What? A new book already? Yes, hot off “Calypso, Girl of the Crystal City”, I have a brand-new sci-fi story available as both an ebook and a paperback, perhaps my most unusual yet, since it’s purely a dive into my far-future setting’s worldbuilding, but with characters and a pleasant setting. I think my blurb says it all:
Join Enya and her five guests over a thousand years in the future at her castle atop a mountain summit on an unfathomably distant planet, opened up to human visitation by the head-spinning advent of mass warp travel, where amid squalls of freezing rain, thunder, and lightning lit by two moons they warm themselves up with a roaring bonfire, and tell each other of calendars across the cosmos: calendars for worlds with long years, short years, calendars Cosmic Standard, Persian, French Republican, American Revolutionary, calendars for worlds tidally locked be they 1:1, 3:2, or otherwise, even touching upon that rarest calendrical dance in the cosmos, gravitational choreographies. Their fireside conversations of space-age timekeeping are revealed in these, their letters from the Night of the Calendars.
In quite a few blog posts on this website I have explored the topic of worldbuilding calendars – “Worldbuilding New Calendars”, “More Thoughts on my New Calendar”, and “Beginning the Night of the Calendars” – but none are quite as thorough nor nearly as atmospheric as “The Night of the Calendars”, so if you liked those blog posts I think you’ll like this novella even better!
And yes, it’s a novella, weighing in at 17,526 words. By a few definitions it might be a “novelette”, but I really don’t like the term anyway, preferring anything between 10,000 and 40,000 words to be a “novella” instead, and “Night of the Calendars” does meet the most common definitions of a novella in the science fiction genre anyway. It was an interesting effort, being my first book too long to be a short story and too short to be a novel, and I must say I enjoyed writing it very much.
My next effort will likely turn out to be much longer, being a novel, also set in the same fictional world over a thousand years in the future, that follows a family, starting from Ilithiana, a girl, who’s an exceptional navigator and cosmographer, recruited to be a progenitor of a clone daughter and lineage by a Sisterhood that focuses on science, exploration, and understanding and that has the signature trait of reproducing only through parthenogenesis.
Later on the story also follows the clone daughter, Anastasia, as she raises a large family of clones on her new home, an island on an ocean planet, with the help of native feathered dinosaur-like creatures (who can talk like the talking birds do) she tames and studies. Ilithiana soon after goes through a torrid love story, becoming a wife and mother, which causes changes in her and conflict between the two families but also eventually new understandings.
But I’ll write more about that some other time; the story is still in the heady “ideas and concepts” stage. Meanwhile, enjoy “The Night of the Calendars”!