There's been a lot happening in the Marti Ward universes. Thank you for being part of it.
The cover reveal is for four Klandor Rising stories coming out at intervals in the first half of this year (in audiobook, ebook and paperback), with the five Moonchild Rising stories to be published in the same formats in the second half of the year. These are books that were in various states of progress at the time of my father's death in 2022, and several of the Klandor stories were largely sketches and notes that I have completed. Klandor Rising will then follow as a collection midyear, with both paperback and hardback editions.
Moonchild Rising follows Irene from her birth on the moon, to her outing as a moonchild at university, and the path of discrimination that she has to overcome as she solves various problems and mysteries around the solar system, with stories set on Earth, Moonbase and Venus. She is then based on Mars for a while before the opportunity comes to take a trip to an earth-like planet in Alpha Centauri, whose lemur-like inhabitants seem to call it Klandor – although the navigator who discovered their intelligence and language ability kept it a secret till things started to go wrong. Klandor Rising follows the survey team and two waves of colonists, then investigates an enigma a generation after the colony was established.
For Moonchild, my contribution has mainly been a matter of tightening up the science in the stories, which like my own are cast as hard science fiction, and indeed for the Moonchild Rising collection, which appeared the day of my father's death, I wrote a science appendix.
The idea was so appealing that I added a science appendix to my Time for PsyQ as an educational edition target to school students, aiming to encourage an interest in the science and technology.
This material was also made available on my blog 'The Science and the Fiction':
But most impressive is the dramatized audiobook on Google Play with an AI-generated cast of 24 characters: sounds great! Oh, and the opening chapters and a poetic synopsis that leads into the sequel were broadcast on the AntipodeanSF radio show, narrated by yours truly. A story paralleling the
School for PsyQ sequel appears in
Fantastic Schools Staff, volume 7 of that series, while the short story that was expanded into
Time for PsyQ appeared in
Out of their Minds, a collection by the Blackwood Writers Group.
Interestingly, Time for PsyQ has been selling around the same number of paperbacks as ebooks - parents are giving it as gifts, teachers are putting it in their school/classroom libraries, and the Heroine's Foreword and Science Appendices have been very well received.
Speaking of which, I'll be giving a workshop shortly on how to research and write hard science fiction that is true to science, including tips on the do's and don't's of using AIs as an author - not to mention the inside scoop on AI from one of the pioneers of Learned/Neural Language Models.
The workshop is only a week away, but if you happen to be in the vicinity of Adelaide...
Workshop Title: Science, Magic and Speculative Fiction
Date: Time: 10:00am to 4:00pm
Location: In Person, State Library of South Australia
Registration: https://writerssa.org.au/event-registration-civicrm/?id=358
Thank you for your interest and support of my writing - and yes, further instalments on Casindra (Casindra Prey), Moraturi (Moraturi Star) and Quantum Talents (School for PsyQ) are in the pipeline and well advanced.
But for various reasons things became very chaotic a couple of years ago, and other projects and tasks have intervened...
Happy Reading,
David [Marti Ward] Powers
https://books2read.com/MartiWard
https://www.amazon.com/David-MW-Powers/e/B001HQ0VTQ
https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?view_op=list_works&user=qTvbbD4AAAAJ
