Earths in Space: We Must Evolve has arrived! The ebook is available, and so is the paperback edition. It’s not absolutely necessary to read the first book, but I certainly won’t stop you.

Let’s have another excerpt, shall we? We shall…

*****

“Good evening, Amena.”

Amena glanced at her before returning her gaze to the moon. “Hey, darling. Sleeping troubles?”

The way she said “darling” with the dropped g … No, it was probably nothing, Quin assured herself. Mere fanciful wishing.

“You could say. My apologies if I’m intruding.”

“You’re intruding on nothing. No worries.”

The “nothing” in this context implied a vacant mind, a person possessed of no deeper thought than her own social standing. But for all her enigmatic nature, Quin was sure of one thing: Amena was the least shallow person she had ever met. “When you look to the sky, what is it you see?”

The question earned Amena’s full attention, and she seemed delighted to respond. “The electromagnetic spectrum. Some of it, anyway. Have you heard of—”

“It sounds intriguing, but I must confess to ignorance on the subject.”

“It’s okay. Word just hasn’t gotten around yet. Anyway, basically, the electromagnetic spectrum is—it has to do with these wavelengths, a whole range of wavelengths.” Her hand swam through the air, bobbing up and down at regular intervals. “The widest could be as big as the universe, potentially, while at the other end, they get as small as the tiniest building blocks of the ittiest bittiest little thing.” Her arms continued to gesture, spreading far apart and swiftly pinching tight together, and then her hands just sort of rolled forward with her speech, as if necessary to siphon off her excess enthusiasm. “Within that, there’s this sliver of a sliver we call visible light. This whole huge spectrum—universe-level huge—and our eyes only pick up a sliver. We’re missing out on a lot.”

Quin looked at the bright moon, wondering what else bounced off it.

Amena’s arms drifted to her sides, and she sounded almost melancholy. “There’s so much more going on than we’ll ever see.”

*****

Want more?

Earths in Space: We Must Evolve has arrived! The ebook is available, and so is the paperback edition. It’s not absolutely necessary to read the first book, but I certainly won’t stop you.

So…excerpt? Yes, time for another excerpt…

*****

Amena materialized in Renaissance Italy—which wasn’t actually Renaissance Italy, but it sure bore a striking resemblance. It pretty much matched how she pictured it. Smelled even worse, though, but maybe the architecture would stun her nose after it finished stunning her eyeballs. As she clung to the shadow of a tight alley, she wondered if any of these ornate buildings could boast interior artwork on par with that of the Sistine Chapel.

Well. That was a lovely half-second during which she could forget her present company and situation.

“What do you see?” Sharp asked.

“More than you, I’d wager, but I’m sure you’ll tell me the correct answer.”

“Look at the natives.”

Yeah, she got where he was going with this. The street was full of men. From her inconspicuous hideaway, Amena listened to snippets of conversation as they passed. They conducted business, discussed philosophy, debated a new mathematical theorem, and so on. All very interesting, but the tableau felt incomplete.

“Where do you suppose the women are?” Sharp asked. “Perhaps the kitchens? Nurseries? Imagine if you were born here.”

“That is a terrible waste. Yes. That’s a shame—that and so much else. There’s a lot more wrong here than you’d ever notice. These people—the ones alive right now—they’ll never explore outer space. They’ll never even reach the moon. Their descendants will create such wonderful art these folks’ll never get a chance to appreciate. They’ll achieve scientific discoveries that would astound any one of them, that would seem so magical—but these people will never know. Yeah, it stinks that it takes so long to grow a civilization, but the payoff’s amazing. These guys might be too stupid to treat their women as people, but each generation will get a little smarter until that’s corrected.”

“They won’t, because I’m about to kill them.” Sharp tapped his badge. “Location Beta.”

*****

Want more?

Launch week for Earths in Space: We Must Evolve has arrived! The ebook’s preorder pages will magically transform into order pages on Friday, and the paperback edition already went live. It’s not absolutely necessary to read the first book, but I certainly won’t stop you. 

