Here is the first part of Chapter One in my science fiction space opera Onet’s Tale.

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Chapter One – Jalnuur

An escape pod sat alone in the vast hanger deck after it was detected on a routine patrol above Dranaa. Its battered outer hull bore scars from countless impacts from micrometeorites and other space debris. The barely legible identification letters indicated its mother ship and battle fleet. The recovery caused great excitement on the orbiting base. The base commander reported the find to the Imperial Council on the home planet.

Technicians conducting a routine scan of the escape pod found a body in stasis. When the stasis unit was opened, the body was found to be desiccated due to the damage to the unit, caused by micrometeorite bombardment. A forensic medical team worked for hours on the lifeless mummy. DNA tests revealed the house it belonged to, and after…

As I promised in my blog post on Tuesday, here is the prologue from my space opera Onet’s Tale.

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My name is Onet, my kind are the Khaz. We are the oldest species across the cosmos and because of our greed and ambition, we are nearly all wiped out. Unlike you, and all other sentient species, we do not live short lives or need to breed with one another. We self-replicate, a painful process that takes months for each of us to endure. We are a cerebral race, able to communicate collectively across vast interstellar distances. Many dominant species still continue to underestimate our machinations.

We were the stuff of nightmares here on Earth in the twentieth century, despite the fact that the ill-informed among your ancestors always depicted us as tiny benevolent grey visitors in your pictorial entertainments. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of…

Back in 2003 while I was briefly back in New Zealand, I stayed with my best friend Graeme Norgren and his family. Each day while they were both at work, I decided to write a sequel to the first book I ever wrote back in 1995 – Turning Point. And so the two-part space opera Onet’s Tale was born. Here are some of it’s reviews:

Since moving a few months ago, I have encountered many animal spirits in their natural environment. The most exciting have been during morning walks on the beach, which include seals, dolphins, and whales. I will write about the others soon, but today I will talk about the symbolism of the animal spirit, the whale, whom I have not only seen in person, but one also appeared in a Tea Leaves & Tarot Reading.

Whales are the largest known mammals, and animals, known to us, and they live in the immensely large and mostly unknown deep ocean waters, which symbolize our emotions, intuition, the depths of our psyches, and the unconscious. Whales are ancient creatures, who seem to have a wisdom and depth of understanding of nature that is just as old.

Whales communicate with other whales and possibly other sea creatures through a variety of ways: the melodic whale song…

The mountain gremlin Lungwort

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Evil’s shadow grows longer

In which Globular Van der Graff, (Glob), Makepeace Terranova (Make), Byzantine Du Lac (Byz), Eponymous Tringthicky (Mous) and finally, curmudgeonly old Neopol Stranglethigh (Neo) seek out the truth about a stranger, assisted by Bejuss, the one eyed lisping raven.

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As the long freezing days of winter gave way to the first signs of spring, an enigmatic stranger arrived in the humin village. He was an itinerant by the name of Eodor who made his living napping the finest flint tools, spearheads and knives in exchange for food and lodging. At first the villagers were wary of him. But he soon charmed them all, turning the heads of the women with his handsome appearance and pleasant nature, especially Mica’s intended, Agnitha, the daughter of the village shaman Yestin. But not all females fell under his spell. Eodor had been…