Joe Vasicek is the author of more than twenty science fiction books, including the Star Wanderers and Sons of the Starfarers series. As a young man, he studied Arabic and traveled across the Middle East and the Caucasus. He claims Utah as his home.
Tim Alberino is a really fascinating guy. It’s like he watched Indiana Jones as a kid, and decided “that’s who I want to be when I grow up.” And then he did!
In this interview, he discusses Biblical giants that the US military may or may not have encountered in Afghanistan (it’s highly classified), Peruvian face peelers, and some other freaky stuff. Really interesting.
This is an excerpt from my poetry collection, Scam Poetry: HAIku, and was written by an AI scambot via personal email. To order your own copy of the full collection, follow the links below.
Readers gather close,
Your words linger in their minds.
December awaits.Five authors stand out,
Your story among the stars,
Will you take your place?December draws near,
A brief word will guide our plans;
Your reply awaited.
These poems demonstrate admirable discipline. The syllables arrive on time. The seasonal reference is consistent. December is named with confidence and returns faithfully, like an automated reminder.
The opening image—“Readers gather close”—suggests intimacy. This is promising. One briefly anticipates a moment of shared warmth against the cold. Regrettably, this gathering exists only to justify anticipation of what comes next. The readers do not linger; they wait.
The repetition of December is especially instructive. In classical haiku, winter often signals withdrawal, quiet, or cessation. Here, December functions as a narrowing corridor. Time does not open; it presses.
The phrase “Five authors stand out” is particularly striking. Numbers rarely intrude so nakedly into haiku. One senses the poet is experimenting boldly with enumeration. The result is… memorable.
It must be acknowledged that the poems exhibit a strong thematic unity. All three arrive at the same emotional posture: expectancy. This consistency is impressive. Consistency is difficult.
However, it is difficult to ignore that nothing in these poems ever truly happens. No snow falls. No breath is taken. No moment completes itself. Each haiku ends as it began—slightly inclined forward, hands politely extended.
One does not feel that the poet has met December. Only that December has been scheduled.
This is understandable. Waiting is uncomfortable. Silence is difficult. Letting the moment pass without extracting value from it requires great patience.
Still, one hesitates to call this haiku.
Rather, these are messages that have learned to stand very still for seventeen syllables.
What happens when you respond to spam emails by asking the AI scambot to write haiku? You get the most unusual poetry collection ever published. Author Joe Vasicek turned the tables on modern email scammers by hijacking their AI agents and transforming their marketing pitches into Japanese poetry. But the experiment took an unexpected turn: when he started sharing ChatGPT's hilariously polite critiques with the scambots, they actually learned to write better haiku. The result is a wild journey from terrible verse to surprisingly genuine poetry, proving that even artificial intelligence can stumble into art when properly trolled.
What does it cost to keep your family safe when your planet is under occupation and war has come to your doorstep? In this character-driven space opera about resistance, family loyalty, and moral responsibility, protection stops being a private instinct and becomes a dangerous, public act. Children of the Starry Sea is built around that question: not whether family is worth protecting—but how much you are willing to risk, lose, or become in order to do it.
I wanted to write a space opera that treated family not as background motivation, but as the central pressure point of the story. Instead of focusing only on fleets and empires, I asked: what does interstellar occupation feel like at the dinner table? In a child’s bedroom? In the split second when a parent has to decide whether to run, hide, resist—or trust? As the opening novel of The Outworld Trilogy, this book establishes the emotional and moral foundation for a larger interstellar conflict that unfolds across the series.
In Children of the Starry Sea, nearly every major decision flows from someone trying to shield the people they love.
Parents take risks they would never take for themselves. They lie, improvise, and step into danger because the alternative is unthinkable. Characters who might otherwise stay cautious find themselves hacking systems, negotiating with enemies, or joining fragile resistance networks—not because they crave heroism, but because someone smaller and more vulnerable depends on them.
But protection isn’t clean. It isn’t just bravery. It comes with tradeoffs. Seeking safety can draw unwanted attention to innocent communities. Rescuing one person may endanger another. Holding your family close may require you to let something else go—status, security, reputation, even pieces of your own identity. The story continually asks whether protecting your own can ever be separated from responsibility toward the wider human family.