This latest excerpt allows me to bring up an extra-special point. An uncommon feature of the Earths in Space series is that it stars an asexual leading lady. Asexuality is the least common of sexual orientations. The description applies to maybe 1 percent of the population. But it’s real. Some people simply don’t experience sexual attraction, and that’s fine. To learn more about asexuality, check out the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network, or just Google it.

This sci-fi story is not about asexuality, and it’s not even explicitly stated. Amena’s asexuality is vaguely hinted at in Vol. 1, but it becomes a bit more obvious in Vol. 2, as you’ll see below…

*****

“He actually can get pretty industrious sometimes,” Jem said.

Amena wondered if “industrious” was a euphemism. It didn’t sound like one, but a lot of euphemisms tended to take her by surprise.

That kiss was ingrained in Amena’s mind. It nauseated her on a number of levels, the age difference being a big one, but even worse was the notion that this bright—well, sometimes bright—beautiful and strong girl who was just barely old enough to drink would choose to spend such quality time with a slovenly wealthy man prone to erratic behavior. Jem was no gold digger. Outside of the salary she drew from this work, she never spent any of his money. The two of them just kind of clung to each other for unfathomable reasons. Amena understood precious little about it, but she was pretty darn sure it wasn’t healthy.

“Jem, let’s talk girl-to-girl.”

“I guess we would have to.”

“Huh?” Smirking? Why was Jem smirking at her?

“You can’t really talk woman-to-woman, can you?” Continue reading →

Launch week for Earths in Space: We Must Evolve has arrived! The ebook’s preorder pages will magically transform into order pages on Friday, and the paperback edition already went live. It’s not absolutely necessary to read the first book, but I certainly won’t stop you. The following excerpt spoils nothing about Vol. 1.

*****

The vice president destroyed civilization, but he didn’t mean to. He simply neglected to seal his containment suit properly. Oh, and the whole initiative kind of was his idea in the first place.

Zanna Fuentes was his deputy press secretary, but now she had a new job—ambassador to the next Earth.

She stared at the massive vessel that would bring her there, along with nearly five hundred other survivors. It sat in the cavernous bunker beneath the Department of Scientific Advancement, where a bunch of paranoids had constructed it in secret a decade earlier. The body was an obese cylinder capped by hemispheres on both ends. The technicians dotted the grainy yellow hull as little more than specks from Zanna’s vantage point in the observation room.

That thing was going to be her home for many thousands of years. It was her future, her entire civilization’s future. Continue reading →

Launch week for Earths in Space: We Must Evolve has arrived! The ebook’s preorder pages will magically transform into order pages on Friday, and the paperback edition just went live. It’s not absolutely necessary to read the first book, but I certainly won’t stop you.

So let’s kick things off with an excerpt. Then, for an even grander time, I’ll post other excerpts throughout the week.

Here we go, but be warned — this snippet includes some spoilers for Vol. 1…

*****

Evolution was a real thing. Amena Wharry knew this for a fact. She had witnessed it in action on an Earth that no longer existed. That giant swimming eyeball was forever etched in her memory. She saw it, felt its slimy tentacles as they ensnared her, and she had regrettably killed the poor thing, though she never learned what species it had descended from. Did a race of giant eyeballs already exist deep within her Earth’s oceans? But those snakes were clearly evolved, the way they stretched their mouths unnaturally wide. Then again, that could’ve been a species of snake that had remained hidden in rainforests or was driven to extinction long ago, and those little dinosaurs might never have gone extinct over there in the first place…

The slender redhead swiped her paintbrush across a side wall in The Patrick Henry’s control room. The dull metal got old on day one, and she finally found time to rectify the horrid situation—rectify it as much as her limited artistic talents allowed. Intricate murals were beyond her abilities, and she didn’t have that much time anyway, but she could slap assorted streaks of color up and down the walls. She preferred detailed images that merited close inspection—the sort of work she’d find in art museums’ historical wings—but she settled on abstract expressionism. It was color. It broke the monotony, stimulated the brain even.

Surely people were capable of evolution. If those animals could evolve on that ancient Earth, then humanity likely had the same potential. They just never got the chance there. That civilization died young, lasted for a teensy fraction of the planet’s ten billion years. But maybe on some other Earth…

*****

Preordering is fun, by the way…