Is Children of the Starry Sea for You?

Children of the Starry Sea is a character-driven space opera about the cost of protecting your family when an empire takes control of your world. Set on a contested colony and orbiting space station, this second book in The Outworld Trilogy blends political tension, intimate family drama, and high-stakes escape into a story about courage under pressure. This is science fiction that cares as much about parents and children as it does about fleets, invasions, and interstellar power struggles.

What Kind of Reader Will Love This Book?

If you love…

  • character-driven science fiction focused on family, faith, and moral responsibility
  • space opera about resistance movements and underground escape plans
  • stories where parents must protect their children in impossible political situations
  • multi-POV novels that balance action with emotional depth
  • hopeful sci-fi that wrestles with sacrifice, loyalty, identity, and belonging

…then Children of the Starry Sea is probably your kind of story.

What You’ll Find Inside

Children of the Starry Sea follows Jeremiah, Reva, Mariya, Isaiah, and Salome as their colony and orbital station fall under the control of the Hameji—an expansionist empire determined to enforce submission. Pirates resurface, political negotiations turn coercive, and secret escape plans unfold under constant surveillance. At the same time, the mysterious collective consciousness that binds Reva and Isaac raises urgent questions about identity, assimilation, and belonging. The emotional journey moves from fear and disorientation to quiet resolve and sacrificial courage. The result is a tense but intimate space opera—fast-paced in moments of infiltration and escape, reflective in scenes of family, faith, and moral choice—about standing firm when everything familiar is stripped away.

What Makes Children of the Starry Sea Different

Fans of traditional military space opera will recognize invasions, political negotiations, and resistance efforts—but this story takes those elements in a deeply personal direction. Where many science fiction invasion stories focus primarily on fleet battles and tactical maneuvers, Children of the Starry Sea leans into the domestic and moral cost of occupation: dinner tables under surveillance, parents negotiating with conquerors, teenagers stepping into adulthood too soon.

Readers who enjoy layered ensemble casts will appreciate the shifting perspectives between parents, children, and outsiders—especially the unique thread of the collective consciousness that shapes Reva and Isaac’s storyline. Instead of framing assimilation as pure horror, the novel explores belonging, identity, and agency in unexpected ways, making it both intellectually and emotionally distinctive within modern indie space opera. Where many science fiction stories treat hive minds as purely monstrous, this novel explores collective consciousness as both gift and danger—complicating the usual invasion narrative with questions of agency, consent, and chosen belonging.

What You Won’t Find

You won’t find grimdark nihilism, graphic brutality, or cynical antiheroes. While the stakes are high and the threat is real, this is not a hopeless dystopia. Violence has consequences, and moral choices matter. If you’re looking for relentless darkness or shock-value storytelling, this may not be the right fit.

Why I Think You Might Love Children of the Starry Sea

This story matters to me because it explores something I think science fiction doesn’t always take seriously enough: the quiet, daily courage of families under pressure. At its heart, Children of the Starry Sea is about parents learning when to protect and when to let go, about teenagers stepping into adulthood too soon, and about holding onto faith and identity when larger powers try to define your future for you. Finishing this novel required persistence and trust—much like the characters themselves must learn. If you care about science fiction where family is central rather than incidental, I think this book will stay with you.

Where to Get the Book

Related Posts and Pages

Explore the series index for The Outworld Trilogy.

Return to the book page for Children of the Starry Sea.

How I Would Vote Now: 1994 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Moving Mars by Greg Bear

Glory Season by David Brin

Virtual Light by William Gibson

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress

Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Actual Results

  1. Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
  2. Moving Mars by Greg Bear
  3. Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
  4. Glory Season by David Brin
  5. Virtual Light by William Gibson

How I Would Have Voted

(Abstain)

Explanation

None of these books/authors are so terrible (or so woke) (except maybe for Kim Stanley Robinson) that I would have ranked them below “no award.” With that said, I just didn’t think any of these books were good enough for me to vote for.

Greg Bear’s Moving Mars is basically a sci-fi retelling of the 60s student protest movement on Mars. That’s the big draw. The more I learn about what was actually happening in the 60s, though, the more insufferable I find the hippies and their ideological descendants to be. Needless to say, I DNFed this one.

I skipped the book by David Brin, because he’s just such a dogmatic atheist. I tried his Uplift books and DNFed them for much the same reason. If you’re going to be so dogmatic in your religious views that you cannot build a fictional world where the opposite views might plausibly be true, I have no time for you. That’s equally true for theists as for atheists (unless, of course, the book falls into the religious fiction genre).

