Interplanetary Family Intrigue via Zelazny in SPACE – check
Fighting on Pluto – check
Beautiful Space Prince – check
Lady Venus and Lord Saturn – check
Evil Space Vampires – check
If these things sound intriguing, then check out SUPERNLUMINARY, John's new project on Patreon.
Anyone can read this, but for those who would like to become Patrons, John is asking $1 a month. (Superluminary is 52 episodes. They will go up weekly. So the entire price will be $12 for one year of interplanetary adventure! )
John writes:
An internet magazine hired me to write an old-fashioned space opera in the mood and flavor of 'World Wrecker' Hamilton to run in fifty or so weekly episodes of two-thousand words each.
However, the magazine folded and returned the rights to me. It is my wish to bring it to my fans directly.
The title is SUPERLUMINARY.
Here's an excerpt:
SUPERLUMINARY Episode 01 Assassin in Everest
Aeneas Tell of House of Tell, youngest of the Lords of Creation, was twenty-one when he was assassinated for the first time.
His secondary brain came awake while his primary brain was still foggy with strange dreams. Alert to danger, the secondary brain stopped the nerve pulses from the primary brain which otherwise would have let him groan and open his eyes, which would have precipitated the nervous killer's attack.
But his primary brain had been in the delta brainwave stage of sleep, a deep and dreamless slumber. There was no sound, no light, no disturbance. What had broken his sleep? A memory, like an echo, of terrible multiple toothaches left a metallic taste in his mouth.
He had been dreaming about his insane grandfather, the Emperor. The old man had been telling him about the secrets of the universe… then a stinging pain in his teeth had jarred him awake. But how could Aeneas remember a dream when he had not been in the desynchronous brainwave state in which dreaming was possible?
Aeneas, eyes still closed, not daring to move, increased the firing rate of his auditory nerves. He was laying on the nongravity cushion of his opulent four-poster bed. The neverending whisper of the high-altitude winds of Mount Everest beyond the bubble of weather-controlled air was now loud to him.
On these upper peaks his family had erected the proud imperial palace-city of Ultrapolis, whose towers and domes were impregnable behind concentric force-shells and thought-screens. None of the artificial or bio-modified races of the nine worlds, fifty worldlets, and one hundred eighty moons of the Solar System could bring any realistic threat to bear on these defenses, not while the twelve ranking members of the House of Tell, the so-called Lords of Creation, retained control of the stratonic supertechnology known only to them.
But betrayal from within was another matter.
The quiet hiss of the protective screen the bedposts projected around the bed was gone. He could not hear the heartbeats of his two bodyguards posted in the anteroom of his apartments. Instead he heard one heartbeat, louder and faster than was possible for an unmodified human being, of the assassin.
As the youngest member of the Family, he had been stuffed into the oldest wing of the oldest palace, and no other guards were within shouting distance.
There was no sound of footsteps on the nightingale wood floor of his bedchamber, and so for a moment Aeneas had a false sense of hope. But the sound of the racing heart was close at hand.
The killer was in the room with him.
