Category: Edenfall

Coming of Age and Loss of Innocence in Edenfall

Edenfall by Joe Vasicek is a science fiction coming-of-age story about a girl raised in an isolated paradise who is forced to confront the larger human world for the first time. The novel combines coming of age and loss of innocence with fish out of water, raised outside civilization, first love, entrusted with a dangerous secret, protective older sister, and paradise lost tropes. Set on a distant world millions of years in humanity’s future, the story begins with youthful freedom and wonder before developing into a tense, sometimes dark adventure about responsibility, moral judgment, love, violence, and the painful transition from childhood into adulthood.

Tropes at a Glance: Coming of Age, Loss of Innocence, Fish Out of Water, Raised Outside Civilization, First Love, Entrusted with a Dangerous Secret, Protective Older Sister, Paradise Lost

Why Edenfall Is a Coming of Age and Loss of Innocence Story

At the beginning of Edenfall, Estee has grown up in a world almost completely untouched by human civilization. She runs barefoot across an alien savannah, explores the wilderness with her younger sister, knows the native “little people” and their customs, and lives with her parents and siblings beneath the ruins of an ancient human space elevator. She is adventurous, curious, impulsive, and confident in the natural world around her—but extraordinarily innocent about the civilization her parents left behind.

That innocence becomes impossible to preserve when a human military expedition arrives from across the stars. To Estee, the newcomers are almost as alien as anything in science fiction: she has never encountered soldiers, cities, military hierarchies, or many of the social customs they take for granted. Even ordinary human assumptions about clothing, privacy, relationships, and authority can be bewildering to her.

What begins as curiosity quickly becomes a much harder education. Estee discovers that the wider human world contains cruelty, political ambition, warfare, betrayal, and moral choices far more complicated than anything she has previously faced. At the same time, she begins experiencing new emotions of her own, including attraction, romantic longing, and an increasing sense of responsibility for people besides herself.

Her coming of age is therefore both an awakening and a loss. She gains knowledge, judgment, independence, and the ability to carry adult responsibilities—but she can never return to the effortless innocence with which she began.

How Coming of Age and Loss of Innocence Drives the Story

Estee’s innocence shapes almost every major decision she makes in Edenfall. Early in the novel, she responds to danger primarily with curiosity. A mysterious object descending from the sky is something she wants to investigate. Strange newcomers fascinate her even when they frighten her. The boundaries between good and evil initially seem simple because she has experienced so little of either.

As events become more dangerous, those simple assumptions break down. Estee has to learn that people cannot always be judged by the group they belong to, that authority does not necessarily make someone good, and that even people with weapons and power must choose whether to use them rightly. Her father ultimately places an especially difficult burden on her: she must decide for herself whom she can trust.

That requirement to exercise moral judgment without having a parent make the decision for her is central to her transformation. Estee begins the novel as a child whose parents define the boundaries of her world. Increasingly, she has to navigate beyond those boundaries using the principles they taught her rather than their direct protection.

Her relationships change along with her. Her younger siblings become people she increasingly feels responsible for rather than merely companions in childhood adventures. Her relationship with Khalil introduces trust, admiration, attraction, and first love. And the threats facing her family turn the preservation of something larger than herself into a personal responsibility.

In Edenfall, growing up is not merely becoming tougher or more capable. It means learning enough about human nature to make consequential choices while refusing to become as cruel as the world that forced those choices upon her.

Supporting Tropes and Genre Conventions

Fish Out of Water / Raised Outside Civilization

Estee is a particularly unusual fish out of water protagonist because she does not initially travel into an unfamiliar society. Instead, human civilization arrives in her isolated world.

She has grown up with her family and the indigenous little people, far removed from ordinary human culture. As a result, things that the newly arrived soldiers consider commonplace can be completely foreign to her. She knows how to track through wilderness, avoid dangerous predators, and navigate the landscape, yet she may not understand a handshake, a city, military rank, or why strangers expect her to dress differently.

This reversal allows Edenfall to make ordinary human society seem strange by presenting it through the eyes of someone encountering it for the first time.

First Love / Romantic Awakening

Estee’s relationship with Khalil forms the romantic side of her coming-of-age story. Because she has never known an unrelated young man before, she initially has no framework for understanding the attraction she feels toward him.

Her growing admiration for Khalil becomes trust, emotional intimacy, and eventually romantic longing. These feelings are genuinely new to her, and the novel treats her first experience of attraction as another form of discovery: she is learning not only about the wider human world but also about herself.

The romance therefore develops alongside the loss-of-innocence plot rather than existing separately from it. Estee is discovering both the darkness of adulthood and some of its beauty.

Entrusted with a Dangerous Secret

Early in the crisis, Estee’s parents entrust her with a piece of hidden data connected to their discoveries about the ancient human civilization that once inhabited their world. Protecting it gives Estee a responsibility that the newly arrived soldiers do not initially realize she carries.

More importantly, her task eventually becomes morally complicated. Keeping the secret away from dangerous people is only half of her responsibility. She must also recognize when she has found people worthy of receiving it.

The dangerous secret trope therefore reinforces the coming-of-age story by transforming Estee from a passive child being protected by adults into someone whose judgment can affect the lives of everyone around her.