That tension—between private love and public consequence—is what drives the emotional core of the novel. The political conflict matters. The empire matters. But what truly raises the stakes is that every strategic move has a face attached to it. A child. A spouse. A parent. The war is never abstract. It is always personal.
At its heart, this theme reflects something deeply human: love makes us brave—but it also makes us vulnerable. The people we cherish most are the very ones who can be used to control or break us. And yet, we keep loving anyway.
Stories about parents protecting children and families holding together under pressure resonate because they mirror our own fears and hopes. We all understand, instinctively, that safety is fragile. That stability can vanish. That sometimes the only thing we truly control is what we are willing to sacrifice for someone else. Children of the Starry Sea suggests that while protection has a cost, love is still worth paying it—because it is the one thing occupation, fear, and violence cannot fully erase. In an era when many readers are drawn to found family stories, resistance narratives, and emotionally grounded science fiction, this theme speaks directly to that hunger for stories where love—not power—is the true source of courage.
When I wrote this book, I was thinking a great deal about responsibility—about what it means to be entrusted with other lives. In the author’s note, I talk about how real-life transitions and uncertainties shaped the emotional undercurrent of the story. I wasn’t interested in writing power fantasy. I wanted to write about burden. About the quiet, relentless weight of trying to do right by the people who depend on you.
For me, Children of the Starry Sea is ultimately about hope that survives fear—not because circumstances are easy, but because love makes endurance possible. It is a family-centered space opera that insists courage begins at home.
Children of the Starry Sea is a character-driven space opera about the cost of protecting your family when an empire takes control of your world. Set on a contested colony and orbiting space station, this second book in The Outworld Trilogy blends political tension, intimate family drama, and high-stakes escape into a story about courage under pressure. This is science fiction that cares as much about parents and children as it does about fleets, invasions, and interstellar power struggles.
If you love…
…then Children of the Starry Sea is probably your kind of story.
Children of the Starry Sea follows Jeremiah, Reva, Mariya, Isaiah, and Salome as their colony and orbital station fall under the control of the Hameji—an expansionist empire determined to enforce submission. Pirates resurface, political negotiations turn coercive, and secret escape plans unfold under constant surveillance. At the same time, the mysterious collective consciousness that binds Reva and Isaac raises urgent questions about identity, assimilation, and belonging. The emotional journey moves from fear and disorientation to quiet resolve and sacrificial courage. The result is a tense but intimate space opera—fast-paced in moments of infiltration and escape, reflective in scenes of family, faith, and moral choice—about standing firm when everything familiar is stripped away.
Fans of traditional military space opera will recognize invasions, political negotiations, and resistance efforts—but this story takes those elements in a deeply personal direction. Where many science fiction invasion stories focus primarily on fleet battles and tactical maneuvers, Children of the Starry Sea leans into the domestic and moral cost of occupation: dinner tables under surveillance, parents negotiating with conquerors, teenagers stepping into adulthood too soon.
Readers who enjoy layered ensemble casts will appreciate the shifting perspectives between parents, children, and outsiders—especially the unique thread of the collective consciousness that shapes Reva and Isaac’s storyline. Instead of framing assimilation as pure horror, the novel explores belonging, identity, and agency in unexpected ways, making it both intellectually and emotionally distinctive within modern indie space opera. Where many science fiction stories treat hive minds as purely monstrous, this novel explores collective consciousness as both gift and danger—complicating the usual invasion narrative with questions of agency, consent, and chosen belonging.
You won’t find grimdark nihilism, graphic brutality, or cynical antiheroes. While the stakes are high and the threat is real, this is not a hopeless dystopia. Violence has consequences, and moral choices matter. If you’re looking for relentless darkness or shock-value storytelling, this may not be the right fit.
This story matters to me because it explores something I think science fiction doesn’t always take seriously enough: the quiet, daily courage of families under pressure. At its heart, Children of the Starry Sea is about parents learning when to protect and when to let go, about teenagers stepping into adulthood too soon, and about holding onto faith and identity when larger powers try to define your future for you. Finishing this novel required persistence and trust—much like the characters themselves must learn. If you care about science fiction where family is central rather than incidental, I think this book will stay with you.
Freedom isn’t the ability to choose whatever you want, Isaiah. It’s the freedom to choose what is right.
