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.
They call them Velociraptors, but they’re really Utahraptors. The actual Velociraptor was only the size of a Labrador or a German Shepherd.
My kids are really into dinosaurs right now, so we’ve been going to all the local museums and checking out lots of dinosaur books from the library. As scary as the dinosaurs were in the original Jurassic Park, I think they’re even scarier with feathers.
Curiosity is one of the defining traits of all great people. It is the driving force behind every dreamer, and the imperative behind all those who seek to improve the lives of their fellow men.
The Sword Keeper by Joe Vasicek
The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke
On Wings of Song by Thomas M. Disch
Harpist in the Wind by Patricia A. McKillip
Jem by Frederik Pohl
Titan by John Varley
(Abstain)
I didn’t like any of the books this year, though none of them were particularly objectionable or bad (at least, not of the ones I read). The Fountains of Paradise just didn’t hold my interest, and I got bored and put it down. As for Harpist in the Wind, I never got to it because I ended up DNFing the first book in the trilogy, The Quest of the Riddle-Master. I wanted to like it, but I was just totally lost, especially when some of the characters were dead… maybe? Or maybe it was a dream? McKillip is clearly a beautiful writer, but writing a clear and engaging plot is clearly not her strength.
As for the other three, I screened them for objectionable content with AI, and based on that, I chose not to read them. I’ve found that I have to do this with all the Hugo Award nominees because some of the books are just way beyond the pale. On Wings of Song is apparently about a 14 year old child’s supernatural sexual awakening. Titan is apparently about a bunch of libertine, pansexual astronauts on a starship making first contact (in more ways than one) and spreading free love across the galaxy. Jem is apparently about the evils of colonialism and capitalism in a world where Malthus was right and Thomas Sowell is wrong (and you thought Ayn Rand’s preaching was bad).
1980 was the tail end of the New Wave, when science fiction went totally woke before “woke” was even a thing. But by this point, the movement was already starting to feel tired. It wasn’t until the mid-80s that a lot of these toxic ideologies were in full retreat, making room for some truly great books like Ender’s Game and Hyperion. At the same time, because the movement was already starting to burn itself out, none of these New Wave books is particularly terrible. Just more of the same tired thing.
Trouble Shooter by Louis L’Amour
The Irrational Decision by Benjamin Recht
On Writing & Failure by Stephen Marche
The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman
The Fellowship of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Seven Mountains Mandate by Matthew Boedy
Moroni’s America by Jonathan Neville
The AI-Driven Leader by Geoff Woods
The Lost Gems of Genesis by Jonah R. Barnes
The Man From the Broken Hills by Louis L’Amour
I just finished it this morning. The final draft clocks in at twelve chapters, 63 scenes, and 64,372 words (or approximately 220 pages, though I still need to typeset it). I’ll send it off to my editor later today.
Next WIP(s): The Soulbond and the Sling and The Soulbond and the Lady.
It’s been a while, but this discussion really blew me away when I first listened to it. The guest (and kudos to him for having a fair and honest debate) basically brought up all the typical libertarian talking points, and Tim Pool shredded all of them in a way that made my jaw hit the floor. The debate gets really interesting around 1:01:40.
What does it take for a woman to survive when every safe, familiar, and comfortable part of her life is stripped away? In Queen of the Falconstar, Zlata is not the strongest person in the room, the most powerful, or the most protected—but she is often the quickest to see the truth of a situation and adapt to it. Her story is about ruthless female competence: the kind of intelligence, self-control, ambition, and strategic courage that can turn captivity into opportunity.
The part of this story that excited me most from the beginning was Zlata herself. I wanted to write a heroine who was crafty, pragmatic, resourceful, slightly pessimistic, and above all realistic—someone who accepts the world as it is, even when that world is ugly, and prepares herself to deal with it accordingly. She is ruthless when she needs to be, but not because she enjoys cruelty. Her ruthlessness comes from clarity: she sees what is happening, measures the danger, and does what she believes must be done. That made her a fascinating character to follow into a story full of slavery, sex, power, polygamy, captivity, and survival—dark material that I struggled for years to handle tastefully, but couldn’t quite let go.
At the beginning of Queen of the Falconstar, Zlata is trapped in a small, stagnant world where competence is useful but unrewarded. On Graznav Station, she works under people who are lazy, complacent, or protected by patronage. She understands how fragile the station really is. She knows how to solve problems that other people ignore. But she has no real authority, no path upward, and no way to become the woman she knows she could be. Her frustration is not simply that she wants adventure; it is that she wants a life where competence matters.
