Where to Start
Monday, March 17, 2025 at 10:00am
I always keep five copies of each of my books on hand, so that if I find an interested reader, I have something to gift them. Since I decided to do my refresh, I’ve started looking for a home for my copies of all the current editions. I’ve had some takers, who should be receiving their books very shortly.
A couple of questions are common: “What should I read first?” “Is there any order?”
I decided to write this down in one place to avoid repetition. It’s important to note that this is not an authorial dictum, by any means. I’m attempting to describe what each story or collection is like so that readers can choose what they might like most or might like to start with.
- My works can generally be divided into two “eras,” with three books existing in a weird, liminal space between them.
- Era 1 consists of Voyage Embarkation, Insomnium, and Alterra. Era 2 consists of Our Algorithm Who Art Perfection, The Other, Intersection Thirteen and Chronicles of Ytria. The three in-between books are Schrödinger’s City, Transmutations, and The Shipwright and Other Stories.
- Era 1 books are very much focused around adventure, self-discovery and developing self-knowledge. The tone is positive and hopeful. Era 2, by contrast, is much less rosy. Hope for a better future has been replaced by hope that some people somewhere will make something like a society worth living in for a time, however brief. There is a lot less adventure and a lot more study of how people live and interact with one another. The in-between books have elements of both eras.
- Schrödinger’s City is easy to recommend as a first book to just about any sf or fantasy reader. It has elements of adventure. It has its moments of humor. It has its serious moments. I still love its variety of characters, their trials, their troubles, the story’s movements.
- The Shipwright and Other Stories is a close runner up, but I have some caveats as to the kind of reader who will like it. It’s fantasy rather than science fiction, first of all. Second of all, I set out to build a fantasy world around exactly one fantastical conceit: the world has three moons instead of one. That’s it. It was an exercise is fantastical minimalism. I love the world and its characters. No magic or monsters (except those imagined by the inhabitants to exist), but I was able to do so much with that. If you like Le Guin-style fantasy worlds, I suspect you will like this book.
- I don’t do series. Sort of. There’s one exception here. Alterra and The Other have overlapping settings, albeit 120 years apart. They can be read in either order. The Other contains some very light references to Alterra, but they’re not crucial for understanding the story. The two novels also have thematic overlap. They’re both about social ideologies that become destructive. In Alterra, it’s the conflict between religion and science. In The Other, it’s political factionalism and xenophobia.
- My short story collection Transmutations has abundant diversity of style, theme, mood, and tone. Many of the stories there are very short. It’s a good choice if you want to sample a large variety of my work quickly.
- If you liked Star Trek’s concept of the “prime directive,” check out Chronicles of Ytria. I decided to throw a twist on it.
There’s a question that, I think, naturally arises from this rough guide: “Will your new works going forward constitute a third phase of your writing?”
It’s impossible to answer that question before I’ve written anything new. However, I suspect the answer is yes. And, also interestingly, I think my novel draft When the Gods Wish to Punish will end up being yet another transitional work, if I decide to publish it.
