Okay. Some explination.
Several years ago I came up with an idea for a TV series. (Where is it written that all our dreams must be small ones?) The working title for it is Never Surrender. It is supposed to be a realistic, sci-fi, war drama following the crew of the Human Republic Heavy Cruiser, George S. Patton Jr. The extreme oversimplification is that it is WWII in the Pacific set amongst the stars against Space Nazis. (I do plan to make it better than that sounds.) Anyway, to help me flesh out this Human Republic Universe; the aliens, the technology, the planets, etc., I started writing short stories. The point of having the flag next to these stories on my Published Works page is so people can quickly tell which stories are connected in this universe.
This is a work in progress, but eventually I ll get around to making up a list of planets, major historical figures and all kinds of stuff like that.
I set the dates back around 2010 when the 2030s were still a long way off. But if I start working on this again, I’ll probably have to change the dates of events.
The Stories
This is a timeline listing all of the stories (and novel) I m working on and their status. The published and accepted I feel are self-explanatory. Finished stories are ones that I am in the process of submitting to various magazines. Hopefully, they will soon be moved over to accepted and then published. Stories listed as writing are stories that could be half-finished or are just a title with a plot and maybe some scribbled notes in a notebook. Then there are ?? stories. These are the ones where I have an idea or a setting, but I don t have a story, yet. Give me time.
2033
In the Blink of an Eye (writing)
2034
2056
2056
2059
2059
2060
2071
2075
2079
2083
2090
2092
2096
2100
2101
2103
2105
2106
2109
2110
2110
2111
2119
2120
212?
2130
2132
2132
215?
215?
2167
2194
22??
The following stories are set during Never Surrender.
22??
22??
22??
22??
22??
22??
22??
The Aliens
This is a listing of (so far) all the aliens in my universe. Eventually, I ll make separate pages for them, but for now I ll just list the stories they are in and what role they play. I think the notes after the stories are rather self-explanatory, and tell whether the aliens appear in the story and have speaking roles, are only mentioned, or if we only know about them through their artifacts.
Asteroiders
Tough Questions (mentioned)
Cetans
Tough Questions (mentioned), Standing Tall (appear?)
The Cube Builders
Bringing Peace to the Void: The Memoir of Admiral Ren Pomeroy, HRN (Ret.) (artifact), Enigma (artifact)
Humans
Appear in all stories.
Intelligent Programs
Bringing Peace to the Void: The Memoir of Admiral Ren Pomeroy, HRN (Ret.) (appear), Enigma (appear), An RI World (mentioned), The Fruits of Piracy (appear), Starrise (appear), Mutiny (appear)
Lumens
Tough Questions (mentioned), Rise (mentioned), Bringing Peace to the Void: The Memoir of Admiral Ren Pomeroy, HRN (Ret.) (appear), Starrise (mentioned), Duty, or Honor (appear), Options (mentioned)
Pentans
Hello (appear), Freelancers (mentioned), Tough Questions (appear), Desert of Stars (appear), Rise (mentioned), Exodus (mentioned), Bringing Peace to the Void: The Memoir of Admiral Ren Pomeroy, HRN (Ret.) (appear), Enigma (mentioned), Always With Us (appear), Starrise (mentioned), How Many (mentioned), Options (mentioned), Standing Tall (appear)
Technophiles
Tough Questions (mentioned), Exodus (mentioned)
The Ursae
Bringing Peace to the Void: The Memoir of Admiral Ren Pomeroy, HRN (Ret.) (artifacts)
Whistlers
How Many (mentioned, as the aliens ), Serve, or Die (appear), Options (mentioned), Mutiny (mentioned)
As Yet Unnamed Slave Race
Standing Tall (appear)
Three unnamed Stone-age species
Tough Questions (mentioned)
Four extinct civilizations
Tough Questions (mentioned)
Alien 101
One of the problems with writing a bunch of stand-alone short stories all set in the same universe is that you tend to repeat yourself. You can spend a great deal of time in one story explaining the history, culture, appearance of an alien species. That s okay. But what about when those aliens show up again in another story? Do you repeat all of that or just hope that the readers have already read the first story, some of which haven t been published yet? My solution for now is to put just enough information in the stories so they make sense, and put more detailed explanations here.
Pentans
The Pentans are amphibious (though they prefer the water) pentapi; think octopi minus three. They were helped into sentience by the Cetans, and have become methodical explorers of the galaxy. They developed tunneling technology to cross interstellar distances and made contact with the Lumens and humans.
Each of their five arms end in two long fingers. Their skins are generally bluish, but they change color according to their emotions: green for confusion, scarlet speckles for laughter. Their language sounds very similar to the whistles and squeaks of dolphins, but that is only a result of both being aquatic, or mostly aquatic. Before making contact with humans, they studied us for several decades. During that time they developed a translation program. One of the biggest problems was names. For example, one of their common names is derived from a description of how seaweed sways in a weak current. How do you translate that into human? Their solution was to just take a list of common Pentan names and match them at random to a list of common human names. Thus, the swaying seaweed name becomes John.
You can go to my Published Works page or My Homepage.