Protective Older Sister

Estee is established as the oldest sister from the opening pages, where even her playful adventures with Celeste contain small moments of responsibility. As the danger grows, however, that ordinary sibling dynamic takes on much greater weight.

She increasingly becomes the person who keeps her younger sisters moving, watches over her baby brother, makes decisions under pressure, and tries to protect the family members who once shared her carefree childhood. The change is gradual but fundamental.

The protective older sister trope gives Estee’s maturation an especially concrete form: adulthood arrives when she can no longer assume that someone older will always be there to take responsibility.

Paradise Lost

The setting of Edenfall gives its loss-of-innocence story an explicitly Edenic dimension. Estee begins in a beautiful, isolated world where human civilization exists mostly in stories told by her parents. Her childhood is associated with open skies, wilderness, family, exploration, and freedom.

The arrival of outsiders changes not only Estee but the physical world around her. Military vehicles cut across the grasslands. Bases and weapons intrude upon familiar landscapes. Violence enters places that once represented safety.

The destruction of innocence is therefore both personal and environmental. Estee loses her childhood paradise at the same time that the paradise itself is being transformed. Even the novel’s imagery and chapter progression repeatedly draw on ideas of Eden, knowledge, exile, and the fall.

How Edenfall Develops These Tropes

What makes the coming-of-age story in Edenfall unusual is the direction from which adulthood arrives.

Estee has not been raised in a broken or oppressive society from which she longs to escape. She begins with extraordinary freedom. Her parents have deliberately removed themselves from civilization and raised their children in an alien wilderness where many of humanity’s customs and institutions simply do not exist. The wider human world therefore represents both possibility and danger.

That creates an interesting inversion of the traditional science fiction coming-of-age story. Estee is not dreaming about escaping a restrictive home and discovering the universe. The universe comes to her—and what it brings forces her to reconsider the value of the sheltered world she once took for granted.

The novel also avoids equating maturity with cynicism. Estee learns that human beings are capable of terrible things, but she also encounters courage, restraint, loyalty, sacrifice, and people willing to oppose evil even at great personal cost. One of her most important lessons is that the world cannot be neatly divided into categories of “good people” and “bad people.” Character must be judged through choices.

Her first love reinforces the same idea. Attraction opens another door into adulthood, but the relationship is tied to questions of trust, restraint, responsibility, and the difference between wanting something and being ready for it.

The result is a coming-of-age story in which knowledge carries moral weight. Estee’s innocence cannot survive what she experiences, but the knowledge that replaces it does not have to corrupt her. Growing up means learning enough about good and evil to choose between them consciously.

The Story’s Tone and Emotional Payoff

Edenfall begins with a strong sense of wonder. Estee’s alien world is colorful, wild, beautiful, and dangerous in ways she understands. Because readers first experience that world through her familiar and affectionate relationship with it, the later intrusion of human conflict feels increasingly disruptive.

The tone consequently moves from adventurous and pastoral to tense, tragic, romantic, and ultimately bittersweet. Moments of discovery and first love sit alongside military violence, family danger, moral betrayal, and the destruction of childhood certainties. Yet the novel is not nihilistic. Its darker events repeatedly force characters to demonstrate what they believe through courage, loyalty, restraint, sacrifice, and protection of the innocent.

The emotional payoff comes from watching Estee become capable of carrying responsibilities she could scarcely have understood at the beginning. She cannot recover the innocence she loses, but neither is she simply crushed by that loss. She learns to move forward into an uncertain future while protecting what remains worth saving.

For readers looking for science fiction coming-of-age stories about loss of innocence, a girl raised outside civilization, first love, dangerous secrets, sibling responsibility, and the loss of an Edenic home, Edenfall brings those tropes together in a high-stakes alien-world adventure.

Where to Get the Book

Related Posts and Pages

Explore the series index for the Genesis Earth Trilogy.

Return to the book page for Edenfall.

What Makes a “Joe Vasicek” Book?

I recently uploaded all of my books to ChatGPT and asked it to read them all and tell me what makes a “Joe Vasicek” book. The result was a fascinating conversation with the chatbot. It was too long to share in its entirety, so I asked ChatGPT to summarize it as a 1500 word blog post. Here is what it gave me:

Every author has recurring patterns. Sometimes they are obvious: favorite settings, familiar plot structures, beloved tropes. Sometimes they run deeper, beneath genre and surface premise, shaping the emotional and moral logic of the stories themselves. Looking across Joe Vasicek’s published science fiction and fantasy, a clear pattern emerges. His books are not simply space operas, frontier adventures, sword-and-sorcery tales, or clean romantic fantasies. At their core, they are stories about people trying to find, build, defend, or become worthy of home.

A Joe Vasicek book is usually set on the edge of civilization. That edge may be literal outer space: a far-flung colony, an isolated station, a small merchant starship, a dangerous trade route, or a frontier beyond the reach of stable law. It may also be a fantasy frontier: a seacoast, a ruined kingdom, a cursed wilderness, a lonely homestead, or a world recovering from plague, war, and desolation. But whatever form the frontier takes, it is rarely just a backdrop for adventure. It is a moral testing ground.

The central question is not merely whether the hero will survive. It is whether the hero can preserve the things that make survival meaningful: family, faith, freedom, love, loyalty, honest work, and moral courage.

