Series to the left of me, series to the right.  Every book seems to be part of a series today. Readers who prefer standalone novels are faced with what must seem like endless series books, from trilogies to never-ending sagas with 20, 30, or more volumes. I’ve contributed to this trend myself, with the nine books of my Crimson Worlds series and the fifteen (on the way to eighteen) for my Blood on the Stars series.

Why so many series?  

Well, there are a couple reasons. We’ll hit the obvious one first. Series make more sense for a writer from a business perspective. From built-in readership for subsequent installments to the ability to promote multiple books at once, authors find it far easier to build true careers writing series.

That’s a little mercenary, perhaps, but it’s far from the only reason. Series wouldn’t be more lucrative without one unavoidable fact: Most readers love them. There are a lot of advantages to longer stories, narratives that unfold gradually over a larger number of books. The ability to more deeply develop characters and storylines is vastly increased over a longer series. It’s hard to imagine if Game of Thrones would have become the cultural phenomenon it did if it had been a single book and one two-hour movie that came and went.

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Readers become attached to characters, and they want to see their stories completed.  

They want to learn more about settings and fictional universes. It’s a lot easier to dive right into a new story that also has some familiarity, some understanding in place when the eyes settle on page one.

Series are nothing new, of course. From the early days with things like the Lensman series through the years to Poul Anderson’s Technic series (and its James Bond in space hero, Dominic Flandry) and beyond to David Weber and the lengthy and beloved Honor Harrington epic, series have always been with us. The move in recent years to faster publication and reduced wait times for new books has enhanced the appeal of these longer tales, eliminating in many cases the wait of a year or more between volumes.

Many stories go on because readers still want more, even years after an author believed a series was finished, and in some cases, even after the original creator has passed away.  

Classic stories like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Frank Herbert’s Dune have continued decades after the original books were written.

The series juggernaut isn’t going away anytime soon, so dig through the books that cross your path, find a story that grabs your attention, and settle in for a long and wild ride.

Jay Allan is a USA Today bestselling author of roughly 30 science fiction and fantasy books, including the bestselling Blood on the Stars series, Crimson Worlds series and the Far Stars trilogy published by HarperCollins Voyager.

A lifetime northeasterner, Jay currently lives in New York City, where he writes from his apartment…and continues to fill small notebooks with ideas for future books.

He has been a voracious reader of science fiction and fantasy for many years, a writer of the same far more recently. His tastes are varied and eclectic, but most often he will be found reading military and dystopian science fiction, space opera, alternate history, and epic fantasy. He is also an avid historian, and is as likely to be reading non-fiction as a novel.

Jay writes a lot of science fiction with military themes, but also other SF and some fantasy as well. His works tend to feature complex characters and lots of backstory and action, always with an emphasis on world-building and extensive detail.

Join Jay's reader group on Facebook to keep up with the latest in his work.

I arrived at a rather unenviable and hopefully “once in a lifetime” position recently—having accurately predicted the novel coronavirus now sweeping the globe. 

It’s an inexplicably eerie feeling. A pandemic is not something you ever hope to be “right about.” You hope it never happens. Unfortunately, one of my greatest fears has come true. A fear with its roots firmly planted in my first novel, The Jakarta Pandemic (TJP for short), published ten years ago.

The idea for TJP sprang from an already unhealthy obsession with viral outbreaks. Captain Trips from Stephen King’s epic, The Stand, was burned into my psyche from an early age. I burned through The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton in a single sitting. The book Hot Zone by Richard Preston and movie Outbreak was like a one-two punch, released a year apart in 1994-95. The movie 28 Days Later in 2002. Max Brooks brilliant novel, World War Z a few years after that. I couldn’t get enough of these stories. And then the Swine Flu pandemic hit in 2008! Looking back, it should have come as no surprise to anyone, especially me, that my first stab at writing a novel would center around a pandemic. 

However, despite my initial enthusiasm—the project barely got off the ground. The usual first time, part time writer challenges applied. Didn’t know what I was doing and wasn’t sure it would be worth the effort. Limited time to write. Busy with two young kids. Everything got in the way, but the biggest delay came from what turned out to be the novel’s greatest strength.

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I spent at least six months researching past pandemics, virology, disease epidemiology, U.S. and world pandemic response protocols and detection capabilities, vaccine production, the U.S. healthcare and medical infrastructure, U.S essential services infrastructure, supply chain dynamics.

I consumed every article or paper publicly available that could help me understand the various impacts of a pandemic on society. I had hit what writers call “research paralysis,” where I was obsessed with collecting and digesting more information than I truly needed to write the novel.

When I finally broke through to the other side, I decided to tell the story differently. I steered away from the heroic CDC scientist hopping from one jet to another to reach the next hot zone or the critical response team fighting against all odds to stay one step ahead of the pandemic. Instead, I focused on a single family’s tense and claustrophobic struggle to stay alive during the most lethal pandemic in recorded human history. Of course, I threw way more at them than an unseen virus. Society collapses in my novel (along with nearly all essential services), pitting neighbor against neighbor in a vicious struggle to survive.

What does this have to do with me predicting the COVID19 Pandemic? 

