J.R. Handley was kind enough to invite me onto his podcast, Blasters and Blades, where we talked about Captive of the Falconstar, my latest book release. We talked about all sorts of other sci-fi and fantasy things too. Check it out!
Category: Queen of the Falconstar
Ruthless Female Competence in Queen of the Falconstar
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.
Where the Idea Came From
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.
How Ruthless Female Competence Shapes the Story
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.
What This Theme Says About Us
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.
Why This Theme Matters to Me
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.
Where to Get the Book
Related Posts and Pages
Explore the series index for the Falconstar Trilogy.
Return to the book page for Queen of the Falconstar.
“Better to be a slave…”
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
Is Queen of the Falconstar for You?
Queen of the Falconstar is a character-driven space opera about captivity, survival, ambition, and the dangerous opportunities that can open when your old life is stripped away. If you like science fiction that combines starships and interstellar raiders with sharp psychological conflict, high-stakes power struggles, and a heroine who refuses to stay powerless, this book may be for you.
What Kind of Reader Will Love This Book?
If you love…
- space opera with frontier-colony danger, raiders, and starfaring clan politics
- character-driven science fiction about survival, adaptation, and rising through a hostile system
- intelligent, pragmatic heroines who think their way through impossible situations
- morally complicated stories where safety, loyalty, love, and ambition collide
- tense emotional dynamics involving captivity, power imbalance, and hard choices
…then Queen of the Falconstar is probably your kind of story.
What You’ll Find Inside
At the center of the story is Zlata, a restless young woman trapped in a dead-end life on an isolated mining station, who is suddenly carried away captive when raiders attack her home. What follows is a tense emotional journey through fear, culture shock, survival, and ruthless self-reinvention, as she realizes that if she wants any future at all, she will have to make herself indispensable. The tone is intense, intimate, and often morally thorny, with a style that is fast-moving, psychologically focused, and grounded more in strategy, character tension, and social maneuvering than in large-scale battlefield spectacle.
What Makes It Different
Fans of space opera will recognize the appeal of starships, frontier colonies, and interstellar conflict, but Queen of the Falconstar takes those elements in a more intimate and socially dangerous direction. Where many science fiction adventure stories focus on external missions or military campaigns, this one leans into captivity, hierarchy, cultural assimilation, and the question of how much of yourself you can surrender without losing your soul. It also stands apart through Zlata herself: she is not a conventional idealist or rebel, but a pragmatic realist whose strength comes from clear-eyed adaptation. The result is a space opera that feels personal, volatile, and psychologically charged.
What You Won’t Find
You won’t find a lighthearted or clean-edged adventure here. This book deals with slavery, sexual threat, coercive power structures, and polygamy-adjacent marriage politics, though it aims to handle those elements seriously rather than gratuitously. You also won’t find a simple good-versus-evil story, since much of the tension comes from navigating a brutal world where survival often depends on morally compromised choices.
Why I Think You Might Love It
This story mattered to me because I could never quite let it go. Zlata especially stayed with me: she’s crafty, pragmatic, resourceful, slightly pessimistic, and ruthless when she needs to be, but she’s also trying to face reality as it is and survive it on purpose. I think this book will connect most strongly with readers who are drawn to stories about what a person becomes under pressure, and about the strange, dangerous line between being conquered and choosing to rise.
Where to Get the Book
Related Posts and Pages
Explore the series index for the Falconstar Trilogy.
Return to the book page for Queen of the Falconstar.
The New (and Improved) Vasicek Free Library
For several years, I would publish a new, free short story every month, keeping about six of them up at a time and unpublishing an old one every time I published a new one. I was able to do this because I was constantly writing short stories, in order to submit to the traditional short story markets (Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, etc). Typically, each story would go on submission for a year or two, and if it didn’t get picked up by a professional or semi-pro market, I would just publish it myself.
All of that changed in 2023 when I decided I was done trying to pursue the traditional short story markets. When I landed a story in the conservative (or at least anti-woke) anthology Again, Hazardous Imaginings, and that story (“The Promise of King Washington”) was reviewed favorably on the conservative review site Tangent Online, I saw a marked rise in my rejection rate—and all of them form rejections, too (about 10%-15% of my rejections were personalized before this, which typically indicates that an editor likes your writing but doesn’t want that particular story).
