Ten books over ten months, an accelerated time table to be ready for a couple of book fairs in October. Moonchild Rising's 5 stories (originally only published as a collection) are now available as individual novellas, brought out interspersed with the 4 Klandor Rising novellas (along with its single-volume collection).
The cover designs of the 10 volumes were the critical path on this timeline, with some back and forth with 100covers.com getting them just right. As you can see, the new Moonchild covers capture and reinforce the between-two-worlds theme of the original cover and the five stories, and also hint at the biomedical themes. In Moonchild Testing, the nightmare starts when we meet Irene in school on the moonbase when her parents are killed, we hear about the literal nightmare at university on earth, when she lets slip to her roommate that she was born on the moon, and then we find Irene trapped in nightmare of prejudice as she finds herself trapped between two worlds and not welcome on either - and framed for a crime she has only just realized she's been investigating in the medical facility where she was unexpectedly offered a job.
Two of the stories (Venus Interlude and History in the Making) were originally pitched as two parts of a single novella. Both independently follow on from the final scenes of Moonchild Testing but can be read alone - and so are published separately (although I've included bonus stories in the individual volumes to bring them up to the same total length as the others). Moon Power has Irene investigating a medical mystery back on the moonbase – where she is again not welcome by the powers that be. Everything under Control has her investigating a medical mystery back on Venus - with an unexpected connection to the original crime of book 1.
So, while these books are set in various places around our solar system, the science backdrop primarily sets the stage for a story about what prejudice might look like in the future, and a series of mysteries to be solved – all with an underlying biomedical theme.
These Moonchild stories were written in the1980s, with the science tweaked only a little for publication. As my brother put in in the foreword to the Moonchild Rising boxset, these classical-stye stories were written before phones were mobile or computers personal. The previously revealed Klandor Rising sequence, featuring the golden-lemur-like yolti, followed in the 1990s – and Moonchild Irene commanded the survey mission in Klandor 1 and chaired the colonist selection committee in Klandor 2.
Interestingly, Klandor Enigma, book 4, was the first written, and includes hints and important names from the backstory that is then developed in the initial trilogy. Klandor Encounter was written immediately after, and is where Encounter pilot Don encounters them and bestows on them the name Yolti, and hears from them the name Klandor for their world, known previously just as the fourth planet in the Alpha Centauri system (aka AC4). Books 2 and 3 were completed by me based on my fathers notes and the incidents recorded in book 4.
Even more interestingly, there is a related story written well before any of these, The Giant Spider Monkeys of Borneo, that encounters aliens that look just like the Yolti, around 1970 (in the midst of the Apollo moon landings and the Apollo 13 crisis). With the push of the Blackwood Writers Group, this has been expanded to novelette size and is likely to become a series in its own right if they get their way. I will not spoil it by explaining exactly how it segues with both Moonchild Rising and Klandor Rising.
Speaking of Blackwood Writers Group, we are running courses for WEA (Workers Education Association) South Australia, on Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction, over the last month of Summer (that's 31 January to 28 February 2026, which may surprise some of you northern hemisphere folks – you wouldn't believe the number of antipodean students who want to start in autumn but say spring, or vice-versa): https://www.wea-sa.com.au/subjects
My SciFi series are all multigenerational series/sagas written for young adults from 9 to 99 (although at a recent book fair I was pipped by someone who wrote for 8 to 108 – in fact, the youngest readers of my books that I know of are 8, and the oldest are in their 90s), and they are all clean. Which leads me to another announcement – starting with the (northern) Winter 2025 edition, I have accepted the roles of Saga Reviewer and Columnist for Clean Fiction Magazine, and propose to expand these MartiSciFi posts to include reviews and recommendations of other Spec.Fic. series: https://www.sunsetvalleycreations.com/cleanfictionmagazine or https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0C65TX7PX
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