Children of the Starry Sea by Joe Vasicek
Moving Mars by Greg Bear
Glory Season by David Brin
Virtual Light by William Gibson
Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
(Abstain)
None of these books/authors are so terrible (or so woke) (except maybe for Kim Stanley Robinson) that I would have ranked them below “no award.” With that said, I just didn’t think any of these books were good enough for me to vote for.
Greg Bear’s Moving Mars is basically a sci-fi retelling of the 60s student protest movement on Mars. That’s the big draw. The more I learn about what was actually happening in the 60s, though, the more insufferable I find the hippies and their ideological descendants to be. Needless to say, I DNFed this one.
I skipped the book by David Brin, because he’s just such a dogmatic atheist. I tried his Uplift books and DNFed them for much the same reason. If you’re going to be so dogmatic in your religious views that you cannot build a fictional world where the opposite views might plausibly be true, I have no time for you. That’s equally true for theists as for atheists (unless, of course, the book falls into the religious fiction genre).
I tried Virtual Light, but DNFed it only a couple of pages in, due to some explicit violence against children. Now that I’m a father, I have a really low tolerance for that kind of stuff. I’ve also found Gibson to be a bit too dark and gritty for my taste. He seems to occupy the same literary niche as Neal Stephenson, and rub me wrong in much the same way.
It’s been so long since I DNFed Beggars in Spain that I’ve forgotten what my issue with it was. I found the basic premise to be quite interesting, and got about halfway through the book. Ultimately, though, I think I just got bored with it. But I might come back to this one. Of all the books on the Hugo ballot this year, this is the one I’m most willing to try again.
As for Green Mars, I just couldn’t get into it. Part of that is how insufferable I find KSR’s self-righteous liberal politics to be, but another part was the sexual content in the first few pages. I read Red Mars back in college, when my threshold for those kind of content issues was much lower, but I did come very close to DNFing it after the farm orgy scene. Also, Red Mars was a bit of a slog for my younger self, since I never really latched on to any of the characters. Same with Green Mars. Just a lot of people doing a lot of things, when it was clear that all the (crunchy liberal) author really cared about was the capital “I” Idea. Pass.
Trust is one of the few things that can’t be taken by force—and one of the easiest things to destroy. Captives in Obscurity, the fifth book in the Sons of the Starfarers series, asks a difficult question: what happens when survival demands obedience, but obedience comes at the cost of trust? This novel explores how quickly trust can be violated under pressure—and how hard it is to rebuild once that line has been crossed.
The idea for this theme grew out of thinking about captivity that isn’t just physical. History is full of situations where people were “protected,” “unified,” or “kept safe” through fear and coercion—and where trust was replaced with enforced loyalty. I was interested in exploring what happens after that line is crossed: when characters realize that something essential has been taken from them, and that getting it back may cost more than they expect.
At the heart of Captives in Obscurity is a fragile community forced to survive under constant threat. Characters must decide who they can rely on, what information to share, and how much control is too much—even when the stakes are life and death. Again and again, the story presents situations where violating trust seems expedient, even necessary, but leaves lasting damage in its wake.
Rather than treating betrayal as a single dramatic moment, the novel shows trust eroding through small compromises, rationalizations, and “temporary” measures. The real danger isn’t just external enemies—it’s what happens inside a group when fear teaches people to hide, manipulate, or control one another. Survival becomes possible, but unity becomes fragile.
This theme reflects a truth many readers recognize: trust is slow to build and fast to break. When it’s violated—by institutions, leaders, or even people we love—the damage isn’t just emotional. It reshapes how we see the world, how we relate to others, and how much of ourselves we’re willing to risk again. Captives in Obscurity suggests that safety without trust may keep people alive, but it can’t make them whole.
While writing this book, I kept returning to the idea that good intentions don’t erase harm. Trust, once violated, can’t be restored through force or guilt—it requires humility, restraint, and a willingness to accept limits on power. That idea mattered to me personally, because it’s easy to justify crossing ethical lines when the pressure is high. This story is my attempt to wrestle honestly with where those lines should be, and what it costs when we ignore them.
Explore the series index for Sons of the Starfarers.
Return to the book page for Captives in Obscurity.
