announcements – Page 2 – The Human Legion

October 9, 2017

Fortress Beta City audio ready to preorder

Attention, Sleeping Legion audio fans! The second novel, produced by Podium Publishing and narrated by Jeffrey Kafer (Jay Allan’s Call to Arms, Daniel Arenson’s Earthrise, Starship’s Mage by Glynn Stewart… Ember War… you get the picture) is available for pre-order from Audible now for release on 17th October. If you have shiny Audible credits, this is where they need to go 🙂 Here are links for: Fortress Beta City at Audible.com Fortress Beta City at Audible.co.uk The audio and whispersync for audio will be available soon directly from Amazon. The first Sleeping Legion novel, The Legion Awakes, is already out on audio. And if you want a taster, the prequel novella, The Demons of Kor-Lir, is available to stream (but not […]

August 23, 2017

Damage Unlimited: Recon team seeks volunteers

NJ McCall’s gotten himself into deep trouble again in a new novelette called Damage Unlimited. Set in the Naddox Archipelago, some 800 miles from his Revenge Squad base at Port Zahir (and where the gun laws are considerably laxer!), a forestry client activates their revenge clause when an unknown assailant slaughters every living thing at a remote logging site. The forest around here is an extremely dangerous place to be, but so too is NJ McCall. Some battles, though, can’t be won by GX-Cannon and railguns alone… This story is going to be about 15,000 words (about an hour to read). It’s set between Hurt U Back and Second Strike, but is designed to be an introductory self-contained story. I […]

May 16, 2017

Marine Novice: cover reveal

Wanted to share some tasty artwork from Vincent Sammy for the Human Legion prequel novella due out early next year. That’s a young Arun McEwan and Springer on the cover. I’ve sketched out the story for Marine Novice in a fair amount of detail, but I’m not going to write it until the Legion climax: The Battle of Earth is completed. But spending time inside the head of this much younger version of McEwan is helping to tie up the end of the series more satisfyingly. It’s feeling natural as I bring the series to a close to be making reference to the first book, and to this prequel too. I’m stoked about how the new book is progressing. With a fair wind and strong coffee, I […]

March 29, 2017

He writes! He talks! He has a new book out. It’s JR Handley!

Many readers of humanlegion.com have been in touch to ask whether JR Handley is a real person or a malevolent, alien gestalt intelligence from a hellish dimension intent on dominating our own. Others have inquired if the ‘author’ is really alive at all, suspecting he is really a rogue 1997 code branch of ‘Clippy’, the Microsoft Office Assistant. Fortunately for these concerned and possibly fictitious individuals, JR Handley has recently spent an hour chatting with Dead Robots Society hosts Paul E. Cooley and Terry Mixon, which you can hear here. Not content with this attempt to prove his existence, JR then proceeded to conduct an extensive interview with Sri Lankan techno-thriller author, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne. Alien intelligence or Clippy the Office Assistant, […]

March 21, 2017

The Subjugation of Humanity

You are instructed to attend the Tawfiq Memorial in Victory City (formerly Washington DC) at midday on day 241, year 27, for a ceremony marking the formal subjugation of humanity. The people of Earth give thanks to our Hardit New Order liberators and wish our lives to have meaning and purpose. Even though the Human Legion has been destroyed, our continued service to the New Order remains essential to give some limited worth to our wretched existence. Failure to attend with enthusiasm will result in the public execution of everyone you know. ONE EMPIRE! ONE SCENT! ONE LEADER! By order of Romulus – Governor of Earth and Greater Terra under the gracious authority of Supreme Leader, Tawfiq Woomer-Calix. THIS IS […]

March 2, 2017

Welcome to Thomas, our new copy editor

Today I welcome Thomas Weaver to the Legion team. Thomas is currently sharpening his copy editor’s eyeballs in readiness to receive the third Sleeping Legion novel, Operation Breakout, which is already with developmental editor, Corey Truax. Welcome, Thomas, welcome. Thomas Weaver is a writer, editor, and blogger who got into professional editing almost by accident years ago when a gamer friend from university needed someone to copyedit a screenplay about giant stompy robots (mecha). Having discovered that he greatly enjoys this kind of work, he’s been putting his uncanny knack for grammar and punctuation, along with an eclectic mental collection of facts, to good use ever since as a Wielder of the Red Pen of Doom. Thomas is disabled and […]

September 16, 2016

Why writers pull apart owl pellets to inspect the bones within

I recall at one of the first science fiction conventions I attended, author Ian Watson replied to the question “What work are you doing at the moment?” by saying he was reading a book about clouds. He explained that he would pick up ideas from every source imaginable and anything could be research. He was reading about clouds because they were interesting. Maybe something he read there would turn up in a novel. And maybe not. That’s a pretty cool concept if your job is an author because you can explain away anything you do as research. Just another glass of chili beer… it’s research! So it turned out to me last weekend. Once a month I take my son […]

September 16, 2016

Coming soon…

The Sleeping Legion is stirring! Standby for further announcements.

August 19, 2016

The Dragon Awards. Vote now!

Awards! Back when I was a teenager in the 1980s and mined my local library for science fiction books, I got an extra little thrill if I took out a novel with words such as ‘Nebula Award Winner’ or ‘Hugo Award Nominee’. Not much of a thrill, and I can’t say it ever made me pick one book over another, but nonetheless an award was something to proudly stamp on your book and helped me to imagine that I was a tiny part of a wider and international science fiction community. In recent years I’ve been eligible to vote in various science fiction awards – I was even nominated once – but I never bothered voting. I was very happy […]

July 27, 2016

BattleNet is up…

BattleNet, our new Human Legion forums went up last night. Come along for a chat. It’s something I’m trialing, partly to give a way to share feedback on the recon team editions of forthcoming books. However, I’m seeing a lot of people registering and then going straight to the lost password screen. Is something wrong? Update: I can see the confusion, thanks to some help from MildDiscomfort. BattleNet works, but it’s a little confusing to get started. I’ll tidy that up. If you want to join the recon teams, you need to first join the Legion, which you can do here. You don’t need to do so to chat away on BattleNet, which you can find here. We’re planning to put […]