This is why exile appears so often in Vasicek’s fiction. His protagonists are frequently displaced people: wanderers, captives, refugees, orphans, widows, failed apprentices, disgraced sons, forgotten daughters, fugitive lovers, and people who no longer belong in the world that formed them. They may dream of a lost Earth, flee an oppressive warrior culture, survive famine on a failing station, escape slavery, seek a ship, or defend a fragile home from powers that would destroy it. Their longing is not abstract. They want something deeply concrete: a place at the table, a family, a ship, a marriage, a household, a people, a future.

That longing for home is one of the defining features of Vasicek’s voice and vision. In many of his books, home is not something the characters simply return to. It must be built, chosen, earned, or restored. Sometimes it is a starship crew. Sometimes it is a marriage. Sometimes it is a frontier colony. Sometimes it is a homestead in the woods, a kingdom healed from corruption, or a family formed under impossible circumstances. His stories tend to end not merely with enemies defeated, but with the possibility of a stable moral order: a household, a child, a promise, a voyage, a free people, a new beginning.

Closely connected to this is Vasicek’s recurring interest in family formation. Marriage, children, inheritance, kinship, motherhood, fatherhood, and legitimacy are not decorative details in his fiction. They are often central to the worldbuilding. Societies in his books are shaped by who marries whom, who inherits, who belongs, who is cast out, who is enslaved, who is protected, and who is allowed to have a future. This gives even his space opera a domestic and anthropological depth. Starships are not just machines. They are households. Frontier settlements are not just adventure locations. They are embryos of civilization.

This family-centered quality sets Vasicek apart from much of contemporary science fiction and fantasy. In a market often dominated by antiheroes, irony, grimdark despair, eroticized power dynamics, or purely individual self-actualization, Vasicek’s books keep returning to older and more ordinary goods: marriage, children, duty, faith, work, and home. That does not mean the books are soft. His stories include captivity, slavery, war, famine, coercion, betrayal, exile, monsters, corrupt rulers, and civilizational collapse. But the darkness does not usually become the point. It is the pressure under which characters reveal what they truly love.

Another recurring element is freedom versus domination. Vasicek’s villains and oppressive systems often seek control over the intimate foundations of human life. They enslave, coerce, corrupt, conquer, manipulate marriage, break families, reduce people to tools, or turn sacred things into instruments of power. Against them stand people who may be weak, wounded, or compromised, but who still recognize that some things must not be surrendered. A recurring moral pattern in Vasicek’s work is that power becomes evil when it severs itself from love, covenant, humility, and responsibility.

This is especially visible in his fantasy. In the fantasy stories, magic frequently tests the soul. Treasure corrupts. Dark orders twist noble purposes. Forbidden power promises victory while hollowing out the one who wields it. Sacred objects and magical gifts are not merely tools; they expose character. The question is often whether the hero can become worthy of the power placed in his or her hands.

The science fiction handles similar concerns differently. In Vasicek’s SF, the central question is more often civilizational: what kind of society will human beings build on the frontier? Technology, star travel, colonization, lost Earth, trade routes, empires, and small ships all become ways to explore whether freedom and family can survive across distance. The fantasy asks whether the soul is worthy to wield power. The science fiction asks whether civilization is worthy to endure.

Yet the two sides of Vasicek’s work are recognizably connected. A sea mage searching for a crew and a star wanderer seeking a place among the stars are spiritual cousins. A cursed treasure that tests a fantasy hero and a civilization-changing technology that threatens an Outworld culture are variations on the same concern: what happens when power outruns virtue?

Faith is another quiet but persistent current. Vasicek’s books are not always explicitly religious, and many are not “religious fiction” in the usual bookstore sense. But they are shaped by a religious imagination. Providence matters. The universe has moral structure. Choices echo beyond immediate consequences. Suffering is not meaningless. Death is not always the final word. Love, sacrifice, chastity, loyalty, mercy, repentance, and covenant are treated as real forces, not sentimental illusions.

This gives his work what might be called moral gravity. The stories are generally clean, but “clean” is too weak a word for what they are doing. Clean can sound bland, safe, or sanitized. Vasicek’s better books are not harmless. They are morally serious. They often deal with brutal worlds, but without surrendering to brutality. They offer hope, but usually after loss.

That balance—dark trials, hopeful destination—is one of the most marketable aspects of his brand. Readers who are tired of nihilism may find in his books a kind of old-fashioned adventure that does not feel cynical. Readers who enjoy romance but do not want explicit heat may respond to the way his stories treat love as courtship, marriage, loyalty, and family destiny. Readers who enjoy frontier survival may respond to the practical details of ships, homesteads, trade, hunger, labor, and settlement. Readers who want faith-friendly speculative fiction may find his work welcoming without feeling confined to the Christian-fiction aisle.

At the same time, the analysis reveals some challenges. Vasicek’s books cross several genre lanes: hard SF, space opera, sword-and-sorcery, seafaring fantasy, frontier survival, time travel, post-apocalyptic fiction, captivity drama, and short-form idea fiction. That range can make the brand feel scattered. A reader who comes for small-ship space opera may not immediately understand how that connects to a fantasy homestead story or a cursed-treasure adventure. The underlying themes are consistent, but the surface packaging varies widely.