Captives in Obscurity (Sons of the Starfarers, Book 5) is a character-driven military space opera about survival under captivity, moral courage under pressure, and the terrifying intimacy of minds that can’t fully hide from each other. It delivers a tense, emotionally charged “trapped behind enemy lines” experience—part escape thriller, part relationship-and-conscience drama, with big series-arc implications kept mostly in the background.
If you love …
…then Captives in Obscurity is probably your kind of story.
Captives in Obscurity follows Isaac—isolated, exhausted, and stripped of control—while he and Reva navigate life as prisoners aboard a pirate ship ruled by a charismatic, terrifying captain. As escape becomes less a single decision and more a long grind of endurance and strategy, the story digs into trauma, agency, guilt, and the cost of survival—especially when a strange telepathic connection (and something bigger behind it) makes privacy, consent, and trust painfully complicated. The result is a tense, gritty, emotional installment that feels intimate even when the stakes are cosmic.
Fans of loyalty-and-duty military SF will recognize the chain-of-command pressure and the “hold the line” mindset—but this book pushes the conflict inward, into the places where survival and conscience collide. Where many space opera captivity arcs focus mainly on tactics and jailbreak mechanics, Captives in Obscurity leans into the psychological and relational consequences: what it does to a person to be used, controlled, and forced to keep going anyway. And the telepathic / collective-consciousness element doesn’t just add cool sci-fi flavor—it turns trust into a battlefield and makes “escape” as emotional as it is physical.
This isn’t a light, quippy adventure, and it doesn’t treat trauma like set dressing. Content note: the book includes fallout from a prior sexual assault between major characters and engages directly with themes of consent and coercion (including the author’s note discussing why that was essential to the story). If you want space opera that stays far away from those topics, this one may not be a good fit.
This was one of the hardest books in the series for me to write—not because the plot wouldn’t cooperate, but because the emotional consequences had to be faced honestly. I wanted to tell a story where survival doesn’t erase harm, where “good guys vs. bad guys” isn’t always clean, and where people from radically different cultures can hurt each other even without intending to be monsters. If you like science fiction that uses its big ideas to put human conscience under a microscope—and still fights to earn hope on the other side—I think this book will stick with you.
Explore the series index for Sons of the Starfarers.
Return to the book page for Captives in Obscurity.
Now that we’re in a good daily routine again, I’ve been making steady progress in Captive of the Falconstar. I’m a little more than halfway done with the AI draft, and around 15% done with the human draft.
So far, there have been no major creative blocks, which is a good sign. The middle is always super messy, but I think I nailed the outline, because the AI draft has no major issues so far—and with a solid AI draft to guide the human writing, I’m consistently hitting 2500 WPH and higher.
In practice, that means that I should have a final polished draft of this book by the end of March. If I had more time to work on it each day, I’d have it done even sooner—perhaps even as soon as this month. But right now, all I can manage is about half an hour (if that) in the early morning, an hour in the evening, and sometimes as much as three or four hours on Saturday.
Not as much as I would like, but better than nothing. And without the way I use AI to generate a first draft, I probably wouldn’t be finished with this book until September or October, and it would be the only full-length novel I’d manage to publish all year. (Though realistically at that point, I’d probably have to go on indefinite hiatus and stop publishing altogether, until the kids grew up and left the house).
After Captive of the Falconstar is done, I plan to work on the human draft of The Soulbond and the Sling and the AI draft of The Soulbond and the Lady, until the first book is finished and ready to publish. But I won’t actually publish it until I have the first three books ready to go, since that way I’ll be able to rapid release the first trilogy.
Depending on how things go, I will probably put Captive of the Falconstar up for pre-order by the end of the month. I don’t usually do assetless pre-orders, but if I’m reasonably certain I can have the writing finished by the end of March, then I don’t see any reason not to give it a launch date and set things up to go. It will probably be available to read sometime in May or June.
I don’t know when I’ll have the third book of the trilogy finished, but if things go well with The Soulbound King series, there’s a chance it will be finished by the end of the year. I’ll probably finish writing The Unknown Sea before I move on to Lord of the Falconstar, just because I want to write and publish another Sea Mage Cycle book before the end of the year, but depending on how things go with Captive of the Falconstar, I might move the sequel up in the queue. Otherwise, it will probably come out sometime in early 2027.