It was at that point that I realized that every professional short story market (and most of the semi-pro ones) is ideologically captured, and that my odds of getting published as a straight white male conservative were essentially zero. So I stopped writing short stories, and in 2025, after cycling through the last story from the submission queue, I unpublished all but one or two of my free short stories and discontinued the series.
The free short stories used to make up the backbone of what I like to call the “Vasicek Free Library.” I patterned it after the Baen Free Library, and it’s basically a list of all of my free books, including permafree first-in-series like Brothers in Exile and, of course, the free short stories. It’s basically a way for readers to sample my writing, and hopefully go on to buy some of my other books.
Long story short, I have decided to bring back the Vasicek Free Library, this time not just with short stories, but with a rotating selection of standalone longer works, too. I’ve got about half a dozen standalone novellas and novelettes, plus a couple of novels like Queen of the Falconstar where I’m currently writing the sequels. I’m going to rotate slowly through those, keeping each one free for a few months, and also rotate through my back catalog of 60+ short stories similar to how I was doing it before. And I plan to do this for the foreseeable future.
Here is the current selection:
Check back each month for new stories!
What do you think of these covers?
I’ve been playing around some more with ChatGPT, working on cover art for the Falconstar Trilogy. The best way to do it, I’ve found, is to make the art with AI, but to do the typography myself.
Anyhow, here are the test covers. What do you think?
The one that I feel most ambivalent about is Queen of the Falconstar. I really like how Zlata turned out, and the Falconstar looks pretty cool too, but the background… let’s see if I can fix that:
Anyhow, what do you think?
Back into writing!
So we are more or less moved into our new (old) house, though there is this overdue kid’s book from the library that somehow got lost during the move, and we haven’t been able to find it… but aside from that, we are more or less settled in. Our five year-old has started kindergarten, my wife is starting her new job, and by the time this post goes live, we will have acquired office chairs from the BYU surplus sale, so I won’t have to be standing all the time like I am as I write this.
I’ve already gotten back into writing my epic fantasy, The Soulbond and the Sling, and am making steady progress on it again. The AI draft is about 66% complete, and it’s good enough that if I were writing it under a secret AI-only pen name, I would feel comfortable publishing it as-is. But my personal standard of quality is higher than that, especially for epic fantasy, so after the AI draft is complete, I will rewrite the whole thing without any AI, to put it in my own voice (and will probably add a whole lot of other stuff to it too—you know, the kind of setting and character details you’d expect in a proper epic fantasy, giving it much more depth).
(Also, as a side note, I do not have a secret AI-only pen name… though I must admit, a part of me kind of wants to start one. With a little bit of market research to figure out the pulpiest genres where I could really excel… but no, with two (soon to be three) small kids and a wife who works full-time, there are only so many projects I can work on at a time.)
I’m also working on The Road to New Jerusalem for my J.M. Wight pen name, though that one has been going much more slow. I really have no idea how much market appeal this one is going to have, and doubt it will do much more than help me to flesh out the world for a potential series in the same universe (a post-apocalyptic Mormon polygamist romance, which also probably has limited market appeal). However, I feel impressed that this is a book I need to see through to the end, so my goal is to finish it before October, at which point I will probably focus on The Soulbound King.
Beyond that, I’m also working on two other novels that I hope to finish before the end of the year (or, more realistically, sometime early next year, since I’m sure the new baby will throw things off for a while. The first is The Unknown Sea, a Sea Mage Cycle book, which is going to be a lot of fun. The rough AI draft is already done, and I had a real blast writing it.
The other one is Captive of the Falconstar, the sequel to Queen of the Falconstar. The rough AI draft is also done for this one, but the revised AI draft is going to take a bit more work. Also, I need to redo the cover and blurb. But I’m really looking forward to getting this one out, and completing the trilogy, which has stood unfinished for nearly a decade now. Yes, I really need to finish these unfinished series, and fully intend to do so—not just with this one, but for all of them.
Over the next year, I hope to transition from being a science fiction writer who occasionally writes fantasy, to a fantasy writer who occasionally writes science fiction. My two big unfinished sci-fi series are the Falconstar Trilogy and the Outworld Trilogy. The plan right now is to finish Falconstar first, knocking out the last two books almost at the same time (the rough AI draft for Lord of the Falconstar is also complete), and then spend a little more time on Return of the Starborn Son to finish that trilogy strong. For a long time, Star Wanderers was my flagship series, so I want to do right by it. But I haven’t even outlined book 3 yet, so it’s going to be a while.