There is also a tonal challenge. Vasicek often writes “clean” fiction, but some of his recurring material is intense: slavery, captivity, concubinage, forced marriage, sexual coercion, famine, genocide, and patriarchal warrior cultures. These are not cozy stories. If marketed carelessly, they can send the wrong signal. The captivity material, in particular, needs to be framed around dignity, survival, identity, and freedom rather than dark-romance titillation or grimdark shock.

The clearest author brand, then, is not simply “clean science fiction and fantasy.” That is accurate but incomplete. The stronger brand is this:

Joe Vasicek writes clean, morally serious frontier science fiction and fantasy about wanderers, captives, exiles, and ordinary heroes building homes and families in dangerous worlds.

Or shorter:

Frontier science fiction and fantasy about faith, family, freedom, and finding home among the stars.

Or more distilled still:

A Joe Vasicek book is about finding home on the frontier without losing your soul.

That is the through-line. Whether the story involves starships, sea mages, cursed treasure, lost Earth, warrior clans, alien worlds, magical swords, or widowed mothers, the deeper movement is the same. The world is dangerous. Civilization is fragile. Power corrupts when severed from virtue. But love, faith, family, and moral courage can still make a home in the wilderness.

That is what makes a Joe Vasicek book.

The Loss of Innocence in Edenfall

Edenfall is a young adult first contact science fiction story about a paradise that doesn’t fall to invasion, but awakens to adulthood. Set on an isolated colony world, it blends coming-of-age, alien-world survival, and military first contact, telling a story where the shock isn’t meeting the unknown—it’s realizing that humanity is the unknown.

All of us are born innocent, but none of us can grow up and stay that way. What happens when innocence is shattered by forces beyond our control? Can lost innocence ever be reclaimed—or does the very act of reclaiming it make it something else?

These were my thoughts as I wrote Edenfall. From those seeds grew a story about childhood, family, first contact, coming of age, and the tragedy of how confronting evil forces us to grow up.

Where the Idea Came From

After I wrote Genesis Earth, I knew I wanted to turn it into a trilogy someday. I also knew that Michael and Terra’s idyllic paradise would not remain isolated forever. So I began to ask myself: what would happen when their children—raised entirely outside of human civilization—encounter humanity for the first time, with all of its violence, possessiveness, flaws, and messiness?

As the ideas came together, I realized that I was writing a different kind of first contact story—not a story of discovery, but a first contact science fiction story of intrusion and loss, told through the eyes of a girl who never knew humanity included armies, geopolitics, militarization, or hidden agendas. In other words, I was writing a story about the loss of innocence.

How the Loss of Innocence Shapes the Story

In Edenfall, every choice Estee makes is a response to the forces that ultimately shatter her world. The adults think in terms of strategies, secrets, and keeping their family safe, but Estee and her siblings have no concept of these things. Instead, the children ask themselves things like: why do we have to go away? What are my parents trying to hide? Who are these people, and why do Mommy and Daddy fear them?

Estee’s journey is not merely one of survival, but the collapse of everything she thinks she knows. By the time things get violent, her world has already ended, because contact itself changed the rules of innocence. That tension—between wonder and dread, belonging and displacement—drives every emotional beat of the book.

What the Loss of Innocence Says About Us

We live in a world where children inherit consequences they did not choose for themselves. Edenfall reflects the quiet tragedy of that handoff: that sometimes the most precarious moment in life is not the arrival of the monsters, but the arrival of adults who aren’t immediate members of our family.

All of us lose our innocence at some point in our lives—and once it is lost, we can never gain it back. That is the tragedy of growing up. But even though we cannot reclaim our innocence, we can become pure again—and purity is stronger and more resilient than innocence. As Estee struggles with the trauma of betrayal and violence, she ultimately learns this lesson as well.

Why This Theme Matters to Me

For many years, I tried to write this book but found it just wouldn’t come. Then I became a father, and suddenly everything just clicked. I think a large part of that had to do with this theme of the tragedy of innocence lost, and the importance of family to guide and protect us through that. This was something I couldn’t fully understand until I had gained that life experience, and I think it made the book much richer as a result.

n the end, Edenfall became a young adult science fiction story about first contact, not as a moment of discovery, but as a moment of collision. It is a coming-of-age novel where paradise is not lost through rebellion or choice, but through the arrival of the wider human world—with all of its fear, power, and politics. In many ways, Edenfall is a first contact story where the aliens are us, and growing up means realizing that the universe is bigger, darker, and far more complicated than childhood ever prepared us for.

Where to Get the Book

Related Posts and Pages

Explore the series index for the Genesis Earth Trilogy.

Visit the book page for Genesis Earth for more details.

Find out if Edenfall is for you.

See all of my books in series order.

Is Edenfall for You?

Edenfall continues the Genesis Earth Trilogy through the eyes of sixteen-year-old Estee Anderson, a girl raised in isolation on a mysterious alien world. Character-driven and emotionally grounded, it explores innocence, family bonds, and self-discovery under rising danger. Like the first book, it favors quiet depth over spectacle—only this time, the world is larger, the threats are sharper, and childhood ends faster.

What Kind of Reader Will Love Edenfall?

