WORLDS APART

SciFi Full of Big, Bold, Silly, Wonderful Ideas. 
No Agenda. No Lectures. 

[Click Here to Just Go to the Amazon Page] 

It has been about five thousand years since humankind first ventured out into the galaxy. Instead of a Star Trekkian/Babylonfivealonian/Starwarsian universe filled with weird aliens and lascivious green skinned women, they found... no one. The galaxy was empty of other civilizations. It was all ours. Humankind had access to tens of thousands of habitable worlds and resources beyond measure. The galaxy was our playground and our wonderland. 

• Prime Commander Bill Keeler of Sapphire – a sarcastic, drunk who never expected to command a starship -- serves as Pegasus's captain. 

• Executive Commander Goneril Lear of Republic - Pegasus's conniving shrew of a First Officer, Goneril Lear, plots ineptly to take over the command she believes should have been hers. Part of one of Republic's most elite and powerful families, her ambition is exceeded, fortunately, by her utter incompetence. 

• Tactical TyroCommander Phil Redfire -- The ship's tactical chief likes to blow stuff up in the most artistic way possible, which is considered an art form on the planet Sapphire.  He has a stormy pass and a weakness for exotic women. 

• Lieutenant Navigator Eliza Jane Change -- The ship's Navigator can see the future (because you kind of have to in order to navigate through hyperspace) but really doesn't want to be on the ship and resents everyone else.

  Rounding out the main characters are a smokin' hot shuttle pilot, a less attractive shuttle pilot, a wildly unstable Artificial Intelligence, a talking cat, and a super-smart, brown-nosing junior officer who helps Keeler with "that technical stuff" since he knows nothing about how his ship works. Each book takes the crew to a new and different world (often more than one). 2,000 years of social evolution since the collapse of the Commonwealth have produced a wildly divergent range of civilizations. Some of them can't even be considered human anymore, even in the loosest sense of the word. (They've become electric dragonflies, sapient trees, mutant carnivals, telepathic dolphins and such.)   

Also, in the darkness between the stars, a terrifying enemy awaits. 

• Each book has its own entry (like this one for example), which includes explanations of the inside jokes, obscure references, and other details that went into the writing. 
• Both minor and major characters get background stories, like the colorful history of Tolkien Xerox, a character who appears in exactly one brief scene in the first part of Book 1. (And a cameo in Book 09.)  
• The History of the Second Aurelian War, which is a huge background event in the second half of the series.
• You can read up on the other pathfinder ships mentioned in the series and see how their missions worked out.
• All that futuristic technology, how does it work?
• Is Trajan Lear ... you know? Well his biography will most definitely not answer that question.
• Do you really want to know the names of every ship in the Fleet of Orion and the names of their officers? Okayfine.

Free Worlds is a collection of shorter stories set within the Worlds Apart Universe. So, you could read these stories and if you think, "These are pretty good," then you could try the books. Or, if you've read the books, you could look at the Anthology as part of nerded-out "Expanded Universe," or something like "bonus tracks" on a 1980's music CD.

Old Rehashed Stories

• 'Fiddler's Green' - The crew of the pathfinder ship Pegasus gets more than they bargained for when they crash-land on the planet Fiddler's Green and must negotiate with the planet's strange inhabitants for a "Spaceship Deswampificator" to raise their sunken spaceship.
• 'Independence' - The crew of Pegasus get more than they bargained for when they get stuck in a weird zone of inexplicable madness following a routine visit to the planet Independence.

Shiny New Stories (Because They Grow the Brand) 

• "Cotopaxi" – The crew of Pegasus get more than they bargained for when they explore an ancient space station in search of parts for their damaged ship. For it seems the entity inhabiting the space station has a way of defending itself from intruders that is so bizarre that none who survive will ever speak of it again.
• "Alpha Priori" – The survey ship Astra Cartographer’s mission is to discover and exploit ancient Commonwealth technologies for the Keeler Trust and Companies, but the crew gets more than they bargained for when they visit an abandoned research base in the ring system of an artificial planet.
• "Triton Lyra" – Eccentric interstellar trillionaire Bernadette Keeler takes her ambitious new assistant on a journey to the remote and hostile Triton Lyra system, but the business deal turns out to be more than they bargained for.
• "Cherchez La Femme" – Young Goneril Lear’s first exo-planetary mission turns out to be more or less what she bargained for.

New "Expanded Universe" Stories 

• "Pioneers" – How did the human race breed fast enough to colonize an entire galaxy in just 2000 years? This is how. Most of the people get what they bargained for except the poor saps in the colony ships. 
• "Electra IV" – When the Commonwealth of the Galaxy collapsed, a lot of struggling colonies died with it which was probably not what they bargained for. This is the story of one of them.

Bonus Story

• "Captain Hepburn Has Some Ideas" -- Katrain Hepburn is the captain of the Fast Attack Corvette Augustana. She crashes a meeting of fleet commanders to bargain for an array of strategies to defeat the Aurelians that would only work in an alternative narrative universe where "we only get one shot at this" is a legitimate tactical assessment. (This was cut from Worlds Apart Book 12. It was sort of a cute little character piece, but it sidelined the narrative flow and didn’t add much to the overall arc.)