Fast forward ten years from the publication of The Jakarta Pandemic to January of this year. Without going into exhaustive detail (I’ve already taken up enough of your time)—YOU DON’T LOCKDOWN AN ENTIRE CITY OF 11 MILLION PEOPLE FOR THE SEASONAL FLU. I had been watching the virus news closely when Wuhan was locked down by Chinese authorities, noting that the first case detected in the U.S. a few days earlier, had recently returned from a trip to Wuhan. That was all I needed to know.

Interested in going deeper into Steve's thoughts about the current Covid-19 situation? You can read about the rest of his Paul Revere ride through the coronavirus pandemic on his personal blog HERE. 

Steven Konkoly is the USA Today bestselling author of over twenty novels and novellas.

His canon of THRILLERS includes: the FRACTURED STATE books, a “24-style,” near future conspiracy series set in the southwest United States; the BLACK FLAGGED books, a gritty, no-holds barred covert operations and espionage saga; and the ALEX FLETCHER books, a tense, thriller epic, chronicling the aftermath of an inconceivable attack on the United States. He recently released HOT ZONE, the first book in a thriller series chronicling the events surrounding a bioweapons attack against the United States.

You can contact Steven directly by email or through his blog.

"You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of one's fears and the summit of one's knowledge. You are now traveling through a dimension of imagination. You just crossed over... into the Twilight Zone."

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Overall, if you’re already paying a subscription fee for CBS, then it’s worth picking through the remake to find the jewels. If I had to rate both seasons together, I’d give the remake a 6/10. But the individual episodes rise both above and below that average. If you’d like a more detailed guide, here are my individual ratings and comments:

Author – Joe Haldeman

I’ll start by plagiarizing a meme (if that’s possible) and say:

The Forever War is the granddaddy of today’s Military Scifi genre. Change my mind. 

Of course, you’d say, ‘Well, there’s Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.’

And I’d reply:

Starship Troopers is the great-granddaddy of today’s Military Scifi genre. Change my mind. 

I’ll cover Starship Troopers in my next Classic Review. Today, it’s going to be The Forever War.

First, a little history. I bought this book in paperback twice. Once back in the 80s because I loved the title, once in the 90s because it had a different cover, and I didn’t realize it was the same book. Unfortunately, I used to buy a lot more books than I had time to read them (that really hasn’t changed), so I never read either until much later. At the time, I thought it was a fantastic book.

The copy I purchased this time around was the audiobook, and that’s what I’ll be reviewing here.

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A little about the narration:

The audiobook was recorded in 1999, and to me, the audio quality sounded just a tad substandard. Perhaps that was all in my imagination. It didn’t, however, inhibit my ability to understand the narrator at all. He read clearly, with excellent diction. He was just a tad dry for my tastes. I did, however, listen at 150% speed. Was that the narrator's style, or the story making me want to hurry it along? I can’t say. But at 150%, it worked for me.

On to the story: I loved it the first time I read it.

I’ve recommended the story to my friends for years. This time around, I thought it was thoroughly okay.

It is Military SciFi, but it is not a high-action story. Of course, there are space battles, even the big climactic throw-down at the end—very satisfying. But, the military action is a bit sparse when compared to many of the more modern books I’ve read in the genre.

So, what do you get instead of rock’em-sock’em war? 

Well, you get a lengthy newbie soldier training sequence. That’s a pretty standard trope in many military stories before the hero(es) goes off to war. You also get a heaping helping of world-building, a world that needs to get built and rebuilt several times because the author chooses to tell his story in a hybrid FTL universe.

What I mean by this is that one of the things authors have to consider when they sit down to write a space opera of any sort, is whether faster than light (FTL) travel occurs in their new universe. The choice carries significant implications for the story that develops. In The Forever War, Haldeman employs ‘collapsars’ the same way wormholes are employed in more modern fiction, as gates through which space travelers can jump from one area of the galaxy to another. For journeys in areas where no collapsar is in the vicinity, travelers in Haldeman’s books move at some significant fraction of the speed of light. Hence, time dilates. So, soldiers go off to battle and come back decades or centuries later. Haldeman squeezes this set of circumstances for lots of pretty interesting chapters, many of which have to do with explaining a world a hundred or several hundred years in the future.

Overall, it’s a good book — worth a read.

A few notes I should mention, however: Haldeman, through his character’s voice, does offer up an editorialized point of view on many of society’s changes. Perfectly fine, we all do it. That’s part of the fun of being an author. However, a few points arise in the book, one where female soldiers were required to sexually service their male counterparts, and one where homosexuality was portrayed as a choice, not a genetic outcome. He presents both of these without the irony that his character seems to view nearly everything else. That seemed a tad odd to me, as though Haldeman were presenting both as natural beliefs. I don’t agree with any point of view where such things are natural, at the same time, I’m not one to get offended by much. But if you, as a reader, are, then beware, there may be a few other pitfalls for your sensibilities wrapped into the text of the story.

Bobby Adair

* If you feel like I’ve been unnecessarily harsh on a masterpiece, or too easy on a terrible POS, please read my Disclaimers, Caveats, and Excuses page before you flame me.

Bobby Adair is a former programmer, with a long-lived passion - and only recently fulfilled desire - for writing.  He is the author of the Freedom Fire series, the Slow Burn series and the Ebola K series.

One of Bobby's favorite quotes:

“It’s not just about me and my dream of doing nothing. It’s about all of us...Michael, we don’t have a lot of time on this earth! We weren’t meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about about mission statements.”
- Peter Gibbons, Office Space