And when Return of the Starborn Son is done, I will probably release another volume of my author’s notes, since hey, why not? But that won’t be for a while—probably not until this time next year, at the absolute soonest. However, Return of the Starborn Son probably will come out before The Soulbond and the Sling, since for marketing reasons I don’t want to release an epic fantasy trilogy until all three books are ready to rapid release. And yes, I fully blame George R.R. Martin for conditioning epic fantasy readers not to try out a new series until it is complete. It is what it is.
So that’s the long-term plan. I will probably start a few new projects as well, including a relaunch of my Christopher Columbus stories, once I figure out what I want to do with that series. But for now, I’m just going to focus on The Road to New Jerusalem and The Soulbond and the Sling, until we are back into a new routine. BYU classes start on September 3rd, so it will probably be a little crazy until then. And the way things are shaping up, I half-expect they will induce my wife at the tail-end of September. So maybe we won’t actually get into a new routine until sometime next year. But either way, I’ll do my best to keep writing.
Queen of the Falconstar currently free
Queen of the Falconstar is one of my lesser-known novels, probably because I haven’t finished the trilogy yet (and when I do, I will definitely get better cover art). But I’m currently writing the second and third books, and hope to publish them both later this year, so I figured it was a good time to run a free sale on the first book.
If you want to pick up this novel, you can get the ebook free through this weekend on my online store, or wherever you get your ebooks. Or you can pick up the AI narrated audiobook for $4.99 on my online store, and get the book free as well (as a side note, the book is always free whenever you get the audiobook from my online store). And if you want a print copy, I will sign and personalize it for free if you purchase it from my online store (ebook free with purchase as well, but shipping only for the US. Check Amazon for the paperback if you are international.)
Queen of the Falconstar
She volunteered to be a captive. Now she must become a queen.
Zlata has always dreamed of escaping the stifling monotony of Graznav Station, but not like this. When space nomads raid her home, she volunteers as their captive to save her friend Sonya from a worse fate. Brought aboard the Falconstar as a slave to the enigmatic Lord Khasan Valdamar, Zlata quickly realizes that her only path to survival lies in the treacherous world of intra-clan power politics. Using her cunning and ruthless pragmatism, she must navigate betrayal, conspiracy, and deadly power games to rise from slave to queen—all while her friend is slated to be sold as a slave.
About the Book
Zlata never wanted to be a hero. She just wanted off Graznav Station.
When nomadic space raiders from beyond the Outworlds attack her home and carry off her friend, Zlata makes a split-second decision and volunteers to be taken captive with her. It’s an impulsive decision that will either save them both—or doom them to lives of slavery among the stars.
Aboard the warship Falconstar, Zlata becomes the property of Lord Khasan Valdamar, a fierce warrior-lord whose star clan teeters on the edge of extinction. Hunted by his enemies and betrayed by his allies, Khasan desperately needs to restore his clan’s shattered honor. What he doesn’t need is a scheming slave with dangerous ambitions of her own.
But Zlata is no ordinary captive.
Cunning. Ruthless. Pragmatic. She sees opportunities where others see only chains. In the treacherous world of Hameji politics—where honor is won through blood, and betrayal lurks in every shadow—Zlata begins an audacious climb from slave to queen.
Order Now
Other Books in the "Falconstar Trilogy"
Preview
Some of the links in the page above are "affiliate links." This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. You will not receive any additional charge.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Has Brandon Sanderson gone woke?
Update (11 Jan 2025): Brandon has addressed this question with his blog post On Renarin and Rlain, and I have responded with Yes, Brandon Sanderson has gone woke.
This is a genuine question: I don’t have any new information or tea to spill. But there have been some rumblings recently that make me wonder if Brandon has gone over to the woke side—or indeed, if he was always quietly there to begin with.
Most of these rumblings have come from the recent videos that Jon Del Arroz has put out on the subject. Before you post your angry comments, know that I am already aware that JDA is an extremely polarizing figure (which doesn’t necessarily speak ill of him—or good, for that matter). Personally, I don’t have a strong opinion about JDA either way: I don’t know him personally, so I can’t speak to his character, and while he does seem to have the right enemies, that only says so much. A lot of his content does seem to be clickbaity and hyper-partisan, and the way he wears his Christianity on his sleeve can make me uneasy at times (though I do appreciate that he’s open about his beliefs).
