'The Cecilian Blue-Collar Chronicles' and the Space Everyman

This book is an omnibus containing four novellas I originally released individually via a small press. I wanted to try my hand at writing sci-fi but not hard sci-fi because I'm really one of the least technical / scientifically inclined people on Earth even though science fascinates me. I also grew up watching (of course!) Star Trek, Star Wars, and a number of other sci-fi shows on TV back in the 1970s like UFO, Battlestar Galactica, and Sapphire and Steel (the last one on the list being my favorite). 

I mean you gotta balance all the ghost / gothic / horror anthology shows with sci-fi, right? That was my childhood.

One short-lived series I really, REALLY loved watching as a kid was Quark. It's a sci-fi comedy that spoofs a lot of the heavyweights like Star Trek and 2001: Space Odyssey, and it follows a crew of a space sanitation service.

That's right: an honest to God space trash collector. Who wouldn't love this premise???

So my memories of that show were my foundation for The Cecilian Blue-Collar Chronicles, and this time, we're following the daily misadventures of a young cab driver (but sci-fi!) who's a few generations from the original settlers of the planet Cecilia. The Earthlings (former Earthlings, that is) are actually refugees from Earth following a global catastrophe, and evolution dictated by their new environment changed their appearance by way of color, so colonists walk around looking like a 1960s acid trip.

I did try to stick to pure sci-fi, plot-wise, doing my own spoof of sci-fi tropes like aliens and the rough environment of a planet. 

However, there were elements in the plot that wouldn't work as sci-fi but were needed for the story to make sense, so I had to turn the series into a hybrid of sci-fi and fantasy. So all the characters coming from Yuli's world are fantasy-based while everything else above ground is sci-fi in its wonkiest form. Yes, there are space ships and astro-cabs and ray guns, but Earthlings are Earthlings, and the original refugees brought whatever knowledge they had from Earth to Cecilia, so buildings, food, etc., are adapted versions of old Earth stuff -- but forced to work with a wilder terrain and so on and with questionable results. 

All in all this series was incredibly fun to write though it also only grounded home my limitations as a sci-fi writer. I'd happily watch my favorite sci-fi shows again for the nostalgia and will just have to live vicariously through them as a writer.

The Cecilian Blue-Collar Chronicles is currently 50% off through the end of March. You can go to Smashwords or Kobo for a copy, and for other online stores, check out the book page on Books2Read.