Edenfall is for readers who want hope-filled science fiction where wonder comes with consequences, and survival depends on courage, loyalty, and family. It is especially for readers who:

  • Love character-driven science fiction with emotional stakes and family at its core.
  • Enjoy exploration of alien worlds, survival, and first contact that feels personal rather than technobabble-heavy.
  • Appreciate worldbuilding that leans on atmosphere and mystery rather than dense scientific exposition.
  • Enjoy stories where children are real people—not plot devices: capable, flawed, curious, and heroic.

In other words, Edenfall is for readers who want science fiction that feels personal before it feels cosmic, with characters of quiet courage who rely on their family as they face the world. Like Genesis Earth, it’s a coming of age story of self-discovery, but with stronger family bonds.

What You’ll Find Inside

Edenfall begins when a military expedition arrives to investigate the anomaly that Estee’s parents were sent to explore. When one of the generals decides to take over and make the planet his own personal fiefdom, Estee must learn who she can trust in order to face the rising threat to her family, even as she grapples with trauma and loss of innocence.

In Edenfall, readers will find:

  • A young protagonist in isolation (Estee) who must navigate danger with wits, courage, and instinct.
  • A slow-burn planetary mystery involving ancient alien megastructures, lost history, and hidden data.
  • A human-versus-human first contact with catastrophic misunderstanding.
  • Nuanced moral ambiguity—leaders driven by fear, idealism, or ambition; soldiers who follow orders but question them.
  • Strong family themes: parental sacrifice, sibling bonds, and the pain of leaving childhood behind.
  • A lush, “wild-world” setting filled with dangerous fauna, hidden canyons, ancient ruins, and an ancient megastructure (the space elevator) stretching into the sky.

What Makes Edenfall Different

There is no chosen one, no prophecy, no love triangle, and no convenient mentorship arc. There are no precocious prodigies or destiny-driven heroes—just an unprepared girl trying to survive the collision between her family and the dangers of a world she doesn’t understand. The first contact story is human on human, told from both points of view, with all of the accompanying messiness and misunderstanding. The result is an intimate story that feels mythic, human, and fresh.

What You Won’t Find

This is not a book for readers who want love triangles or steamy romantic elements. There is no explicit sexualization, and the romance is very low-key and slow-build. It also avoids graphic violence and heavy militaristic fetishization. While there is some violence and some of the characters die, the tone ultimately leans toward resilience, curiosity, and hope rather than gritty cynicism. This is hope-forward science fiction, not despair-driven dystopia.

Why I Think You Might Love Edenfall

It took me more than ten years to finish this book. Ultimately, it wasn’t until I had a child of my own that I was finally able to write it. The experience of becoming a father and having my own family made it possible for me to write about family bonds with the sort of emotional depth that Edenfall required.

If you loved the characters, the heart, and the driving sense of wonder in Genesis Earth, I think you will enjoy Edenfall even more!

Where to Get Edenfall

Related Posts and Pages

Explore the series index for the Genesis Earth Trilogy.

Visit the book page for Genesis Earth for more details.

Ponder the loss of innocence in Edenfall.

See all of my books in series order.

Why books written by mothers are better than books written by childless women

I never know which posts of mine China Mike Glyer is going to pick up for his pixel scroll, or whatever he calls the daily bucket of chum that he feeds the folks over at File 770 (the ones who aren’t Chinese bots, anyway). I’ve written at much greater length about my 2022 reading resolution here, and my insights and impressions gained through the experience here and here, but for some reason the post he decided to pick up was the last one. Perhaps he thought that it would be better at ginning up outrage than the other posts? But if that were the case, surely he would have picked up the one before that instead. It was practically written for ginning up outrage among the File 770 crowd (or at least the ones who aren’t Chinese bots).

So when I got the pingback last night, I glanced over the post over at File 770 and saw this comment from Cora Buhlert:

I have to admit that whether or not writers have children is not a characteristic I pay the slightest bit of attention to. Never mind that it is difficult to tell, because even today, not every writer chooses to talk about their family or private life.

But I guess that Joe Vasicek is the sort of person for whom people without children, particularly women without children, are by definition evil.

Cora is an indie writer from Germany that I used to interact with a lot on the KBoards Writer’s Cafe, and some other indie author hangouts. She’s earned the ire of Larry Correia a couple of times, and she has a bad tendency to straw man any opinions or perspectives that challenge her worldview. On one thread, we went back and forth over whether Hitler was a creation of the political right or the political left. I tried to explain that “left” and “right” mean different things in the US than they do in Europe, but it was like trying to have a discussion with a brick wall.

So it doesn’t surprise me in the least that she’s completely mischaracterized me in the comment above. I do not believe that childless women are evil—if I did, I would not have served in the bishopric of a mid-singles ward (a mid-singles ward is a Latter-day Saints congregation of unmarried and divorced people in their 30s and 40s. I was the ward clerk—basically, the guy who handled all the finances and other paperwork for the congregation). My faith teaches me that people are not evil, but are all children of God, no matter who they are born to or what their life choices may be.

In fact, my interest in the parental status of the Hugo and Nebula winning authors has nothing to do with religion or morality, and everything to do with life experience. I didn’t get married until almost a decade after I had started to write professionally, and the experience of becoming a father was so completely lifechanging that it’s transformed my writing as well: what I choose (and don’t choose) to write about, who I choose (and don’t choose) to write for, as well as the themes and ideas that I explore in my books.