With all of that said, JDA has broken some very interesting and important stories in the recent past, such as the very serious sexual abuse allegations against Neil Gaiman—and more importantly, the way the publishing industry and legacy media have been working to downplay that story and even cover it up. So when he started covering the controversy surrounding Brandon Sanderson’s recent release of Wind and Truth, the fifth book in the Stormlight Archive, and how some of his fans are reacting to what they perceive as a woke sell-out, I perked up.
But the thing that prompted me to write this blog post is what Brad Torgerson posted, and which JDA quotes in the above video. I’ve chatted with Brad on several occasions, and I know and like him a lot. He’s also a bit of a polarizing figure in the fandom, mostly for spearheading the Sad Puppies movement in 2015, but he’s always struck me as a good guy and completely undeserving of most of the crap that he’s taken, including some local convention drama. Brad and I are both Utah writers, and we both run in the same circles, though we only cross paths maybe a couple of times a year.
As for Brandon, it’s been a few years since the last time I spoke with him, but I did take his writing class at BYU, and one of the members of his writing group is also a member of our writing group. In fact, I’m very curious to talk with her the next time we meet, because a couple of months ago she did cryptically mention that there were a couple of things in the early draft of Wind and Truth that she read that she really, really did not like, and advised Brandon to cut. Are those the same things that are behind the controversy now. Perhaps—though she did make it seem like Brandon’s agent and publisher were also advising him to cut them, so whatever it was, I don’t think he added it because they pressured him to, and he “sold out,” as JDA characterizes.
Also, I think JDA takes it a little too far when he says that Brandon is denying his faith. As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I’ve served in a bishopric before, and participated in church disciplinary councils where excommunication and disfellowshipment were on the line. From what I can tell, nothing that Brandon has said or done would warrant a formal church council—not even donating to the Utah Pride Center, though if I were his bishop, I would want to talk with him about that. The church is a place for sinners and doubters, which we all are in some degree. If Brandon were to explicitly denounce the Family Proclamation, that might (or might not) warrant a disciplinary council, but I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to say that Brandon has denied his LDS faith.
With that said, if Brandon is putting gay romances and transgender characters in his books, that’s awfully hard to square with the Family Proclamation, which explicitly states that “marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God” and “gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.” Personally, I sustain the Family Proclamation wholeheartedly and without reservation, and it saddens me to see other members of my faith take issue with it. I firmly believe that these are the words of living prophets, with the same scriptural authority as the Bible and the Book of Mormon, and I look forward to the day when the Family Proclamation is officially canonized in the Doctrine and Covenants, which I expect it will be.
You have to leave some room for nuance, though. My book Queen of the Falconstar, which is currently available as a free ebook (no, I didn’t plan it that way), has a LGBT main character, whose bisexuality is an important part of the plot. The book does not “celebrate” her bisexuality, or promote it as a morally justified lifestyle choice—in fact, it’s a major driver in her downfall in the second book, which I’m currently writing. When I was writing the first book, there were many times when I wondered if I should scrap this part of her character, but when I prayed about it, I got the distinct impression that I should keep it in. In fact, there were many times when I wondered if I should trunk the whole book, and the only reason I ultimately wrote and published it was because I felt prompted by the Spirit that God wanted me to write this book.
Of course, stating it in these terms means I’ve basically alienated everyone from either side of this issue. But it’s true. The book is neither woke nor anti-woke: it has a bisexual main character whose sexuality is a liability and an obstacle. Guaranteed to offend both sides. Also, I firmly believe that this was a book God wanted me to write—and for that reason, I’ve been careful not to write it in such a way that it disparages or denies the Family Proclamation, though the characters themselves would probably not agree with it. Which is also guaranteed to offend basically everyone.
Enough about Queen of the Falconstar. I only bring it up to make the point that you have to leave room for nuance, if you want to write truthfully. But if Brandon’s conservative fans feel he has betrayed them, that feeling is totally legitimate—and frankly, the part of this story that interests me the most. Is that what’s going on here? I’ve only ready partway through book 2 of the Stormlight Archive, so I’m not up to date on the series. A cursory glance at the Goodreads reviews shows that there’s some interesting discussion about this, but I’m not connected enough with the Sanderson fandom to really say what that means.