I tried Virtual Light, but DNFed it only a couple of pages in, due to some explicit violence against children. Now that I’m a father, I have a really low tolerance for that kind of stuff. I’ve also found Gibson to be a bit too dark and gritty for my taste. He seems to occupy the same literary niche as Neal Stephenson, and rub me wrong in much the same way.

It’s been so long since I DNFed Beggars in Spain that I’ve forgotten what my issue with it was. I found the basic premise to be quite interesting, and got about halfway through the book. Ultimately, though, I think I just got bored with it. But I might come back to this one. Of all the books on the Hugo ballot this year, this is the one I’m most willing to try again.

As for Green Mars, I just couldn’t get into it. Part of that is how insufferable I find KSR’s self-righteous liberal politics to be, but another part was the sexual content in the first few pages. I read Red Mars back in college, when my threshold for those kind of content issues was much lower, but I did come very close to DNFing it after the farm orgy scene. Also, Red Mars was a bit of a slog for my younger self, since I never really latched on to any of the characters. Same with Green Mars. Just a lot of people doing a lot of things, when it was clear that all the (crunchy liberal) author really cared about was the capital “I” Idea. Pass.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

The Cost of Violated Trust in Captives in Obscurity

Trust is one of the few things that can’t be taken by force—and one of the easiest things to destroy. Captives in Obscurity, the fifth book in the Sons of the Starfarers series, asks a difficult question: what happens when survival demands obedience, but obedience comes at the cost of trust? This novel explores how quickly trust can be violated under pressure—and how hard it is to rebuild once that line has been crossed.

Where the Idea Came From

The idea for this theme grew out of thinking about captivity that isn’t just physical. History is full of situations where people were “protected,” “unified,” or “kept safe” through fear and coercion—and where trust was replaced with enforced loyalty. I was interested in exploring what happens after that line is crossed: when characters realize that something essential has been taken from them, and that getting it back may cost more than they expect.

How The Cost of Violated Trust Shapes the Story

At the heart of Captives in Obscurity is a fragile community forced to survive under constant threat. Characters must decide who they can rely on, what information to share, and how much control is too much—even when the stakes are life and death. Again and again, the story presents situations where violating trust seems expedient, even necessary, but leaves lasting damage in its wake.

Rather than treating betrayal as a single dramatic moment, the novel shows trust eroding through small compromises, rationalizations, and “temporary” measures. The real danger isn’t just external enemies—it’s what happens inside a group when fear teaches people to hide, manipulate, or control one another. Survival becomes possible, but unity becomes fragile.

What The Cost of Violated Trust Says About Us

This theme reflects a truth many readers recognize: trust is slow to build and fast to break. When it’s violated—by institutions, leaders, or even people we love—the damage isn’t just emotional. It reshapes how we see the world, how we relate to others, and how much of ourselves we’re willing to risk again. Captives in Obscurity suggests that safety without trust may keep people alive, but it can’t make them whole.

Why This Theme Matters to Me

While writing this book, I kept returning to the idea that good intentions don’t erase harm. Trust, once violated, can’t be restored through force or guilt—it requires humility, restraint, and a willingness to accept limits on power. That idea mattered to me personally, because it’s easy to justify crossing ethical lines when the pressure is high. This story is my attempt to wrestle honestly with where those lines should be, and what it costs when we ignore them.

Where to Get the Book

Related Posts and Pages

Explore the series index for the Sons of the Starfarers series.

Return to the book page for Captives in Obscurity.

Is Captives in Obscurity for You?

Captives in Obscurity (Sons of the Starfarers, Book 5) is a character-driven military space opera about survival under captivity, moral courage under pressure, and the terrifying intimacy of minds that can’t fully hide from each other. It delivers a tense, emotionally charged “trapped behind enemy lines” experience—part escape thriller, part relationship-and-conscience drama, with big series-arc implications kept mostly in the background.

What Kind of Reader Will Love Captives in Obscurity?

If you love …

  • military sci-fi / space opera that puts characters first and treats survival as a moral problem, not just an action set piece
  • captivity, escape, and resistance stories where hope is stubborn and hard-won
  • high-stakes relationship tension shaped by trust, betrayal, and incompatible cultures
  • psychological sci-fi elements (telepathy / shared consciousness) that intensify both danger and intimacy
  • stories that wrestle honestly with hard topics instead of sanding them down

…then Captives in Obscurity is probably your kind of story.

