Announcing QUANTUM MORTIS

About twelve years ago, not long after writing the short story “Medal for a Marine”, I started writing another short story. This one concerned the murder of a man in exile from his home planet. I didn’t get very far on it before setting it aside, in fact, I didn’t even make it to the actual murder. Nevertheless, I had a very clear picture of the murder, the SF setting, and the detective. Heavily influenced by Fifth Frontier War, the story was set in a futuristic world that was a combination of the Traveller universe and the Space Lords universe. I should probably explain that Space Lords was a 1997 attempt to design a science fiction MMO that was a thousand-year extrapolation from the worlds of Rebel Moon Rising. We never really did much more than discuss it with Microsoft in a desultory manner, but for the next 16 years, the design document sat untouched on a hard drive.

In early 2013, I happened to run across the fragment of the short story. Having almost completely forgotten about it, it read as if someone else had written it. I thought it compared rather well to most of the SF I’d read since then, (China Mieville and Neal Stephenson aside), but realized that with four more 850-page TAODAL novels to write, there was absolutely no way I was going to be able to get around to that SF world for at least another six years. So, I contacted one of the guys who had expressed interest in publishing a Selenoth-related story through First Sword and suggested that we collaborate on turning that story fragment into a SF mystery series.  Steve agreed, we wrote the novel together, and we are very pleased make the following announcement:

QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted will be published by Marcher Lord Hinterlands on December 2, 2013. It is 326 pages and will retail for $4.99 ebook and $22.99 hardcover. Those who preorder the hardcover by December 1st can do so for a discounted price of $14.99 and in addition to the hardcover will also receive a copy of QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted in either epub or mobi format (please specify) via email the day before release.

The independent planet of Rhysalan
provides contractual Sanctuary to 1,462 governments-in-exile. It is the
responsibility of the Military Crimes Investigation Division,
specifically, the Xenocriminology and Alien Relations department, to
keep a firm leash on the hundreds of thousands of xenos residing
on-planet. Assassinations, revolutions, civil wars, and attempted
planetary genocides are all in a day’s work for Chief Warrant Officer
Graven Tower, MCID-XAR.

However, as it happens, there is more. Steve is an unusually fast writer, especially in comparison with me. So, while he was waiting for me to turn the first draft into a final draft, he decided to make use of the time to write a short story concerning another of Graven Tower’s murder investigations. One thing led to another and by the time we were done with QM:AMD, we had also completed a novella that stood up rather nicely on its own. Since releasing A Magic Broken in company with A Throne of Bones worked rather well, Marcher Lord didn’t see any reason to not adopt a similar approach in the science fiction arena.