military sci fi – Page 4 – The Human Legion

March 25, 2016

War Against the White Knights

The fifth book in the Human Legion series is available from Amazon now in its Kindle edition. Paperback to follow shortly. As is Legion custom, I’ve set a low launch price for loyal humanlegion.com subscribers to pick up the book for a song. I’ll be raising the price shortly, probably next week. I do get asked whether it’s more helpful to me to wait and buy at a higher price, a question that I’m grateful that people want to ask. Actually, buying now does help me because at this stage it’s all about getting the book in the charts and the Amazon selling algorithms so that people notice the book. Enjoy the book. There will be one more novel in […]

March 25, 2016

Book 5. It’s there…

At some point over the next 12 hours, War Against the White Knights should pop up on Amazon. It will be Kindle-only initially, although the paperback will follow in about a week. I’ll make a big fuss about it next week, but I reckon my job’s done for tonight. Tomorrow morning I’m off to a science fiction convention in Manchester, England for the Easter break. Much more on this next week when I’m back. And future projects too! Enjoy the book.

March 23, 2016

The Invasion of Athena: Order of Battle

Book5 will be ready to roll, just as soon as the edits are back for the last section. While we’re waiting, I thought I’d give you a taste of what’s coming with a partial order of battle from partway through the book. You won’t recognise most of the names yet, but you should know a couple. The Legion has certainly scaled up a little since they started with the First Tranquility Campaign, and not just with the units described here. Author J.R. Handley is working on what is going on back on Tranquility with his Sleeping Legion series. His plans for novellas have turned into novels, and a draft of the opening novel is undergoing an alpha test at the moment. History of the […]

March 2, 2016

Book 5 releasing soon

Thanks for your patience, everyone. Here’s a quick update on the progress of Book 5: War Against the White Knights. I finished the first draft of the novel earlier this week, and it weighs in at just over a hundred thousand words. Now, first drafts can be a bit rough, but Ian and I have been editing each other’s chapters all the way through. I’m still waiting for Ian’s feedback on the last two chapters, but other than that the draft pretty tight. Normally, by this point I would have asked for volunteers to sign up to a Force Recon Team. The volunteers from previous books have given us sage advice, but running the Recon Teams takes time, and so I’ve decided […]

February 3, 2016

The Empire at War is available for pre-order

The launch of a major new military sf anthology.

January 18, 2016

The invasion of the White Knight homeworld

One of the greatest pleasures of life is the warm swell of pride at watching your helpless babies grow first into children — with their own personalities, interests, and aptitudes — and then mature into adults who achieve feats we as the older generation could only dream of. We realize that the youngsters really did learn from those mistakes they made in their youth, that they were actually listening to our sage advice (even though they never admitted it at the time), and quietly ignored our advice when they had moved beyond us. Doesn’t always work out so well, of course, but it has for me with the characters of the Human Legion. In the first TO&E I wrote out […]

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 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 […]

November 6, 2015

War Against the White Knights: teaser#1

It’s been a tough week in the Human Legion writing shed (pictured). Ian and I had written 18,000 words for War Against the White Knights, the fifth Human Legion book, but we needed to meet to discuss the next stage. Unfortunately, I’ve been too ill this week to write books. Every writer is different, but for me I find it relatively easy to get my head in a place where I can come up with story ideas, but to get in the mental place where I can craft scenes effectively and efficiently is much harder. In a good working day dedicated to writing, I might write 5,000 words of story. Half of that will come in an intense 90-minute burst […]