Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

Book four in the Carson & Roberts T-Space Archeology series, The Centauri Surprise, releases this week. To encourage those who would rather read the series from the beginning, rather than just the recap (“Previously…”), I’ve put the whole series on sale, at 99 cents each (ebook), this week only.

I think followers of this series are really going to like where this is going. Several important events take place, which set up the next few books in the series. The relationship between Hannibal Carson and Jackie Roberts takes a turn, a new talisman turns up, significant advances are made on reverse-engineering alien tech, more of the Kakuloa backstory (which plays out in the Kakuloa series), more run-ins with Velkaryans, we meet again a couple of characters from Alpha Centauri: Sawyer’s World (older, of course), and there’s a brief wargame between Earth’s Space Force and Sawyers World’s Space Guard. And more. One of my beta readers called this my best work yet, but judge for yourself.

Amazon has some restrictions on what we can do here, so Book 1, The Chara Talisman, is “permanently” on sale until the publisher manually raises the price again (at the end of the month). Books 2 and 3 (The Reticuli Deception and The Eridani Convergence) are on a price countdown, 99 cents until Thursday (8/22) night, then 1.99 Friday, 2.99 Saturday (8/24), and back to the original 3.99 Saturday midnight.

And I hate asking for favors, but reviews do help, both Amazon’s algorithms and readers looking for new books to read. Please take a moment to leave one. Thanks, and enjoy!

If you posted a legitimate comment here recently, you might want to re-post. I hadn’t checked the spam bucket in a couple of weeks, and found something like 1,127 items in it. I’m not going to wade through all that, so I just flushed them.

Sorry if your post got caught up with all that, although my spam filter is usually pretty good. (Once you’re authorized, your comments won’t have to wait in the moderation queue. But trust me, you really don’t want to see some of the crap that spambots try to post here.)

The seventh Denver area Myths & Legends Convention (MALCon) is coming up, August 9-11 at the Radisson Denver-Aurora. I will be on a bunch of panels, mostly on the Saturday (along with autographing sessions) and one Sunday. It should be a lot of fun. If you’re in the area, come on out. I may have a few giveaways at my presentations.

Also, number four in the Carson & Roberts archeology series, The Centauri Surprise is available now for pre-order. Release date is August 20. It turns out Rico is alive, although he’s not sure just where; Carson finally gets to talk to Peter Finley (you may remember him from Alpha Centauri: Sawyer’s World — he’s not dead yet) about “Pete’s Peak”; and Homeworld Security is getting increasingly nervous about the Velkaryans.

I’ll be heading to Spikecon in Layton, Utah, for a prolonged July 4th weekend. I have panels on Thursday and Friday, check the online schedule.

Today also marks the beginning of the refresh of my Carson & Roberts archeology adventures in T-Space. The three existing novels are getting all new covers, plus an edit pass to clean up a few typos but mostly to remove some British usage in the language that was inconsistent with my later novels. The e-books are being re-released first, starting with The Chara Talisman with new paper editions coming later in July. Also coming in July will be The Centauri Surprise, (currently in edit), which follows The Eridani Convergence, and then The Pavonis Insurgence.

Above, samples of the new covers.

UPDATE: The updated versions are all now live. Click the images for links to the books’ pages on Amazon. The Centauri Surprise is now available for pre-order.

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.

Denver Starfest 2019 is coming up this weekend, April 26-28. Guests of Honor include William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols of Star Trek fame, Ben Browder of Farscape and Stargate: SG-1 and many others. But best of all, I’ll be there, in Author Alley. (Okay, maybe I don’t quite compete with the likes of the above.) There’ll be lots of other things to see and do, too.

The fellow, er, robot on the right there has attended many a Starfest. You may remember him from the original Lost In Space TV series. He (rather, a look-alike) also shows up in my upcoming The Centauri Surprise, for perfectly logical in-story reasons.

I will have copies of my books for sale, maybe a few giveaways, and I don’t charge for autographs. See you there?

