With thoughts on the evolving science fiction ecosystem…

Best-of-the-year lists have started to appear across the Internet. Those lists are a lot of fun when your book appears on them. And when it doesn’t? It’s easy to shrug and sooth your ego with the certain knowledge that the list-makers never read or considered or even heard about your book. Anyway, that’s how I handle it! 😉

When I originally indie-published The Red: First Light back in 2013, the Internet’s science fiction eco-system was different than it is today. SF Signal was a thriving website, the author cooperative Book View Café had a new-ish online bookstore and freshly enthusiastic membership, there were a lot of excellent independent blogger/reviewers willing to have a look at vetted indie work, Twitter was more personal, and the potential end of the Republic was not a great weight on anyone’s mind.

Times have changed. I feel like it’s a lot harder to get the word out about a new book — and I don’t think I’m alone. The sheer number of excellent novels being published every year remains overwhelming. But we do what we can.

To that end, here is my annual post of my award-eligible work from 2019. “Award eligible” generally just means the work was published in the past year. If you’re able and interested in nominating for the annual science fiction awards, in particular the Hugos, Nebulas, and Locus awards, I would appreciate your consideration.

In the short story category:

“Devil in the Dust” (amazon affiliate link)†
A short story set on Mars in the last days of a bitter war. Included in the anthology Mission Critical, edited by Jonathan Strahan. (July 2019)

In the novel category:

Edges (Inverted Frontier #1)
From the Edge of Apocalypse:
Deception Well is a world on the edge, a lone surviving outpost at the farthest reach of human expansion. Now a determined crew resolves to cross the light years to explore the fallen worlds of old and discover what monstrous life might have grown up among the ruins.

Silver (Inverted Frontier #2)
A Lost Ship — A New World:
A hardened adventurer, marooned on a surreal artificial world, must master the mysterious nanotech known as “silver” to defeat the entity who pursues him.

I like to think of Inverted Frontier as Sense-of-Wonder fiction — an exploration of the cosmos and of human potential, embedded in a far-future adventure.

If you’re not yet acquainted with the books and that description appeals to you, I hope you’ll click on over to my website where I’ve posted the opening chapters. You should be able to quickly tell if these books are for you.

If you have read the books and you consider them award worthy, I implore you to focus your attention on Edges. Can’t have them competing with each other after all!

Thanks for stopping by…

Posted on: Thursday, December 5th, 2019 at 5:30 am
Categories: My Books.
Tags: Award Eligible Work