I was first introduced to him with Dread Empire's Fall series which has one of the more realistic space battles between capital ships. There was a long gap between the first trilogy (2002 - 2005) and the second (2018 - 2022).
Some of the ending of a trilogy is tiding up ends in a faster way that could have been left open if there was more certainty of the full arc, but I like it and it challenges a lot of the standard tropes of military science fiction.
> Where did you get the original idea for The Accidental War and how different is the finished novel from that initial concept?
> The story hasn’t changed much since I first worked out the series arc eighteen or so years ago. I had always planned to write nine to twelve books in the series, but the publisher decided to end the series after the third book [Conventions Of War] due to disappointing sales.
> But those original books just kept selling. Initial sales weren’t spectacular, but the books kept going through one reprinting after another, and they never went out of print. Finally, years later, a new editor looked at the cumulative sales and made an offer for the books I would have happily written fifteen years ago.
I like that the characters are all self serving characters with various grays of morality that are self serving in different ways.
Thank you. When I think of completely different takes, I think of “The Golden Oecumene” trilogy by John C. Wright: “The Golden Age”, “The Phoenix Exultant”, and “The Golden Transcendence”.
Also, these are not to be missed:
- “The Fall Revolution” tetralogy by Ken MacLeod: “The Star Fraction”, “The Stone Canal”, “The Cassini Division”, and “The Sky Road”
- “Void Star” by Zachary Mason
- “Singularity Sky” by Charles Stross
- “The Freeze-Frame Revolution” by Peter Watts
- “Perfekcyjna niedoskonałość” by Jacek Dukaj
- “A Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky” by Vernor Vinge
> My first two published SF novels, "Singularity Sky" and "Iron Sunrise", have a long and tangled history. And I figure it's probably worth (a) explaining why there won't be a third one in that particular series, and (b) spoilering the plot thread I had kicking around that would have been in the third Eschaton novel if I was going to write it.
Some of the ending of a trilogy is tiding up ends in a faster way that could have been left open if there was more certainty of the full arc, but I like it and it challenges a lot of the standard tropes of military science fiction.
https://paulsemel.com/exclusive-interview-the-accidental-war...
> Where did you get the original idea for The Accidental War and how different is the finished novel from that initial concept?
> The story hasn’t changed much since I first worked out the series arc eighteen or so years ago. I had always planned to write nine to twelve books in the series, but the publisher decided to end the series after the third book [Conventions Of War] due to disappointing sales.
> But those original books just kept selling. Initial sales weren’t spectacular, but the books kept going through one reprinting after another, and they never went out of print. Finally, years later, a new editor looked at the cumulative sales and made an offer for the books I would have happily written fifteen years ago.
I like that the characters are all self serving characters with various grays of morality that are self serving in different ways.