Preparing To Go Rogue! #RogueOne #StarWars

Official countdown top right on the Star Wars app!

On Sunday my local Odeon cinema announced that Rogue One tickets would be going on sale at midnight. Woo hoo! I've been waiting on this film all year, especially after attending the Rogue One panel at Star Wars Celebration Europe in July and seeing a lot of the costumes and props. I have the impression this will be a darker story - a scene toward the end of A New Hope hints at a tragic end for the spies who stole the Death Star plans - and that kind of appeals to me. While both the latest SW films have central female leads, where Rey may be seen as a very definitely representative of the Light Side, Jyn seems more of a rogue element and possible reluctant hero - a nice contrast (much as I adore Rey).

But as is usual with Odeon online, there were issues. At least they seemed to have anticipated problems because their Twitter help account was being staffed way outside normal hours...not that it helped me. After my usual lengthy struggle with the website (despite the Book Now link going live early), the booking system bumped my payment twice with a message to contact services. After half an hour I gave up and went to bed. Stupid o'clock Monday morning is not my favourite time to battle technology, and apparently a lot of people were having the same problem and it didn't look like any of us would be getting anywhere with it very soon.

Next morning, I tried again and the whole thing went through without a glitch this time. Odeon Help confirmed at least one of the failed transactions hadn't gone through. My account said neither had...as yet. There was yet another glitch with the ticket machine at the cinema itself so I had to go to a till, but I finally got them! My two boys and I will be seeing Rogue One on release day in 3D (though we won't be the first. I can't quite justify going to the 00:01 performance on the 15th without them). Eldest will be missing out as she and hubs have a concert already booked (oh, dear, guess I'll have to go again to take her!). So, with tickets and t-shirt, I'm all set! Roll on 15th of December...

Happenings
Over at Romancing the Genres, I've found three new Christmas/winter SciFi romances to snuggle up to.

Status Update
Revisions to Keir's Shadow is progressing...if the odd paragraph a day counts. With Christmas coming up and various needlework projects to complete, the whole book thing is taking a seat at the back of the bus.

Chook Update
My girls have not enjoyed the recent wet and windy weather! So no pics. I promise to have some more soon...

Author Libby Doyle on The Pain Season - New SFR Release

Today I'd like to welcome author Libby Doyle to Spacefreighters Lounge with a scene related to her new sci-fi romance release The Pain Season.

The Covalent Healers Ease Barakiel’s Wounded Heart

By Libby Doyle, author of the Covalent Series

The Covalent Series began with The Passion Season. On the vernal equinox, a group of shadowy monks from France burned a man’s internal organs in a bizarre ritual sacrifice. Through this gruesome crime, FBI Agent Alexandra “Zan” O’Gara met Rainer Barakiel. They fell deeply in love, but Zan didn’t know that Barakiel is a superhuman warrior from another dimension. The shadowy monks were the minions of his father, Lucifer, who perpetually seeks his death or enslavement.

Zan learns Barakiel’s true identity in The Pain Season, Book II of the Covalent Series, when she is attacked by demons at the autumnal equinox. She questions her sanity, and leaves him. His duties as a warrior give him some relief, when he can express his emotional pain and rage by cleaving the skulls of demons, but this goes only so far. Barakiel’s passions are as strong as his sword. He never loved anyone the ways he loves Zan.

In the following scene, Barakiel visits the Sylvan Three. The most masterful healers in the Covalent Realm. He is there to be repaired after a battle, but they also offer their understanding, a soothing balm to his lovesick mind. This scene is not in the book. It happens “off-camera,” after the Three have healed Barakiel’s leg wound and he has awoken from his restorative sleep. They know about his broken heart.

***

Barakiel opened his eyes to see the exquisite faces of the Sylvan Three looking down on him, their tranquil smiles betrayed by the nervous movements of their hands.

“How do feel, warrior?” they asked in unison, arranging themselves around the pale green glow of his bed.

He stretched and flexed his muscles. “As if I could combat Lucifer’s armies single-handedly. Thank you, Three. As usual, your healing powers have made me better than I was.”

“Yet, still you do not shine. We wanted to restore your light.”

