Tim C. Taylor

January 7, 2016

Book 5 progress report

I was so confident that the fifth book was going to be out by January that I wrote that down in the back of book 4 and on the website. That will teach me. Today I’ve taken stock of the situation, and realistically we’re not going to make January. That’s partly due to the box set I’m working on taking more time than I expected, but mostly due to the authors and their families being ill (though nothing serious, thankfully). I don’t say that to make excuses, but rather to explain that it’s nothing to do with being out of ideas or writer’s block or anything else that means the book won’t be something that will make me proud when […]

December 24, 2015

Happy Christmas from the Human Legion

I’m in full-on Christmas mode now. Dad needs some sherry, the guinea pigs need more hay, and my son needs to engage in intense physical activity in case he explodes from excitement because tomorrow is Christmas Day. I wanted to take a moment out to thank all of you for your support during 2015. It was December 26th 2014 when the first Human Legion book was published. Since then we’ve launched a total of four novels and sold around 70,000 copies. I say ‘we’ because I haven’t done this on my own. My most obvious partners are Ian Whates who is co-writing the main series with me, JR Handley with The Sleeping Legion, and the team at my audio publisher, […]

December 18, 2015

Empire at War – a military SF box set

More announcements! You’ve probably seen plenty of box sets in the Amazon Kindle Store in recent years. The idea is that several individual titles are collected into a single Kindle book, and usually presented at a bargain price. The books are connected by a theme, and the first Kindle military SF/ space opera themed box set that I’m aware of was Stars & Empire, which came out last year and did very well. These box sets are a very good idea, I thought to myself. So I decided to make one of my own. I wanted a strong theme, which took me a while to dream up. Then it occurred to me that I had discovered other British military […]

December 17, 2015

The Sleeping Legion series

Time for more revelations about the Human Legion spin-off series: Sleeping Legion. I announced this a few weeks ago as a series of novellas that pick up the story of the war on Tranquility that we leave behind in Human Empire, the 4th book of the Human Legion series. As tales are wont to do, this beast has come alive and is now telling us its own story. The Sleeping Legion series will indeed pick up the events left in Human Empire, but will now start off many years before the Human Legion series, deep into the dark history of the Human Marine Corps. Nix the novellas too. The Sleeping Legion will be short novels. I’m working closely with author J.R. Handley […]

December 15, 2015

Marko Kloos interviewed

Not by me, unfortunately, but there’s a podcast interview by the #Wrongfun podcast team that they carried out at the recent Honorcon militarySF convention at Raleigh, NC. [The interview is episode 7, which you can find here.] It’s a small world, because a guest of honor at next year’s Honorcon is Christopher G. Nuttall, and in a few days I’ll be announcing a collaboration that Chris and I are working on together. If you don’t know about Marko Kloos and his ‘Frontlines’ series, then I recommend you check him out. I read the first book when it was still self-published by Marko, but now he’s published by 47 North (a very successful division of Amazon) which means he gets smarter […]

December 11, 2015

Have a science fiction Christmas with Human Legion audiobooks

Tantor Media have been busy producing audio editions of the first three novels in the Human Legion series. Narrator Tom Zingarelli does a fantastic job of bringing Arun McEwan and the others to life. It is a strange experience for me to hear a voice actor speak the words I wrote in 2014. You can hear a sample of Marine Cadet here and of Indigo Squad here. You can pre-order CDs or an mp3 download at the Tantor website (follow the links above to the audio samples). You can buy CDs from most Amazon stores too, though at the moment the purchase links seem to be for CDs only and aren’t available in Australia. The audio edition of Marine Cadet […]

December 11, 2015

Human Dynasty – teaser

And the Human Legion begat… Human Dynasty. Phaedra Tremayne, known as Springer until this point in the story of the Human Legion, foresaw a future with Arun McEwan as the head of a dynasty, but she didn’t see herself in that vision, only a darkness that drove her to homicidal rage. If the guns ever fall silent and Arun still lives, what then? Xin, Indiya, and Springer… if any of them survive the war then what will be the next part of their stories, and will any be tied to Arun’s? The story of the Human Legion will be told in six novels. There will eventually be prequels, spin-off books and series, and short story collections, but the main series […]

December 10, 2015

War Against the White Knights: Teaser#4

… and he’s back again. Where were we? The dreaded man flu has kept me from the blog for a while, and have I got news to share! Let’s begin with some more of the things that have me so excited to be writing the next Human Legion novel. Starting with the Night Hummers. These mysterious aliens have been plotting the events of the Human Legion books for centuries. Or is that just more of their lies? We’ve already caught them whispering into important ears at several points. They’ve made Arun swear an oath to protect and nurture them from their coming extinction at the hands of the White Knights, but that oath has already led to the death of brave […]

November 24, 2015

Book recommendation: Inish Carraig by Jo Zebedee

When I notice good books on offer that I think Human Legion readers will enjoy, I’ll sometimes mention them here. This one’s a cracker! After galaxy-spanning space opera, sometimes it’s good to narrow the focus a little in time and distance. Author Jo Zebedee does that in Inish Carraig, a science fiction thriller set in and around Belfast in Northern Ireland. Belfast has seen some troubled times, but none more so than the future Jo paints of a devastated city in the aftermath of a one-sided war with an alien race. These are dangerous times, and they’re about to get more dangerous still. I enjoyed this book enormously (I wouldn’t recommend it if I didn’t) and it seems to be […]

November 9, 2015

War Against the White Knights: Teaser#3

In Marine Cadet we learn about the Cull, that cruel ritual imposed on the Human Marine Corps by the White Knights. Everyone must submit to the possibility of being selected for the Cull. It is an absolute rule across the Empire for all subservient species. As the war begins to move from survival to expansion and conquest, the minds of our Legion characters moves forward in time to the peace that will come one day. The Legion fights for freedom but what settlement can the Legion actually win? What about the Cull? Would you bring a child into a world where you might have to order its death as part of a barbaric death ritual, and that the alternative would […]