20. With the official publication date of Footprints moved up, that’s two Troubleshooter stories in two months (even though they’re set nearly 25 years apart)! Since “Powers” is so close now, I’ve added non-spoiler discussion to my Original Short Fiction and (newly renamed) Only Superhuman/Troubleshooters pages. It seems a bit redundant to put discussion of Troubleshooter stories in both places, but since they’re new short fiction, it seems to make sense to put them on the short fiction page, at least until they aren’t new anymore. Of course, there will be spoiler annotations for both Troubleshooter stories going up at some point after their releases.

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I’ve also made a couple of tweaks to the look of the site. I figured out I could add an animated slide show of my book covers to the top of the home page, making it a bit more visually striking. It’s kind of hypnotic, and a random slide show of all my covers is a good way to call attention to the full range of my work, including projects that might go overlooked. But it has a couple of problems — it obscures the dropdown menus on the home page, and it doesn’t show up well on my mobile phone. I’d appreciate reader feedback on whether you like the slideshow or not. If it isn’t well-received, I’ll switch to something else like a thumbnail grid.

I also used thumbnail grids to make my main Star Trek Fiction page a bit more compact, with the covers in each series displayed side by side instead of top to bottom. I think it looks a lot better.

There will be more updates to follow!

THE CAPTAIN’S OATH annotations are up!

Since Star Trek: The Original Series — The Captain’s Oath has been out for a couple of weeks now, and since the folks on the podcast I linked to yesterday expressed the hope that my annotations for the novel would be up soon, I’ve now gone ahead and posted them. As usual, I don’t want to link to the annotations page directly, to minimize the risk of accidental spoiler exposure, but you can access it from the link at the bottom of the novel’s main page here:

https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/home-page/star-trek-fiction/tos-the-captains-oath/

Enjoy!

“Crooked Hub” discussion and annotations are up!

You know the drill — the new Analog is on sale now, so I’ve updated my Hub Series page with non-spoiler discussion of “…And He Built a Crooked Hub,” plus a link to the spoiler annotations page, which I trust folks will save until after they’ve read the story. You’ll need to scroll down a bit, since I decided to put it below the “Hubpoint of No Return” discussion, which just seemed logical.

I tried looking for online reviews to quote, but apparently it’s a bit early for those.

For some reason, while it took me ages to get around to finishing the previous issue I was in, I’m already nearly finished with the current issue; I’ve read everything but the novella. Some interesting stuff in this one, including a sci-fi twist on the French Revolution called “The Pendant Lens” by Sean McMullen, a story of AI activism called “Optimizing the Verified Good” by Effie Seiberg, a twisty monster-movie deconstruction called “The Unnecessary Parts of the Story” by Adam-Troy Castro, and a handy science-fact overview of “Alien Biochemistry” and its possible forms by Jay Werkheiser, useful for the SF worldbuilder.

A couple more minor site updates

Two site fixes today. One: A poster alerted me that my Uncertain Logic Annotations page was displaying the table too wide in Chrome and cutting off part of the text, which I think was due to that page having a second table inside one of the table cells. I tried some formatting changes to fix it, and something I tried caused the table formatting to disappear altogether, so I just went with that and converted it to the non-table format I use for most of my short-fiction annotations.

Two: I updated my Bibliography with my past couple of Hub stories and Among the Wild Cybers. It was about a year out of date, but now it’s current again. I wasn’t sure how to enter both AtWC and “Aspiring to Be Angels,” the new story appearing only in AtWC, so I just went with the redundancy.

Meanwhile, updating my own bibliography reminded me to check my Internet Speculative Fiction Database page, and as I hoped, they’ve finally added my three online original stories now that they’ve finally appeared in print in AtWC. Although they list AtWC as their only catalogued publication with just a note that they were previously published elsewhere. It also lists Hub Space now, but lists it by its trade paperback publication date of 2018 rather than its original e-book release date of 2015. Odd that an online resource would fail to count online publications. Although the bibliography isn’t entirely complete, since it doesn’t include the Russian translations of my first two Hub stories in ESLI Magazine. Still, it’s finally complete as far as my English-language professional fiction goes, so that’s good.

Today’s book news: AMONG THE WILD CYBERS is out… and STAR TREK novels are back!

Well, today’s the day that Among the Wild Cybers: Tales Beyond the Superhuman is officially released in trade paperback! It’s been out in e-book form for a week already, but I missed that date, so I decided to wait until today to do the big site update I’ve been planning. I’ve added a new page for the collection here:

Among the Wild Cybers: Tales Beyond the Superhuman

This page contains the basic information, discussions, and annotation links that used to be on my Original Short Fiction page, which is now much shorter because it only has one story left, “Abductive Reasoning,” at least until my recently sold “The Melody Lingers” comes out in Galaxy’s Edge. But I’ve added links to my story collections on that page so it isn’t too empty.

