Between the day job, kids, grandkids and everything else, I’ve still managed to get in a little word count this week. Not to mention pushing the next Corner Scribblers title out to the masses. It is a fun collection of flash fiction centered around first contacts.
Take Me To Your Reader: A Corner Scribblers Flash Collection w/ guest author, Dan Hollifield (Corner Scribblers Quarterly Collections Book 5)
Take me to your reader is a collection of fun, serious and wacky stories centered around a first contact with an alien species.
Why?
Because…Aliens!
Foreword and story contribution “the signal” by guest author Dan Hollifield, head editor and owner of Aphelion: The Webzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Then we have the latest Anthology that I am heading up. Starflight: Tales from the Starport Lounge, will be a collection of short stories centered around the year of 4620, at the Games begining. We’re see a mix of stories from smugglers, to colony supply runs, to the cocky space jock that needs to be knocked down a notch or two.
For those who don’t know what Starflight is, In the simplest definition Starflight is a computer game for the IBM PC developed by Binary Systems which started development in 1983, and was released in 1986 “after 15 man years” for the cutting edge video technologies of the time, namely black-and-white, Hercules monochrome, composite TV, 4-color CGA, and 16 color Tandy graphics. Later a second version was released with EGA graphics support and versions were ported to the C64, Amiga, Atari ST and the Sega Genesis platforms. Three years later two of the five original developers went on to create the sequel Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula.
Unlike other archaic DOS-based games of the time, you do not have to memorize a huge number of keys since all functions can be executed by using convenient menus controlled by the keypad. All events occur in pauseable real-time, events such as ship combat, lifeforms moving or attacking, or even just time passing only takes place when you are outside of a menu, giving players the ability to think before they act and removing the stress of figuring out controls under pressure.
But still this doesn’t answer the question of “What is Starflight?” Starflight is an open ended space simulator of 269 star systems and roughly 800 planets. Is also a role-playing game considering your ships strengths are improved as you spend resources on crew training, equipment purchases, and obtain specialized artifacts. It is an adventure game set in space with a sophisticated artificial intelligence system, alien races with distinctive language traits, personalities, and behaviors. It is a simulator of a huge universe requiring greater and greater amount of fuel to travel to distant locations. It contains open-ended scripting with chains of hints leading players varied and different conclusions about meanings and histories and events.
The game starts you off in Starport, a torus-shaped space station orbiting Arth, the last surviving colony of the Old Empire and the only planet with any form of human life. A thousand years ago a great empire spanned the stars combining almost all the known alien races in a cooperative alliance a.k.a. Star Trek. Now after a great dark age, you command a spaceship built with the pinnacle of Old Empire technology and set out to explore the galaxy. Within a short time, your true mission begins to unfold as it is discovered that not only Arth’s sun but all the stars in the region are systematically exploding, vaporizing planetary ecosystems, and slowly and methodically extinguishing all life in the galaxy.
Author PR Fight club book of the week.
Planetary Anthology: Saturn
From: Tuscany Bay Press, A NEW RELEASE COMING OUT ON 2/16/21, but it’s up for pre-order now.
Saturn. The Ringed Planet. Harbinger of ideas and wonder. The planet that gave birth to the modern era of science envisioning the myriad of multi-colored rings circling the planet, one of the reasons for the invention of the telescope and the second largest in our solar system. These are the stories of Saturn, the great Titan. Tales of time, age, and endings.