What You’ll Find Inside

Captives in Obscurity follows Isaac—isolated, exhausted, and stripped of control—while he and Reva navigate life as prisoners aboard a pirate ship ruled by a charismatic, terrifying captain. As escape becomes less a single decision and more a long grind of endurance and strategy, the story digs into trauma, agency, guilt, and the cost of survival—especially when a strange telepathic connection (and something bigger behind it) makes privacy, consent, and trust painfully complicated. The result is a tense, gritty, emotional installment that feels intimate even when the stakes are cosmic.

What Makes Captives in Obscurity Different

Fans of loyalty-and-duty military SF will recognize the chain-of-command pressure and the “hold the line” mindset—but this book pushes the conflict inward, into the places where survival and conscience collide. Where many space opera captivity arcs focus mainly on tactics and jailbreak mechanics, Captives in Obscurity leans into the psychological and relational consequences: what it does to a person to be used, controlled, and forced to keep going anyway. And the telepathic / collective-consciousness element doesn’t just add cool sci-fi flavor—it turns trust into a battlefield and makes “escape” as emotional as it is physical.

What You Won’t Find

This isn’t a light, quippy adventure, and it doesn’t treat trauma like set dressing. Content note: the book includes fallout from a prior sexual assault between major characters and engages directly with themes of consent and coercion (including the author’s note discussing why that was essential to the story). If you want space opera that stays far away from those topics, this one may not be a good fit.

Why I Think You Might Love Captives in Obscurity

This was one of the hardest books in the series for me to write—not because the plot wouldn’t cooperate, but because the emotional consequences had to be faced honestly. I wanted to tell a story where survival doesn’t erase harm, where “good guys vs. bad guys” isn’t always clean, and where people from radically different cultures can hurt each other even without intending to be monsters. If you like science fiction that uses its big ideas to put human conscience under a microscope—and still fights to earn hope on the other side—I think this book will stick with you.

Where to Get the Book

Related Posts and Pages

Explore the series index for the Sons of the Starfarers series.

Return to the book page for Captives in Obscurity.

Making Steady Progress

Now that we’re in a good daily routine again, I’ve been making steady progress in Captive of the Falconstar. I’m a little more than halfway done with the AI draft, and around 15% done with the human draft.

So far, there have been no major creative blocks, which is a good sign. The middle is always super messy, but I think I nailed the outline, because the AI draft has no major issues so far—and with a solid AI draft to guide the human writing, I’m consistently hitting 2500 WPH and higher.

In practice, that means that I should have a final polished draft of this book by the end of March. If I had more time to work on it each day, I’d have it done even sooner—perhaps even as soon as this month. But right now, all I can manage is about half an hour (if that) in the early morning, an hour in the evening, and sometimes as much as three or four hours on Saturday.

Not as much as I would like, but better than nothing. And without the way I use AI to generate a first draft, I probably wouldn’t be finished with this book until September or October, and it would be the only full-length novel I’d manage to publish all year. (Though realistically at that point, I’d probably have to go on indefinite hiatus and stop publishing altogether, until the kids grew up and left the house).

After Captive of the Falconstar is done, I plan to work on the human draft of The Soulbond and the Sling and the AI draft of The Soulbond and the Lady, until the first book is finished and ready to publish. But I won’t actually publish it until I have the first three books ready to go, since that way I’ll be able to rapid release the first trilogy.

Depending on how things go, I will probably put Captive of the Falconstar up for pre-order by the end of the month. I don’t usually do assetless pre-orders, but if I’m reasonably certain I can have the writing finished by the end of March, then I don’t see any reason not to give it a launch date and set things up to go. It will probably be available to read sometime in May or June.

I don’t know when I’ll have the third book of the trilogy finished, but if things go well with The Soulbound King series, there’s a chance it will be finished by the end of the year. I’ll probably finish writing The Unknown Sea before I move on to Lord of the Falconstar, just because I want to write and publish another Sea Mage Cycle book before the end of the year, but depending on how things go with Captive of the Falconstar, I might move the sequel up in the queue. Otherwise, it will probably come out sometime in early 2027.

The Healing Power of Love in Star Wanderers

What heals a person when the universe won’t stop moving—when home is gone, language is чужой, and every port feels temporary? Star Wanderers is a character-driven science fiction novel built around a simple, stubborn hope: that the healing power of love isn’t just something you feel, but something you build—and that it can stitch a fractured life back together into belonging.

Where the Idea Came From

The seed of this theme came from two places. First, I wanted to take the love-story core of an old western (Jeremiah Johnson) and translate it into frontier science fiction—into a world where survival is hard, communities are fragile, and intimacy carries real risk.

