The New People & Elegant Threat: M-Brane Preorder

M-Brane Press has opened a pre-order for the M-Brane Double, featuring Alex Jeffer's The New People and my own Elegant Threat... On the Demise of Captain Fantomas Patton-Guerrero and Loss of La Amenaza Elegente.

I have a page HERE that outlines some information about Elegant Threat.

The thought is not original to me, but perhaps the perfect length for a science fiction tale is the novella.  Therein is enough space to flesh out a tale with character arcs and world-building on a scale that the short story is often not able to support.  And too often, novella length ideas are fleshed out into novels because the later are easier to market.

The M-Brane Double take a classic Ace-inspired layout and uses it to bring the best of both worlds.  With two novellas in the book (back to back and each with a dedicated cover) the readers gets plenty of reading material, while the individual tales --I assert-- are chock-full of all that makes you love an SF story.  Both tales are set on watery worlds, a happenstance that I find quite appealing.

Science Fiction stories run the gamut from mundane tales that look very much like the current day, to alternate histories, dystopias, cyberpunk futures, alien invasions, and a myriad other modes and subject matters.  There is nothing, for me, like a good space adventure.  These stories have gone by many names: space opera, space westerns, new space opera, baroque space opera... And they range from science fantasy of the Star Wars mode, to work struggling hard for verisimilitude, sometimes to the point that hard SF is as fitting a descriptor.

'Space western' might be apt to my tale of Shaivist, Sunni, Mahayanist, and New Madhi settlers in the Alpha Centauri system, and the ecological niche they've been forced into... but in a very real way all these labels are limiting.  If they help a potential reader to identify my story as something of interest, great.  And, I wrote this tale as a something my daughters would find compelling: ages 10 to 20.   There's a challenge!  So add to the labels, juvenile.  I don't know if my story really holds up to the expectation of YA fiction, but I do hope my girls love this story.

I am writing an interlude right now.  This short story covers what happens to a certain character who is 'off screen' for much of Elegant Threat.  I hope to submit that story to an anthology called Future Lovecraft if I am able to complete it in time.  None of my Shanama stories are overtly Lovecraft, but squint just right and certain tales in the milieu will fit in that mold.

Next comes Bakhara, the middle tale in the Elegant Threat sequence, in which the reader gets to travel to Oasis, including the city of Dar al-Salam and the holy site of Rub al-Ghali.

Please join me on this journey.  Grab your pre-order copy HERE along with a slew of extras!  This is a limited offer for the first 100 people to take the leap.  Please help us meet this goal.  The small press is struggling right now, and this is an awesome and unique venue for SF at the novella length.  If you will go out on a limb and buy the Double, give us a bit of your faith that we're right and this is a good idea... I believe you will be rewarded with two fantastic stories.

Thanks for your support.

Brandon