(So which was your favorite Lost In Space? The 60s TV version, the feature film, or the Netflix remake? Or maybe the original comic book, aka “Space Family Robinson”?)

Which is to say, a report on where I am with in-progress and upcoming books, not a report on anything I’ve read recently.

The first draft of The Pavonis Insurgence, next in the Carson & Roberts series, is finished, but still requires revision (which will probably add ten thousand words or so) and final editing. So, maybe by Memorial Day? I spun up a lot of different plot threads in The Eridani Convergence and The Reticuli Deception before that, and I’m starting to tie them together.

When I came up with the whole T-Space series, I envisioned a twelve book plot arc, loosely based on a four-act structure. The Alpha Centauri series was act one. Kakuloa was supposed to bridge act one and act two, the Carson & Roberts series. Those of you mathematically inclined (if you’re also familiar with the four act structure) will be starting to recognize a problem about here. Pavonis will be the fourth of the Carson & Roberts books, and I’ve already suggested that Kakuloa itself may end up as four books (the first, A Rising Tide, came out in January, the next, The Downhill Slide is also in progress, about one-third done, with some work started on the third, Crash and Burn). And I’m only (with Pavonis) nearing the end-of-act-two plot twist. So, maybe a twenty (-plus?) volume series? We’ll see.

In my defense, these volumes are not the multi-hundred-thousand word volumes of a Song of Ice and Fire (aka Game of Thrones) or Wheel of Time. (Note, I’m not comparing myself to Martin or Jordan as an author, just comparing word counts.) I grew up on much shorter novels, and I think my readers would prefer to see me publish more frequently than once every few years. So there’s that. Anyway, I’d like to have the next Kakuloa book out by Westercon/NASFiC, which is the July 4th extended weekend.

On the other hand, I don’t want to get myself pigeonholed as just the author of the T-Space series. I have a few other projects that I’d like to work on.

Two of these are set within our own solar system, and are old projects I’m looking at taking off the back burner. One is my “Great Martian Novel” (every hard SF author should write one), centered around a couple of major construction projects on Mars. The other is my “Apollo 18” book, which was about half-written when that [expletive deleted] movie of the same name came out. I think it has been long enough now, and the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 is coming up. Working title is now Apollo 18: Project Jeannie. This is set between Apollo 17 and Skylab, and has nothing in common with the movie except the mission number and the Soviet lunar lander. (No doubt we were both inspired by the revelation that there was a Soviet lunar lander, although it never flew and was kept secret by the USSR to pretend there never was a Moon race.) No promises on these. I have mentioned them in passing before and will post more when there’s something more definite.

Another one is set in T-Space, but will be YA (young adult). I’ve alluded to the fact that Jackie Roberts was born on a starship during the five-year Eta Carinae mission. I want to tell a story of her growing up ten years after that, when her parents take her on another multi-year mission. I’d like to have that one ready for Christmas, but that depends on my writing schedule and priorities.

Somewhere in there I’d also like to do a sci-fi/fantasy crossover, maybe an expansion of my short “The Gremlin Gambit” (but I have some other ideas, too).

Too much to write and too little time. What would you like to see?

Speaking of interviews (see below), back when The Chara Talisman was about to be released, I was interviewed for a podcast while at MileHiCon. I came across a link to that recently. Oddly, the page is tagged for Connie Willis. She usually attends MHC, and she may have been a guest of honor that year. (Ironically, I interviewed Connie myself about twenty years earlier, for a public access TV show our local National Space Society (L5) chapter was doing.)

Anyway, here’s the link to the interview. There are two MP3s on that page for some reason; they’re both the same interview. I intend to make that available from this website in case that link goes away. I’ll post the link when I do.

The interviewer starts off relating how he was reading my “Poetic Justice” and got so distracted he missed his train. That story originally appeared in Space Horrors and is reprinted in my Alastair Mayer: A Sampler if you’d like to read it yourself. (And if you have read it, that page could use a few reviews. [grin])

Meanwhile, work on the next two Kakuloa books and the sequel to The Eridani Convergence continues. Look for releases beginning in May.