Sci-Friday: An Invitation, a Publishing Opportunity

or, come write with me

Writing is a weird hobby. I’ve always thought this. I’ve even written about it before. But writing is also a lot of fun and one thing that I think gives it the potential to be even more fun is to make it an open invitation to join in on the action.

With that in mind, I formally and officially invite writers to take part in the worlds I’m making.

I’m specifically talking about The Shattered Stars and the Howling Earth series.

Why are you doing this?

I’ve always been very interested in collaborative storytelling and especially in big sandboxes where lots of artists can play around. I’ve also been doing research on Warhammer 40k for no good reason and I like the ethos there, at least in terms of what it means for an artist/writer to take part in that world.

And since I quietly build these worlds all the time, I thought it would be fun to just open the door on some of these for other people. Especially since people are reading these books and, presumably, enjoying them.

Why not let you become an active part in the world you’re reading?

Also, I know there are a lot of people who always want to write a novel, and so this may give you the scaffolding to hop in and tell your own stories without having to do all the worldbuilding that may be intimidating, depending on your disposition.

Think of this as an opportunity for collaboration but also publication.

If you’re serious about this, I’ll work with you not just on the front end but also on editing and preparing for publication.

Upon publication, all royalties are yours. I’ll be taking a 0% cut.

And, no, that is not a typo.

The Shattered Stars

This is the space opera series I’m cowriting with Kyle Muntz under the KE Wolfe pseudonym. So far, we’ve written seven of these books and published three, with the fourth book coming out in two weeks(!).

You can read them here:

• Colony Collapse

• The Blood Dancers

• Sleeping Giants

Part of making this world was also creating a very large universe and timeline for this all to exist in. And since The Shattered Stars is focused on a single crew on a single ship in a far distant future, there’s a lot of room for others to begin playing around in the playground I made.

With that in mind, here is the background to the series:

As Climate Change makes earth less and less habitable, corporations invest heavily in extraterrestrial travel.

Technology corporations go all in on AI. AI then begins accelerating its own development and evolution. AI come up with FTL capable engines and ships.

Great Ark Ships are built in the USA, Europe, and China to take colonists into the stars.

Most of humanity is left behind to deal with an increasingly uninhabitable earth.

Humanity takes to the stars on long journeys to different points. Onboard AI identifies likely targets for habitation and develops terraforming technologies. Of the 33 Ark Ships, 27 make landfall within 20 lightyears of earth.

The remaining 6 are lost.

The 27 known earth colonies make contact with one another as quickly as possible and form a federated structure of cooperation, which develops into an ad hoc form of supergovernment. Trade and travel treaties are signed. The AI across the colonies develop the Ansible technology which allows for instantaneous communication between planets, which leads to further cooperation.

Generations go by as the planets develop both independently and dependently. Most colonies are very authoritarian in nature to allow for the supergovernment to function. More and more of government and daily life becomes reliant upon the AI. These lead to tensions on most of the 27 colonies, with opposition parties and revolutions becoming a more common aspect of life on the colonies as populations increase and habitable land increases. 

Over the course of the next century, several of the colonies break off communication with the other colonies. Then, without warning, the AI abandons humanity. The federated colonies splinter further due to the sudden instability caused by the loss of the AI. 

For centuries, the colonies develop independently and separately. Travel and trade between colonies continues but becomes more dangerous, more profitable, and less acceptable, as long-distance traders effectively travel through time (spending weeks or months in Deep-Slow between planets while years or decades happen to everyone else). 

Some planets become completely habitable while others contain only geographic pockets of humanity. This leads to some human civilizations to embrace bio-engineering to adapt the species more to the planet. This creates further divisions and differences between colonies, with certain species of humanity becoming distinctly alien to other human species.

Some colonies completely abandon the stars while others develop imperial aims, hoping to remake the federation that united humanity.

There’s a lot of fertile ground here for stories! Whether you want to write about the birth of the AI, humanity’s flight from Earth, the establishment of a colony, the unification of humanity across the stars, or any other pocket of interest, the playground is open.

My only asks are two:

• Come talk it over with me. I’m pretty flexible with the worldbuilding but we’ll want to avoid any potential confusion.

• Don’t use the time period or characters from The Shattered Stars. Feel like this is pretty simple and straightforward and hopefully obvious. We’re writing this right now. Please don’t step on our toes.

The Howling Earth

This is my lofi sword and sorcery cyberpunk vampire hunting series. If you’re following along in the books, you get the deal.

You can read them here:

• Howl

• Iron Wolf

• Broken Katana

But the world is vast and weird and wild and open to just about anything.

Here’s the background on the series:

In 1999, the moon cracked in half. The cracked off half fell to earth, landing on Jerusalem, and effectively wiped out life for a thousand miles and kicked up enough dust in the atmosphere to occlude the sun for a year leading to mass starvation.

The crater left behind by the moon crashing down formed a desert, which gradually bloomed into strange new plants over the course of a century. A lunar forest grew. Black trees with purple leaves towering over the landscape. From the forest emerged a breed of wolves the size of a grizzly bear.

The scattered remains of humanity fell backwards and forwards through technology. Governments collapsed and society reformed in a mix of Mad Max and solarpunk communes. In this way, dystopias and utopias rise and clash and fall right alongside one another, with new syncretic cults and religions forming and branching off in different directions. Some treat the lunar forest as a mecca with the wolves as new gods. Others believe it’s a curse.

The lunar dust of the desert/forest contains strange quantum qualities. This leads to what can more or less be defined as magic, but also techniques that revolutionize bioengineering. 

Lots of rogue biohackers turning themselves into mutants while others dig through the husks of civilization and pull out 20th century technology that gets innovated and twisted in new ways. 

And so the world is chaotic and wild and often empty. Magic is real but so are theoretical technologies that you might see in something like Ghost in the Shell. Maybe people have turned themselves into vampires or werewolves. Strange new creatures emerge from the lunar forest.

Whether you see any of this while reading Howl, Iron Wolf, and Broken Katana, it’s all hanging out beneath the surface. But I’ve also hinted at a much wider world for stories and peoples.

I’ll repeat the same asks above:

• Talk to me

• Don’t use my characters

If you like the sounds of this, reach out to me at ejrathke at gmail or just reply to this in your email.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be releasing outlines for potential books for other people to write, which is always fun.

In the meantime, follow these other fine folk to get more out of Sci-Friday:

@Andrew Smith @Dré Labre @Kevin Alexander @Rudy Fischmann @BrianAlfred1983 @Alejandro Piad Morffis @Joe Mayall @Kathryn Vercillo @Alex S. Garcia @Michael S. Atkinson @Ross Bingham @Scoot @Lausanne Davis Carpenter @Cole Noble @Jordan Moloney @Edward Rooster @Redd Oscar @Jon T @JR Clover @Jeff Kinnard @Daniel M. Bensen