Tag Archives: Breakpoint: Nereis

Breakpoint: Nereis is part of the Bundoran Buddies Sci-Fi Bundle

Breakpoint: Nereis is currently keeping excellent company in the Bundoran Buddies StoryBundle, which offers bundles of four or twelve books published by Bundoran Press, or by Canadian authors, available for the rest of January (2019).

The basic bundle, for $5, consists of four books in any ebook format,

  • Valor’s Choice by Tanya Huff
  • Template by Matthew Hughes
  • The Cyanide Process by Jennifer Rahn
  • Right to Know by Edward Willett

For the bonus price of $15, you get all four of the regular books, plus eight more!

  • Frameshift by Robert J. Sawyer
  • Nexus by Ramez Naam
  • vN – The First Machine Dynasty by Madeline Ashby
  • Breakpoint Nereis by Alison Sinclair
  • Stars Like Cold Fire by Brent Nichols
  • Fall From Earth by Matthew Johnson
  • Organisms – Selected Stories by James Alan Gardner
  • Transient City by Al Onia

All the details are available at the Bundoran Buddies StoryBundle, and by Hayden Trenholm at Bundoran Press’ blog.

Hayden is also publishing a series of blog posts by the authors included in the bundle. Mine is–ahem! still on my hard drive.

Catching up: February-April, 2014

Derek Newman-Stille interviewed me for his Speculating Canada blog. Derek has published an academic paper about and presented at conferences on the Darkborn trilogy, and he asks good, probing questions.

I was one of the readers at ChiSeries Ottawa on March 18, 2014, whereupon I discovered it is indeed possible to go to Ottawa and back in an evening (It was a Tuesday, I had a Wednesday morning meeting, and the 0625 train held very little appeal). The piece I read was the follow-on to the posted section of Breakpoint:Nereis. And it's on YouTube.

I was invited to speak at the Ampersand 2014 conference (theme Science(Fiction)) here at McGill on March 22, 2014.

I went to Ad Astra 2014, April 4-6, 2014, and launched a book!

My wandering starship finds a small press home

Old news, now, in this social networked age, but two of the three novels I wrote between Cavalcade and Darkborn have found a home with Bundoran Press, a Canadian small press. Their (current) titles are Breakpoint: Nereis, which is due out in April 2014 (in time for LonCon3, hurray!), and Contagion: Eyre, currently scheduled for April 2015.

When asked what they are about, I have described them somewhat cheekily as “Star Trek meets medicine.” They concern the voyages of the 50-person starship Waiora (one of nine) on a mixed humanitarian and diplomatic mission to re-contact human colonies in the aftermath of a plague that collapsed an interplanetary human civilization. Their purpose is twofold, to try and ensure the immediate survival of the colonies they contact, and investigate the source and nature of the plague.

Sounds straightforward, right?

But the people on the surviving colonies have their own ideas about what they want, and they’re not shy about asserting them. Aeron Ivesen wants her lands back and its invaders defeated. Creon McIntyre will do anything to ensure his people’s freedom and survival. The history of colonization has left its own legacy of bitterness and distrust, and the sponsoring colonies of the mission are anything but united. And two of the crew of Waiora have a separate agenda that could threaten the whole mission.

Draft 2 (and rantlet)

I now have a complete Draft 2 of Graveyards of Nereis, pending spellcheck and proof-read. Though spellcheck is a doleful prospect. My default spelling is British, since it was in Scotland that spelling was drummed into me, as far as it went. (Much rewriting of misspelled words; much learning of synonyms to circumvent use of certain words, such as ‘receive’). But I’m using MS Word. And I’m writing SF. There are going to be a lot of squiggly red underlines to pick through, with trips to my old red Chambers or my newer Collins as final arbiter, because I am not a confident speller, and I don’t dare put anything into the spellchecker memory without verification. But I won’t let MS Word grammar check for me. I am a law-abiding person, but grammar must be subordinated to (a) sense and (b) sound and rhythm. To take an example, some sentences simply need the softness of ‘which’ in them; ‘that’ is just too harsh if the other words in the sentence are soft ones, or I am trying to characterize the speaker as someone gentle or diffident. And I will resist to my last misplaced comma the devolution of the wonderful, supple, quirky English language into a form dictated by the programmers at Microsoft!