Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

Last week it was announced that Teegarden’s Star, a red dwarf about 12.5 light years away, has not one but two roughly Earth-sized planets orbiting within its habitable zone. That doesn’t necessarily mean the planets are habitable, but they are at the right distance(s) for water to exist in liquid form, generally considered a prerequisite for habitability.

So far, most of the nearby, Earth-sized, potentially habitable exoplanets have been found orbiting small red dwarf stars. That’s more because they are easier to detect around such stars in the first place — their relative mass and closeness to their parent stars (needed to stay warm around such cool stars) means their gravity causes more wobble in the star, and if they pass between it and us, they cast a proportionately bigger shadow. There’s still hope for Earth-sized planets orbiting nearby Sun-like stars, we just would have difficulty detecting them with current techniques.

As I’ve noted in the T-Space books so far, the Terraformers apparently didn’t bother with anything around red dwarfs, so if I mention these new planets in my novels, they won’t be terraformed. They may, however, have been reshaped to resemble some other planet, one orbiting a red dwarf. There’s a hint of that in my soon-to-be-released The Centauri Surprise, but more on that later. 😉

I have decided to make my collection of short stories, A Sampler, available as an e-book. I’m not sure why I didn’t do it before, but until now (it just went live on Amazon) it has only been available in paperback. If you’ve already bought the hardcopy from Amazon, you should be able to download the e-book free thanks to their Matchbook program, otherwise it’s 99 cents.

This includes my very first T-Space story, “Into the Fire,” and an excerpt from Alpha Centauri: First Landing, but the rest is a mixed bag of stories that have appeared in Analog and elsewhere.

Enjoy!

So May was a hectic month, between my two youngest graduating college (on the same day, 700 miles apart), attending the SFWA Nebulas conference, and ferrying one son to the six-week geology field camp that, for whatever reason, the university scheduled for after graduation even though it’s a requirement. Only about 12,000 words written on the new novels, but also I got some editing in and even, for the first time in years, got a couple of short stories out to seek homes in the magazines.

Speaking of words written and new releases, The Centauri Surprise is almost ready for final edit. I’d like to release it the beginning of July, with next one, The Pavonis Insurgence, following some time in August. I’ll post a more complete and definitive release schedule as details firm up. Also, look for Kakuloa: The Downhill Slide later this year. (Ideally, I’d like to have Kakuloa: Crash and Burn out this year too. All of the above are in various stages of progress, so it could happen.)

Before that, though, I will be relaunching the existing Carson & Roberts novels (The Chara Talisman, The Reticuli Deception, and The Eridani Convergence) with new covers (I can hear several of you cheering as I write that) and some minor revisions.
The latter is mostly just typo cleanup, but there are a couple of inconsistencies that crept into the overall timeline when I wasn’t looking. For example, the Belize wreckage found at the end of Reticuli makes more sense in 2122, not 2123. Also, the name Flora for hurricanes was retired after 1963, so I’ll probably rename it Fiona. That’s a minor detail of no story importance, it just offends my OCD now that I’m aware of it. The new covers will look something like the one above. I’ll post another update with all of them soon.

With the change to the title font, the Alpha Centauri series covers should also be refreshed, so that will likely happen sometime this summer.

I’m also toying with the idea of boxed sets for the Alpha Centauri trilogy and the first three Carson & Roberts books. Not literal boxed sets, of course (very hard to do with modern publishing), but rather all three books collected into a single e-book volume for sale at a lower price. Stay tuned.

Let me know what you think of the proposed new covers, boxed sets (omnibus editions), or anything else.