You can see this transformation if you read my Genesis Earth Trilogy. Genesis Earth was my first novel, but it wasn’t until almost nine years later—after I’d met my wife and was engaged to be married—that I felt I had the life experience necessary to write the sequel, Edenfall. And the final book, The Stars of Redemption, was not the sort of thing I was capable of writing until after I had become a father and knew what it was like to help bring a child into the world.

When my daughter was born, the very first thought that came into my mind was “this is her story now, not yours.” We all like to say that we’re the hero of our own story, and in a very basic way, that’s true. But when you become a parent (assuming that you’re a responsible parent, and not a scumbag), you’re no longer living just for yourself, but for your children. “He who findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”

Having a child changes your perspective on everything. Among other things, you have a much deeper and more personal investment in the future, since you know that your child will inherit that world. Your perspective on your own family history changes too, as you have become a link in the generations, not merely a byproduct of it. Life becomes a lot harder, but it also becomes more meaningful. Things that took up a great deal of your time and attention when you were single suddenly become trivial, and other things that didn’t make much sense to you about people before suddenly click into place.

So that was why, when I decided to read all of the Hugo and Nebula winning novels, I was curious about the parental status of the authors. I wanted to know if the experience of being a parent had affected the quality of their writing, since I know it’s affected mine. And honestly, it’s not that hard to look up: almost all of these authors have Wikipedia pages with a section about their personal lives. Obviously, the details about their children are sparse, but the only thing I cared about was whether or not they had any.

(As a side note, there were other stats that I decided to track, such as the age of the author when they won the award. That hasn’t seemed to have impacted my taste, except that I have not enjoyed a single award-winning novel by an author who was in their 20s at the time that they won. The only exception was Isaac Asimov with the retro-Hugo for The Mule (Foundation and Empire), but that wasn’t awarded until after he was dead. There are also three authors whose age I was unable to determine from a quick internet search: Michael Swanwick, Sarah Pinsker, and Charlie Jane Anders.)

(As another side note, I’ll be the first to admit that I may have made some errors in my research. For example, if a five-minute internet search on an author didn’t tell me anything about their kids, I assumed they didn’t have any. It’s entirely possible that they just prefer to keep that information private. Also, I didn’t bother to look up when they had their children, so it’s possible that they were still childless at the time they won the award.)

Why should I be interested in this sort of thing? Why look at things like an author’s age, gender, or parental status?

Two reasons. The first is that I wanted to do a deep dive on the Hugos and the Nebulas, the two awards which represent themselves as representing the very best of the science fiction genre. Since that is the genre that I write, I want to understand not just the kind of books that win these awards, but the kind of authors who win them. The goal is to have a deeper understanding of the genre, and to look for trends and movements within it.

Second, and more importantly, I want to have a better understanding of my own reading tastes. All of this is subjective, of course, since the act of reading is always a collaboration between the reader and the writer. I’m sure that some of the books I think are terrible are considered by others to be the best in the world, and vice versa. My goal is to look for patterns that will tell me whether I’m likely to enjoy a book (or an author), so that I can find the best books more efficiently. I don’t do this for all of the books that I read, but since the Hugo and Nebula winning books are supposed to be the very best, I figured it was worth it to do a deeper analysis—especially since my goal is to read all of them.

The thing that surprises me is that it isn’t parental status that matters, but gender + parental status. I can think of a couple of reasons why this would be the case. The most obvious is that it’s easier for me to empathize with a childless man, since that was me for such a long time. And I do think that’s a major part of it.

But I also think that there’s something specifically about being a mother—or deliberately choosing not to be one—that’s also a factor. And yes, I’m talking about biological essentialism. I mean, I’m not a biologist, but I know that I will never be able to be a mother—that’s a life experience that I will never be able to have. Conversely, I will never be able to deny my potential motherhood, an equally major life decision. Both of those experiences are bound to have a major impact on an author’s writing, either way.

I also think this factor is what lies at the heart of Roe v. Wade, the worst decided Supreme Court case since Dred Scott v. Sanford. Certainly the cultural impact of that decision has profoundly influenced how our society views children and motherhood. It’s also why I am sooo looking forward to Matt Walsh’s documentary What Is a Woman? coming out in two weeks:

With all of this in mind, I find it fascinating that every Hugo Award for best novel after 2015 (the year that the Sad Puppies had their high water mark) was won, as far as I can tell, by a childless woman. It would be interesting to see if that trend extends to nominees, or to the other categories like best short story, best novelette, and best novella. Maybe I’ll look that up sometime.

And now that I’ve referenced Roe v. Wade, I’m sure that Cora Buhlert (if she’s reading this) is saying to herself: “yup, he just thinks that all childless women are evil.” And to the extent that File 770 is read by humans and not bots, they’re no doubt picking and choosing those parts of this post that confirm their prejudices (if China Mike Glyer even has the balls to cross link to a post that includes that trailer—do it, China Mike! I dare you!)

But I don’t really care either way, because now I have a much better understanding of my own personal reading tastes, and how they contrast with the Hugo/Nebula crowd. For me, the best books are those that are written by authors who have had the life experience of being a mother, and the worst books are by those who have chosen to deny themselves that path. Apparently, the Hugo/Nebula crowd takes the opposite view. Good to know.