 “I know,” Barakiel said softly. “I wish I could get better for you.”

They laid their hands on his naked frame and explored where his leg wound had been, before they pulled him upright. One healer cupped his face in her hands.

“It always hurts us, when Covalent lose their mates. We cannot help them.”

“But you do help me, Three. The only other Covalent who knows about my love is Pellus, and he warned me that it would come to no good end. He does not believe she is my mate. He thinks I am deceiving myself, and that a Covalent could never truly choose a human. He does not understand that I will never stop loving her.”

“We understand, Barakiel. We felt your mind. Your love is deep and pure. It cannot end.”

The Three handed Barakiel a robe and beckoned for him to follow them. Soon, they sat in their inner chamber on white cushions next to a pool of clear water that bubbled gently at its edges. A servant brought them glasses of root wine, rich garnet red in delicate crystal goblets. Barakiel sipped his wine, wondering why they had brought him there.

“Tell us about her, warrior.”

Barakiel rested his hand on a slender ankle. “You know, Pellus would say that will make it worse, indulging my reflections.”

“Have you found anything that will stop you from thinking of her?”

“No.”

“Tell us about her.”

He chuckled and they matched him with a musical trill.

“Her name is Zan. Like me, she is a protector of her kind. She is tall, strong and clever, as courageous as the finest Covalent warrior.” Barakiel broke into a wide smile as he spoke. “She plays the guitar. You should see her on the stage, Three! She is a force of nature. That’s when I wanted her, when I saw her play. I was beside myself with lust.”

“But it became more?” they asked, sipping their wine, smiling back at him.

“Yes, much more. I feel the snow in her skin. I see the night sky in her eyes. When she holds me, I feel like I belong to her, in her mind and to her body. I never felt that belonging before.”

“How could you, Barakiel? You were so young when the Covalent Council banished you.”

 The warrior closed his eyes. He did not want to lose control. The Three put their arms around him.

“It’s all right, warrior. The Council banished you and now they expect you to slaughter our enemies. You selflessly attend to your duties, yet know one never asks you what you need. We recognize your love. At least you can feel some measure of belonging, here, with us.”

“Yes, I can,” he murmured. He let his head fall and revealed his grief to the only beings who would accept it from him.

***

The Pain Season

 

ON THE AUTUMNAL EQUINOX, ZAN O'GARA'S LIFE WILL CHANGE.

 

Tonight’s the night. Rainer Barakiel is going to tell me all his secrets. I thought I’d be excited, but I feel like someone shoved a knife into my gut.

 

Heh. Fitting, considering I met Rainer because of his expertise in edged weapons. The daggers used in that ritual sacrifice became our best lead thanks to him. What kind of omen is it, that I met the love of my life because someone found a human spleen in the bushes?

 

I didn’t expect someone like him. When he opened his door I couldn’t talk, I was so stunned. God, how I flirted with him. Hell of a way for an FBI agent to act. This whole relationship is a hell of a way for an FBI agent to act. I didn’t want to face that he was hiding things from me.

 

What if he has something to do with this murder?

 

I’m being paranoid. He’s denied being a criminal and I believe him. I don’t see how my instincts could be so wrong. He can’t be bad. He can’t.

 

He’s hiding things from me, but he loves me. I feel it. Maybe he didn’t expect to fall in love with me, but he did, and now he wants out. He’s going to confess, leave it all behind. For me.

 

I wonder, after he tells me all his secrets, will this become a wacky story we love to tell? Or a story I tell only to myself, alone in a stale-smelling apartment, stewing in pain? The story of how my heart got damaged beyond repair.

 

WARNING: This book contains foul language, violence, and explicit sex. Adults only, please.

 

The Pain Season is available now at these book sellers:
Amazon: goo.gl/O3MEfT 
iBooks: goo.gl/JQIOHL 
Barnes & Noble: goo.gl/sSNpSb 
Kobo: goo.gl/AHm51x 

Although not a cliffhanger, The Pain Season is not a stand-alone novel. The story begins in The Passion Season and will continue in The Vengeance Season coming in 2017. 