Second, the story grew alongside my own life. I began writing the original novellas as a single young man during the Great Recession, pouring real loneliness into Jeremiah’s wandering. Years later, I finished the novel married and on the verge of fatherhood. That personal journey reshaped the book’s central idea: that love has the power to heal isolation—not by removing hardship, but by giving hardship meaning.

How the Healing Power of Love Shapes the Story

In Star Wanderers, the central conflict isn’t just pirates, frontier scarcity, or outworld politics—it’s the ache beneath all of that: the fear that drifting will hollow you out. Jeremiah begins the story as a lone starship pilot shaped by motion and isolation, surviving by staying unattached. But when Noemi enters his life, love becomes the force that redefines what “survival” even means. Commitment pulls him out of mere wandering and into responsibility: protecting someone else, learning someone else’s world, and choosing a future that requires roots instead of constant escape.

That healing love ripples outward through the story. Other characters see the difference it makes—because love creates an anchor in chaos. It becomes the standard by which temptation, loyalty, and trust are measured. Again and again, the story asks: what happens when you risk the one thing that’s keeping you whole? That’s why moments of fear, sacrifice, and moral choice matter so much here—not as plot mechanics, but as stress tests that reveal whether love is strong enough to carry a life.

What the Healing Power of Love Says About Us

This theme is hopeful, but it’s not naïve. It suggests that loneliness isn’t only a circumstance—it’s a wound—and that healing usually comes through commitment rather than convenience. Real love costs something: pride, independence, comfort, the illusion that you can keep yourself safe by staying separate. But it also gives back something many of us are quietly starving for: a place to belong, even when the world remains uncertain and unfinished.

Why This Theme Matters to Me

I keep returning to this theme because I’ve seen how easy it is to drift—emotionally, spiritually, socially—especially when life feels hostile or unstable. Star Wanderers is the most personal thing I’ve written in that sense: it begins in loneliness and ends in family. I wanted to capture that truth as honestly as I could—that love doesn’t magically remove hardship, but it can transform hardship into a life worth living, and an adventure you’re grateful to stay for.

Where to Get the Book

Related Posts and Pages

Explore the series index for The Outworld Trilogy.

Return to the book page for Star Wanderers.

Is Star Wanderers for You?

Star Wanderers is a character-driven frontier space opera and science fiction adventure about loneliness, love, and the search for home on the far edges of human civilization. It delivers a quiet, emotional adventure centered on wandering starship pilots and fragile outworld communities—less about conquering the stars and more about what it costs to keep moving when you don’t know where you belong.

What Kind of Reader Will Love Star Wanderers?

If you love…

  • frontier space opera with a lone-trader or wandering starship feel
  • character-driven science fiction focused on relationships, marriage, and family under pressure
  • stories where faith, conscience, and moral choice shape the action
  • found family science fiction set against danger, exile, and cultural collision
  • quieter, thoughtful adventures that balance tension with hope

…then Star Wanderers is probably your kind of story.

What You’ll Find Inside

Star Wanderers follows Jeremiah, an independent starship pilot drifting from port to port, whose life changes when he rescues a young woman from a dying frontier station and becomes entangled with her people, her faith, and her future. As pirates, famine, and outworld politics close in, the story explores loneliness, commitment, belief, and the cost of choosing to belong. The pacing blends reflective, intimate moments with sharp spikes of danger, resulting in a hopeful but hard-earned journey.

What Makes Star Wanderers Different

Rather than focusing on galaxy-spanning wars or elite soldiers, Star Wanderers centers on ordinary people trying to do the right thing in an unforgiving frontier. Romance, marriage, and faith aren’t side plots—they’re core engines of the story, shaping every major decision. The book treats technology and heroism pragmatically, favoring ingenuity, sacrifice, and cooperation over brute force or spectacle.

What You Won’t Find

This is not grimdark science fiction, nor is it nonstop military action. You won’t find cynical nihilism, endless explosions, or characters who survive purely on luck. Instead, the tension grows from moral choices, relationships under strain, and the consequences of standing your ground when running would be easier.

Why I Think You Might Love Star Wanderers

I put more of myself into Star Wanderers than almost anything else I’ve written. I began the story as a single young writer wrestling with loneliness and finished it while married and preparing for parenthood, and that journey shaped its heart. If you’re drawn to science fiction that treats love, faith, and responsibility as real forces—capable of both wounding and saving—I think this story will resonate with you.

Where to Get the Book

Related Posts and Pages

Explore the series index for the Outworld Trilogy.

Return to the book page for Star Wanderers.