P is for Parenthood

I’m currently in the process of writing the second edition of my newsletter exclusive, Science Fiction from A to Z, adding a bunch of new chapters and rewriting all of the old ones. For a blog post this week, I thought I’d share one of the new chapters. Let me know what you think!

I was going to make this section “P is for Pulp,” rounding out “G is for Golden Age,” “N is for New Wave,” “D is for Dark Age,” and “I is for Indie.” But I have to admit, I’m not as familiar with the pulp era of science fiction as I would like to be. I’ve read all of Robert E. Howard’s Conan and Solomon Kane stories, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars (though not the rest of the Barsoom series, unfortunately. It’s on my TBR!) but that’s pretty much it. From what I understand, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and (of course) Mary Shelley all preceded this era, and I’m a little more familiar with them, but all I know about the pulp era is what I’ve heard from other sources, and I’d rather not regurgitate that without first exploring it myself.

Instead, I want to write about a major influence on every writer that gets almost no play whatsoever in public treatment of their work, but is arguably the single most important aspect of their lives: parenthood.

Becoming a parent really changes you. When I held my first child in my arms for the first time, a distinct thought came into my mind, almost like a voice: “this is her story now.” They say that we’re all the hero of our own story, and to a certain extent that’s true, but anyone who has brought a child into the world (or adopted a child as their own) has a much more complex and nuanced understanding and perspective. Even a terrible, abusive parent has still experienced what it’s like to become a link between the generations. That experience reshapes everything you do and are in ways that are impossible to appreciate until you’ve had it for yourself.

There is a subtle but distinct difference between books written by authors who have experienced parenthood vs. authors who are childless. I wasn’t as conscious of it until I became a parent myself, but even back in my days as a bachelor, I think I could still sense it, even though I didn’t know what it was. I suspect it’s why I’m a huge fan of David Gemmell, but not of George R.R. Martin, even though on the surface, they write the same kind of book. Both of them write dark and gritty fantasy, both of them are known for killing off major characters and doing horrible things to the ones who survive, and both of them are written quite well—in fact, on an artistic level, Martin is probably superior. But where Martin tends to obsess over themes of victimhood and victimization, Gemmell focuses more on heroism and what makes a hero. Gemmell had two children; Martin (so far as I can tell) has none.

In 2022, I made a new year’s resolution to read or DNF every novel that has won either a Hugo or a Nebula award. To prep for this resolution, I made a spreadsheet of all the novels, along with other pertinent information that interested me, such as each author’s gender, their approximate age when they won the award, and whether or not they have any children. I found some very interesting patterns. There were 110 novels in all, and fifty of them were written by authors who were childless (or at least did not have any mention of children in their author bios and/or Wikipedia entries). After 2015 and 2016 respectively, every Hugo and Nebula award-winning novelist (not counting the Retro-Hugos) has been childless—more specifically, childless women in their 40s and 50s, with one exception who is transgender (Charlie Jane Anders), one exception who is in her thirties (Arkady Martine), and one whose age I cannot determine (Sarah Pinsker). But all three of them are still childless, at least according to the internet.

Now, this is not to say that not having children makes you a terrible writer. In fact, it may actually make you a better writer, since you have more time and energy to devote to learning and improving the craft. But whether for good or ill, I do think that it gives you a handicap in terms of life experience. That handicap is going to influence both the subjects you choose to write about, and how you choose to write about them. I say this not just from my experience as a reader, but as a writer.

My wife and I married a little late, and by the time we had our first child, I’d already been writing professionally for about ten years. Up until that point, the reader I’d had in my mind was basically a younger version of myself. Bringing Stella Home is not a YA book, but a lot of my Amazon reviews assume that it is, probably because I was in college when I wrote it and was writing the sort of book that I wish I’d discovered back when I was in high school and reading things like Ender’s Game and Dune. After I’d experienced the real world and become sufficiently red-pilled, I wrote books like Gunslinger to the Stars for my naive college self. But since becoming a parent, my perspective has begun to change, and I find myself writing less for myself and more for my daughter—or rather, the kind of person I expect my daughter to grow up to be. I’m a lot more conscious of certain kinds of content, and while that doesn’t mean that I shy away from it, I do find myself asking: “What am I really trying to say here? What purpose does this really serve?”

The Genesis Earth Trilogy is a good example of this evolution in my own work. The first book, Genesis Earth, was my first published novel, and really was written for a young adult version of myself, which is why I chose to categorize it as YA science fiction. The whole story revolves around two young scientists on a mission to an alien planet, and how they come to discover just as much about each other as the planet they’ve been sent to explore. It took me ten years to write the next book, Edenfall, not because I didn’t know what would happen next, but because I didn’t feel like I was ready to write it. Then I got married, and that was the experience I needed to break through the block and finish the book—and it went in a much different direction than it would have, if I had written it while I was still single. But the conclusion to the trilogy, The Stars of Redemption, was the book that I wrote after my daughter was born, and that experience had a very profound impact not just on the story itself, but on the characters, the thematic elements, and the way the last book brought everything together from the first book to a meaningful conclusion. I know for a fact that I would not have been capable of writing such a book without the experience of becoming a father.