About the Author

Libby Doyle is an attorney and former journalist who took a walk around the corporate world and didn’t like it. She escapes the mundane by writing extravagant yarns, filled with sex and violence. She loves absurd humor, travel, punk rock, and her husband. You can discover more about Libby’s world at http://www.libbydoyle.com

 

 

A LONE VOICE OF DISSENT ON ARRIVAL

The reviews for the new science fiction film ARRIVAL have been uniformly over-the-top, calling it “one of the year’s best films” (THE DAILY SUN) and a “poetic vision” (THE GUARDIAN) and its star, Amy Adams, “spectacular” (USA TODAY). According to a consensus of the critics (and many young filmgoers), director Denis Villeneuve has created an SF masterpiece on the order of 2001: A SPACE ODDYSSEY or CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF A THIRD KIND, bringing us a vision of alien first contact that somehow avoids the destruction of major landmarks and lots of things blowing up.

That much I will concede. Bravo for him on that score. ARRIVAL is not your run-of-the mill pop(corn) culture SF-by-way-of-comic-books film. And because we see so much of that kind of mindless fare in the multiplex and so little grown-up science fiction, we are inclined to fall all over ourselves to praise an effort that gives us something to sink our intellectual teeth into. INTERSTELLAR comes to mind.

And like that film, ARRIVAL was a huge disappointment to me. I know I might be the only one, and I might very well catch holy hell for explaining why the film let me down. But when has that ever stopped me, faithful readers?

The audience of this film is asked to take many things on faith from the beginning—to go with the flow, so to speak. Okay, I’m a reasonable person, a science fiction fan and a long-time film lover with a deep catalog of movie knowledge to draw on. If you show me that twelve gigantic orange-segment-shaped alien spaceships have arrived to hover inches above the surface of the earth in various middle-of-nowhere spots around the world, remaining impregnable and incommunicado despite all our initial attempts to contact them, I’ll go along. I may even believe you when you say the ships open at certain intervals every day for humans to go inside, though I’ll start to squirm in my seat.

I’ll endure what appears to be backstory on your main character, a linguist teaching at some obscure college (Amy Adams), but I’ll begin to have real questions when it turns out she is the only one in the United States deemed capable of communicating with the alien creatures. Just her. Not a team of linguists, with computers and mathematicians and psychologists and cross-cultural specialists. No. Just one obscure linguist from a small college somewhere in the Northwest.

Oh, yeah. There’s a physicist (Jeremy Remmer). You’d think there would be a few, because, you know, we might like to know where these aliens came from, but, no. There’s just one, and a few random generals and guys in white coats who do things that aren’t spelled out. The physicist holds up signs for the linguist once she begins to communicate with the aliens.

If this set-up begins to smack of Mary Sue, then the plot soon becomes redolent of it. Because, of course, though our heroine is not the only linguist to figure out how to communicate with the aliens (there are other teams working with the other alien ships around the world), she is the only one to figure out the all-important question of why they have come. The poor physicist is just a bystander (in more ways than one, it turns out). Given Amy Adams’s performance as Lois Lane in BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN (see my review here), she may be forever associated with Mary Sue in my mind after this film.

But here is where it becomes very difficult to argue about ARRIVAL without giving away the M. Night Shyamalan-type core of the film. Without spoiling it, let me just say that the science fiction elements are simply an elaborate construct for delivering an emotional message. That’s not unusual; the best films do it. The best science fiction stories do it, too, whether they are written for the page or for the screen. Unfortunately, the message conveyed here was summed up a century and a half ago by Alfred, Lord Tennyson: “’Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.” Even if we're not talking about romantic love. Even if the other person doesn't have a choice in the matter.

Which is to say, really? All this novel buildup about aliens and first contact and other deep things (which shall remain nameless to avoid spoiling the plot) to arrive at this much-visited emotional destination? Yes, the central theme of the film poses an interesting moral dilemma, but it has nothing to do with aliens. It’s a very human dilemma—and it’s nothing new.

I just can’t help thinking this is a long, though admittedly scenic, trip taken for nothing--and not just because I don't agree with the outcome. For those of you who need a special reason to go to the multiplex, my recommendation is to stay home and wait for pay-per-view. ARRIVAL is a NO-GO.