Meanwhile, I’ve put up four new annotation pages linked from the AtWC page, for “Aggravated Vehicular Genocide,” “Among the Wild Cybers of Cybele,” “The Weight of Silence,” and the brand-new Emerald Blair story “Aspiring to Be Angels.” The notes from “Weight” were previously published on my old website. I never did full annotations to AVG and AWCC until now, but their annotation pages reprint the in-universe worldbuilding notes I did have on my old site. I’ve also updated the annotation pages for “No Dominion,” “The Caress of a Butterfly’s Wing,” “Murder on the Cislunar Railroad,” and “Twilight’s Captives” with the page numbers for the new book, along with a few minor updates to reflect changes in the new editions.

There may be a few other site tweaks coming, like a link of some sort to “Aspiring to Be Angels” on the Only Superhuman page, and maybe some kind of combined timeline page. But I think I’ve done enough for today.

Now, of course, it’s up to you guys, since now you can buy my book! (Well, you could pre-order it before, but now you don’t have to wait to get it!) And if you buy it from an online bookstore, please post a review of it. The more reviews a book gets on Amazon or a similar site, the more attention it gets. Reviews and ratings on Goodreads will help get the word out too!

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The other big news today was announced at the Star Trek Las Vegas convention and reported on StarTrek.com:

STLV Reveal: Tilly Tale Heralds 2019 Trek Novels

Yes, after a long and frustrating delay in the license renewal, Pocket Books is finally resuming the publication of Star Trek novels. Three have been announced so far: a Discovery novel in January 2019 by Una McCormack, an Original Series novel in March by Greg Cox, and a Next Generation novel in April by Dayton Ward (picking up story threads from previous 24th-century novels). But there are more books that will be announced later when the time is right. And that’s about all I can say on the subject for now. Except that I’m glad to see that the novel line is finally back in business.

“Hubpoint of No Return” annotations now available

Sorry I’ve been late putting up the annotations for “Hubpoint of No Return.” I had them written some time ago (I try to make a habit of doing annotations at the same time I proofread the galley pages, since I sometimes notice things that need fixing in the process), but I couldn’t post them until I saw the finished issue and could get the right page numbers. Unfortunately, my author copies apparently got lost in the mail, and I didn’t get replacements until this afternoon.

Anyway, the annotations page (with full spoilers) is here:

“Hubpoint of No Return” Annotations

Looking through the contents page of the May/June Analog, I see I’ve got the only novelette-length story in the issue — the rest is a serial conclusion, a novella, and a bunch of short stories. That’s unusual. Anyway, looks like I’ve got a bunch of stories to read now.

Annotations update: dead links fixed

A TrekBBS member called Extrocomp was kind enough to go through the Star Trek annotations pages here on my blog and alert me to the various links that have gone dead in the years since I posted them, even providing updated file names from Memory Alpha. I spent the morning correcting the dead links — either updating the file locations, linking to Internet Archive snapshots of the now-defunct pages, or finding suitable alternative links to convey the same information (such as Wiki pages, or in one or two cases, the original source of an article that I’d linked to a mirror of). After which, since I can never resist being thorough, I went through my Original Fiction and Marvel annotations on my own and updated or replaced broken links as needed. So now all the annotations should have fully updated links, although there might still be broken links I haven’t yet found on some of the non-annotation pages of the site.

So, thanks, Extrocomp, for your diligence!

 

STAR TREK: THE FACE OF THE UNKNOWN annotations are finally up!

I’ve been unable to get around to annotating Star Trek: The Original Series: The Face of the Unknown, since I’ve been preoccupied with other projects. The delay in getting my subsequent novel approved and written left me kind of backed up. But I’ve cleared my backlog now, and indeed I’m kind of lacking in things to do at the moment, so that freed me to tackle the annotations at last. As it turns out, they aren’t that long this time:

The Face of the Unknown Annotations

The page is also accessible from the top menu of this site. Hopefully I won’t get delayed so long on future annotations.

LIVE BY THE CODE annotations are up, “Cislunar Railroad” coming soon (UPDATE: now up)

Okay, I’ve finally gotten around to doing my story notes and spoiler annotations for Rise of the Federation: Live by the Code. I’ve also restructured the site a bit, combining the individual book entries for ROTF on the same page (which still has “a-choice-of-futures” in its URL, since I didn’t know if I should change that). Here’s the master ROTF page, and you can scroll down to find the general notes on LBTC and the link to its spoiler notes. (I’ve kept the original pages for Books 2 & 3 in existence so I don’t break any links, but I’ve removed them from the top menu.)

I’ve also added a section on my new Analog story “Murder on the Cislunar Railroad” to my Original Short Fiction page. I’ll be adding spoiler notes for that story later.