That changes when the Valdamar star clan raids her home and carries her away captive. On the Falconstar, Zlata enters a brutal hierarchy where weakness can destroy you, but usefulness can raise you. She studies the ship, the clan, the customs, the politics, and the people around her. She learns when to submit, when to resist, when to speak, when to remain silent, and when to strike. Her rise from Zlata to Zenoba is not a simple empowerment fantasy. It is a dangerous transformation. She survives by making herself indispensable, but every step upward requires her to become harder, sharper, and more willing to play by the rules of a ruthless world.
That is why her relationship with Sonya is so important. Sonya reminds us what captivity costs emotionally, while Zlata shows what it takes to survive strategically. Zlata protects Sonya, but she also frightens her. She becomes powerful enough to save her friend, but also powerful enough to command her. By the end, Zlata has not merely escaped victimhood—she has become Lady Zenoba, Queen of the Falconstar. The victory is real, but it is not innocent. Her competence saves her life, earns her a place, and gives her power, but it also changes the way she sees herself and everyone around her.
Ruthless female competence speaks to a deep human question: what do we do when the world does not reward goodness, innocence, or fairness? Some people break. Some people retreat into fantasy. Some people become cruel. But others learn to see clearly, act decisively, and carve out a place for themselves without waiting for permission. Zlata’s story does not pretend that power is clean or survival is simple. It asks whether a woman can become strong enough to rule without losing the part of herself that first made her worth following.
Zlata mattered to me because she would not leave me alone. Even when I had doubts about the story, even when I trunked the project, even when the darker material made me question whether I could handle it the right way, I kept coming back to her. I loved the challenge of writing a woman who is not soft, sentimental, or conventionally heroic, but who is still deeply compelling because she sees reality and refuses to be crushed by it. In many ways, Queen of the Falconstar exists because I wanted to know what would happen if a woman like Zlata were thrown into one of the harshest societies I could imagine—and whether she would survive it, escape it, or learn how to rule it.
Explore the series index for the Falconstar Trilogy.
Return to the book page for Queen of the Falconstar.
My five year-old daughter really likes this piece (played by a real orchestra, of course).
Better to be a slave with the opportunity to rise than to live a comfortable life without it.
Queen of the Falconstar by Joe Vasicek
Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed
Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold
Blackout by Mira Grant
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
Redshirts by John Scalzi
None of the books this year were super woke or objectionable to me, so I wouldn’t put any of them below No Award. But the only one that I actually finished was Throne of the Crescent Moon, which I found to be an enjoyable debut fantasy novel. It’s got some flaws, but it makes up for that with heart, just like many good debut novels. It’s also got a real Islamic / Middle Eastern flair to it, which made it fun and unique. And while these days, there’s an association between Islamism and the Left (the “red-green alliance”), Throne of the Crescent Moon isn’t woke at all—which I suspect was one of the reasons it didn’t win.
I hope Saladin Ahmed writes a sequel to this book. The world is interesting, the characters are good people, and the first book is clearly setting things up for other books. But I’ve heard rumors that the reason Saladin hasn’t written the next book yet is because the whole Hugo Awards process was such an emotional rollercoaster that it burned him out and killed his desire to go through all that again. Plus, when you experience a surprising degree of success too early in your career, there’s a danger that the pressure to perform will kill your subsequent efforts. Which is too bad, because I definitely want to read the next book!
As for the other books this year, none of them were all that great. I DNFed Mira Grant’s Newsflesh series with the first book, so I didn’t bother reading Blackout. Redshirts is basically a space opera retelling of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which I thoroughly hated (not to mention, I haven’t liked anything Scalzi has written since Old Man’s War, for reasons I’ve explained previously). And 2312 was more of a hard SF slice-of-life novel about all the wonderful things Kim Stanley Robinson would like us to build as we expand humanity’s presence across the Solar System—all with the correct neoliberal politics, of course. A little too heavy on the vision, and a little too weak on the plot.
I wanted to like Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, and I’ve enjoyed most (if not all) of the other Vorkosigan novels by Bujold… but after the first few chapters, I just started to feel as if the series has run too long for me. One of the biggest obstacles to reading the Vorkosigan Saga has been figuring out a proper reading order, since the chronologically first few books have virtually none of the important recurring characters, and every other book seems to refer to the events of half a dozen other previous books, sometimes including books that haven’t been written yet. And trying to read them in publication order doesn’t help either, since Bujold tends to jump all over the place in her own timeline. But in general, I think all the best books are the ones she wrote earlier, because the later-written books are mostly just about the feelings and relationships of the side characters in the series.
When I was a younger writer, I thought it would be wonderful to have a career like Bujolds, with a popular long-running, open-ended series that I could add new books to as the muse tended to strike me. But now, I tend to think that every good series has a definitive arc, with a beginning and an end. I might end up eating these words, of course, especially if one of my series becomes popular enough that that’s all my readers want to read more of. But I would rather have multiple popular series, each with a distinct arc, than one never-ending series where the later books just don’t quite measure up to the first ones.