Category: Sex, Life, and Love under the Algorithms

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 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:

Nothing Found

Nothing Found

Check back each month for new stories!

2019-10-17 Newsletter Author’s Note

This author’s note originally appeared in the October 17th edition of my author newsletter. To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.

I had a major realization about my creative process while writing “Sex, Life, and Love under the Algorithms.” My original goal was to take a short break from The Stars of Redemption in order to work through a creative block. Instead, I came away with a plan that could revolutionize the way I write everything.

The major realization was that my natural writing length is between 10k and 30k words. When I try to write short stories, they tend to balloon very quickly into something longer. But when I try to write novels, I always run into a creative block somewhere in the middle, usually around the 30k-40k word mark.

This doesn’t mean that I can’t write novels; just that I have to find ways to work through this problem. I remember asking Brandon Sanderson a question about this ten years ago while taking his writing class:

Me: So I have this problem, where every time I try to write a novel, I always get stuck in the middle and have to put it aside for a few months before I can finish it.

Brandon: But you finish it, right?

Me: Uh, yeah. But—

Brandon: Then what’s the problem? So long as you end up with a finished novel, your creative process is still working. It might not work the same as someone else’s, but it works.

Ever since then, that’s basically been my process. I work on a novel until I hit a creative block, then lay it aside and pick up another half-finished novel and work on it until I either finish it or hit another creative block, at which point I lay it aside to work on something else.

But in 2017, I decided that wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t producing novels fast enough to keep up the rigorous release schedule that I needed in order to stay relevant in the indie publishing world. So over the course of the next two years, I developed an outlining method to write faster, cleaner, and more efficiently.

I’ve written three or four novels using this new method, and in spite of all my best efforts, I always find myself getting stuck somewhere in the middle—in other words, after surpassing my natural writing length. At the same time, I still haven’t managed to write more than 2-3 novels per year.

It’s very difficult to keep writing on something that won’t be finished for months when your sales are starting to flag and you know you need a new release to boost everything again. Some people thrive on that sort of pressure, but not me.

That’s why “Sex, Life, and Love under the Algorithms” was so refreshing to write. From start to finish, it only took a month to write (and the only reason it took that long was because I was taking it easy). No creative blocks. No long breaks. What’s more, I now have a story to submit to the major markets, or self-publish, or do whatever else I can think of to earn money and reach new readers.

This made me wonder: what if I could write all of my novels this way?

In the golden age of science fiction, there was this thing called the “stitched novel.” Most SF writers specialized in short stories, but found it much more difficult to write novels. The solution they found to this problem was to stitch together several short stories that took place in the same world, and turn that into a novel. Asimov’s Foundation books were written this way, for example.

What if, instead of stitching together a novel after the fact, I used my novel outlines to come up with short stories or novelettes that I could later assemble into a finished novel? Each story would be a complete story in itself, and I might only reuse half of it in the novel, or rewrite it from a different character’s point of view.

Not only would I avoid hitting creative blocks, but I’d also be able to get paid during the novel-writing process itself, and also have more frequent new releases. I would also have more material to submit to the major magazines and other traditional short story markets, potentially getting my name out that way.

To keep my readers from paying for the same story twice, whenever I self-published one of these stories, I would make it free for the first couple of weeks. I would also retire most of these stories after the novel itself came out, though I might use one or two of them to help promote it.

There are a couple of novels I still need to finish using the old method. The Stars of Redemption is one of them, and I should probably also finish the Twelfth Sword Trilogy before doing anything too experimental. But I have some new story ideas that could really work out well with this assembled novel technique. Also, I think it’s time to retire the Star Wanderers novellas and combine them into a single novel, which could serve as a proof-of-concept.

I have no idea if this plan will work or not, but I figure it’s worth a try. If breaking things down to my natural writing length enables me to write more novels in the long run, that would be fantastic. And if the quality of my novels goes up because the short stories help to flesh out things like character and setting, so much the better.