However, I did find this article on Brandon’s blog, dated back to 2023, which makes me think that he’s always been symathetic to some, if not all LGBTQ causes. Then again, he does talk about how his LGBTQ friends have been “patient” with him as he’s “come a long way,” so maybe there has been some recent influence on him? I honestly don’t know, though I suspect that all those sensitivity readers have been leaning on him pretty hard. His scalp has got to be worth quite a lot.
Jon, if you’re reading this, thanks for covering this story. I’m not particularly close to Brandon anymore, but I do run in many of the same circles here in Utah, and count him as an early mentor of mine, so I’m following this story with interest. Also, thanks for reading from the Family Proclamation on your channel. If you want to talk, feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an email.
Spring Shorts 2022 #4: The Freedom of Second Chances
I’m really happy with how this short story turned out. It pushes the edge in a lot of interesting ways, with the main character having to choose between duty and honor and doing what is right, and a forced abortion situation that puts the lie to the “women’s right to choose” insanity. It will probably get me blacklisted at a few more magazines, but at this point I really don’t care.
Once again, I used the Mythulu cards to come up with this story. Here are the ones I used:
- CLONE: Many available forms, including: duplicate, twin, rebirth, alternative life path manifested, time traveler overlap, actor, understudy, etc. Can even mean a second chance or a relapse.
- ABANDONED: Indicates a severe problem in the environment that prior ihabitants were unable to solve. Draw +1 Habitat.
- COASTAL: Peaceful threshold where the ocean meets land. Known for caves, karsts, and dunes. Represents unsolvable relationship problems.
- ERODED: Extensive, exponential deterioration of a foundation due to long-neglected defense.
- MARRIAGE OF HONOR: A permanent relationship initiated to help someone else avoid shame or discredit.
- TATTOO: Marked to identify, warn, or remember.
- GUILTY: Responsible for the worst thing that has happened recently to everyone around them.
- BODYGUARD: Primary purpose is to protect something else, at any cost.
- VELVET: Labor-intensive weave of fabric that mimics the soft fur on a young buck’s antlers. Worn to inspire reverence or respect.
- BLOOD: Represents the energy invested to keep something alive. The only element which affects the soul beyond mortality. Can taint or purify.
- SLIPPERY: Wants freedom and is hard to hold onto. Often enjoys the chase.
- BUREAUCRAT: Keeps others in bondage with words. Diverts enemies toward illusions to exhaust them into giving up.
- CATALYST: Initiates or accelerates a chemical reaction without itself being affected. Gifted at getting things moving.
- NECRO: Things that were once living, but no longer are. Draw again to decide what died. Draw +1 Habitat or Element.
- PET: Healthy codependence with a clear heirarchy, usually between members of different species.
- TORN: Forcibly separated parts, which often continue to exist separately. Indicates a lost privilege or reduction in status. Symbol of anger.
- SIGIL: Symbols that have power to force or bind. Used in communities to rally groups together.
I’m going to keep going through until I’ve used all of the Mythulu cards in a story at least once. So far, they’ve proven to be an interesting way to not only generate story ideas, but to send my stories off in different and interesting directions. It usually takes me a little while (or sometimes a couple of different draws) to figure out how to fit everything into a coherent story, but I’m getting the hang of it, and the process is actually pretty fun.
As for the spring shorts challenge, it’s Memorial Day today, which means that the challenge is basically over. I only ended up writing four stories, which is a lot less than what I’d hoped to write, but I think these will turn out really well after I rework them a bit, so I’m counting it as a partial success.
For June, I plan to write two more short stories in order to fill up the buffer. My writing group meets once a month, so with two more stories to critique in June, that will give me a buffer of six months by the time July rolls around. I also plan to fix up all four of these spring shorts stories and put them on submission for the next few months, before I publish them as free singles.
I will try to do a new short story each month, in order to keep the buffer at six months, but I may do another short story nanowrimo this year if it turns out that I need more. As far as other WIPs are concerned, though, after I write these next two stories in June, I’m going to go back to novels. My plan right now is to write the first three chapters of The Sword Bearer and Captive of the Falconstar by the fourth of July, then decide whether to go on with one of those or to keep working on Children of the Starry Sea.