2019-09-26 Newsletter Author’s Note

This author’s note originally appeared in the September 26th edition of my author newsletter. To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.

So for this newsletter’s author’s note, I thought I’d do a roundup of all the magazines that have published my short stories in the last six months. There’s a surprisingly large number of them. They’re all great publications, so if any of them look interesting, feel free to give them your support and pick up a copy or two.

(As a side note, I’ve found that some email clients break my hyperlinks if I have too many of them in one email. I’m going to put the links in anyway, but if they’re broken for you, please let me know.)

First, my story “The Janus Anomaly” appeared in Kasma Magazine in May. It’s still up on the website, if you want to read it. They did a great illustration for it too!

The story is about a science officer on a scout ship that encounters an alien anomaly, and she can’t tell if she’s losing her mind or if she’s the only sane one while everyone else is crazy. Also, the story takes place in the same universe as the Gunslinger Trilogy.

Second, my story “The Gettysburg Paradox” appeared in the July issue of Bards and Sages Quarterly. The ebook copy of the magazine is available on most ebookstores, and you can find the link here.

The story is about a time traveling tourist at the Battle of Gettysburg who learns that almost all of the combatants are (not so secretly) time travelers themselves. In their efforts to reshape the world, they’ve all converged on this one turning point in history, making it the largest battle ever fought on American soil.

Third, my story “The Curse of the Lifewalker” appeared on The New Accelerator just last month. This is my third story that the good folks at TNA have picked up, and they publish new stories weekly with a very reasonable subscription model to their site.

The story takes place in Utah Valley a couple of hundred years after the apocalypse. Humanity has been afflicted with a blight that shortens all of our lifespans to 25 years, but the main character is one of the few people who is immune. But because of how things have changed in the intervening centuries, his immunity turns out to be more of a curse than a blessing, as he gradually becomes an outsider in his own community.

Fourth, my story “Lizzie-99XT” appeared in last month’s issue of Serial Magazine. The digital copy of the magazine is $2.99, and the print copy is $4.99. There are a bunch of other stories in this issue, and all of them are about life and death decisions.

Next month, I have a couple more stories coming out. “Starchild” will appear as a reprint in Bards and Sages Quarterly, and “The Infiltrator,” a never before published story, will appear in the anthology Not Far From Roswell. So be sure to keep an eye out for those!

Finally, here is the cover art for Edenfall. Check it out!

I’m very happy with how it turned out. The illustration is by Hideyoshi, aka Lorenz Ruwwe, who did the cover art for Genesis Earth. I still have to go through the edits, but that shouldn’t take longer than a week, and the ebook will be up for preorder shortly after. The release date will be in December.

Edenfall cover reveal!

Last week in my author newsletter, I revealed the cover art for my next big novel release, Edenfall. This is the sequel to Genesis Earth and the second book in that trilogy.

Without any further ado, here is the cover!

The art is by Lorenz Ruwwe, aka Hideyoshi. I’m really happy with how it turned out. He did the art for Genesis Earth, so I’m really glad I was able to get him for this one too.

Edenfall will be up for preorder soon. To keep up with all of my new releases, as well as writing updates, special offers, book recommendations, and other cool stuff, be sure to sign up for my author newsletter! I’ve scaled back my blogging, so that’s the best way to keep up with me now.

I’m married now!

So last week Future Mrs. Vasicek and I got married! It’s been really amazing so far. Amazing, and surreal. This is the first I’ve been on a computer since the 11th. We honeymooned in a cabin up in the Tetons, about a dozen miles from the edge of civilization, and it feels odd to be back, not the least because I’ve moved into her house now, which is now our house… an actual house. Like, with a yard and stuff. It’s pretty rad.

The reception was amazing, too. I should probably post pictures, seeing as we had a dunk tank in the end. Yes, Mrs. Vasicek got dunked in her actual wedding dress. She didn’t want the guests to get bored during the reception, so we had a dunk tank, and a bounce house, and an ice cream bar, and a live band that was really amazing. I’ve never seen so many people dancing at a wedding reception. The floor was packed.

So we’re married now, which means going through all of our stuff, figuring what to keep and where it should go. That process will probably continue for the next couple of months. I’m also learning a bunch of interesting new things about her, like the fact that she has a pen collection of probably more than 100 pens! Good thing she married a writer.

In any case, it’s going to take a couple of weeks to ease back into writing again. My plan as of now is to spend the rest of June outlining my next WIP, The Stars of Redemption, which will complete the Genesis Earth trilogy. Lots and lots of publishing stuff to do, too, including new print editions of all of my books. Expect to see those in the very near future.

To get back into the swing of things, I will do my best to regularly update this blog. I also plan to send out a newsletter before the end of the week, with a sweet deal for my subscribers.

So much stuff happening. It’s surreal. I’m married to a woman who is perfect for me in every sort of weird, quirky way imaginable. If you’d told me a year ago that this was where I’d be, I wouldn’t have dared believe it. It’s amazing. It’s beautiful. Everything is beautiful. When people cut me off on the road, I don’t even care. My wife gets off work in an hour and ten minutes, and I can hardly wait to see her again. Being a newlywed is the most amazing drug ever.