Cheers, Donna

Inherited Secrets: Blame it on Dartis

I wasn't sure how to write this series of posts without including spoilers, but I'm going to hunker down and take my best shot because there are some things I'm excited to share with readers.

This will be the first of many blogs where I talk about the connections between stories in the Inherited Stars universe. You can think of them as part treasure map and part travel guide.

I'll even include a little quiz at the end for those who've read the stories and should I get any correct responses, yes, there will be prizes.

So to kick off the series...

Blame it on Dartis

Inherit the Stars is the first full-length novel in the series because it takes place at such a dynamic place and time in my Inherited Stars history. What might be a mere mention in this story that takes place 1500 years in the future, may come life in living, breathing color in other stories set in different timelines.

StarDog takes place in the same timeline, about six moons (six months) before the events in Inherit the Stars, just as the Ithian Alliance is starting to tighten its vice-grip on the known galaxy. But fate has a lot more in store for the hero, star navigator Taro Shall, than he ever expects when he's sent by his captain on a simple mission to hire an exterminator. You see, his ship--Calypso--picked up a serious problem on its previous stop.

“Sand viper.” The captain screwed up her face in disgust. “We must’ve picked it up back on Dartis.”

As Taro sets out, it's apparent he doesn't have a very high opinion of Dartis.

The wall com clicked on as he headed down the curved passage toward the airlock. Captain Jordan’s voice filled the corridor. “If you see Pareen out there, tell him to stay away from Calypso until I shoot him an all-clear on his recall. I’m not going to drop the quarantine flags. Don’t want to scare off our client.”

“You got it, Skipper,” Taro answered as he reached Calypso’s main airlock and activated the controls to extend the ramp.

“And watch out for Palies. I want no trouble with the Ithians.”

“No messing with the Alliance. Check that.”

Outside the ship, Carduwa’s warm, herbal-scented air ruffled Taro’s hair and danced along the pavement in gentle eddies. A friendly sun lit the heavy greenery of tall trees and dense shrubbery just beyond the spaceport grounds. This planet was nothing like the bone-dry dustbowl of Dartis. Thank the Island Spirits for that much.

Because of his innocent quest to rid his ship of sand vipers, Taro ends up being sucked into something he never saw coming. Blame it on Dartis.

Taro's not alone. Six months later, as Inherit the Stars opens, the Rathskian slave hero, Sair (he doesn't have a last name--that's part of his culture) begins his own journey when he slips off a merchant starship where he'd stowed away.

Now.

No shouts of alarm spiked above the roar of the busy spaceport when he darted off the ship. Outside the hangar, he tried to disappear into the crowd on the bustling street. He sucked in his breath when a sharp-featured man in a dusty sun cloak strode straight for him.

Carduwan, not Ithian. Thank the Fire Lords. A neutral.

Sair caught the man’s arm. “Where am I?”

The Carduwan registered his size and build, his expression melting from annoyance to fear. “Eliptis hangtown.” He edged away. “Sir.”

“What planet?”

The man’s eyes widened, and he croaked, “Dartis.”

Just my luck. A sandy, hell-baked ball where the Ithians ran as thick as rats in grain.

It's apparent Sair shares Taro's opinion of Dartis.

And just like Taro, Sair also get swept up in something he never sees coming when he negotiates his escape away from the Ithian-held planet. Blame it on Dartis, again.

Dartis is a small, backwater planet with one major spaceport that provides the lifeblood for a world that's poor in resources or industry. Most of the population makes their living off that single spaceport, in one way or another, respectably or not so.

The space hub has no formal name. It's simply called Eliptis Hangtown after the town where it's located. "Hangtown" is slang for spaceport, deriving from another slang term "hang" which is short for hangar.

Yet this sandy little "hell-baked ball" that gets no respect is the catalyst to kick off two adventures in the Inherited Stars universe.

Quiz Time
For those who've read StarDog:
When the story opens, how many days had it been since Calypso left Dartis?

For those who've read Inherit the Stars:
What bothered Sair about the dust of Dartis clinging to his boots?

For those who've read both stories:
A ship in StarDog is destroyed in Inherit the Stars. What's the name of the ship?