Category: Tyche’s Deceit

The Power of Names

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Ever since I read Le Guin’s amazing A Wizard of Earthsea, I’ve been captivated by the idea of names having a kind of power. (Side note: if you haven’t read the Earthsea books, you’re missing out. I don’t use ‘amazing’ lightly; this is a series I re-read often. The writing is brilliant, the characters captivating, the stories both beautiful and poignant). Hobb has her own take on this with her Liveship books (also excellent). Same but different, you know? Worth your time (and I needed to look up ‘Fitz’ when I started on these books). Me, I’m pretty much a hack compared to those two. But I still want the names of my characters to have meaning. In my Tyche books, I named the crew with a purpose. Some of the characters were renamed from their originals (did you know, Hope used Read More …

Tyche’s Deceit

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My latest book, Tyche’s Deceit, is out! You can get it here: https://www.books2read.com/TychesDeceit The enemy is already here. After the encounter with the merciless Ezeroc on Absalom Delta, Grace Gushiken and Nathan Chevell make a run for home. They have a new mission: to warn humanity. Aliens are real. And they are already among us. The crew of the free trader Tyche are hunted by men in black, fearsome fighters who share the Ezeroc’s powers. When the Tyche lands on Earth the ship’s placed on lockdown. Her crew are scattered and on the run. Without their ship or friends, Grace and Nate have no escape. The Republic and its military have been corrupted to the core by the Ezeroc. Humanity’s homeworld is at risk. As hope dwindles, Grace and Nate receive an offer they can’t refuse from an unlikely source. The Read More …

The fate of us all

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Today’s #RichardWrites comes from Tyche’s Deceit. The Tyche has uncovered an alien nest … on the moon, yo. There’s a lot of bugs. I mean a lot of bugs. As the Tyche stalked across the hard black towards the moon, leaving mother Earth and the Torrington behind her, eyes looked out from the flight deck. The holo stage brought up hostile action, a storm of rocks leaving the moon’s crust. These were unlike those the Tyche had dodged back on Absalom Delta, dumb missiles thrown into the dark. These were guided, agile like fighter craft. They moved towards the Tyche, accelerating as they came, but without the telltale drive plumes of human craft. The Torrington appeared to take this in, and then the ship shivered and blinked away, an Endless Drive whisking her to safer waters. The aliens on the moon took in Read More …

Difficult Life Choices

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Today’s #RichardWrites features October Kohl, right after he’s jumped out of a perfectly good spacecraft (the Tyche) and landed in the middle of a warehouse that is on fire. Let me know what you think 🙂 It’s from the second book in Tyche’s Journey: Tyche’s Deceit. The side of the warehouse had been carved in with what looked like God’s own baseball bat, a nice straight line bored right through the middle. Plasma burn, looked like, or a couple of ‘em. Roof was off, hole in the side: not much of a warehouse anymore. He jogged into it anyway, carbine held low and ready, taking in the sights. There, one of the guys that looked like Abel, but with his arms cut off, which looked like Gracie had been through here and hadn’t been happy about the process. Next layer deep, there were Read More …

Never fuck with an Engineer

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This week’s #RichardWrites is a scene starring Hope Baedeker, ship’s Engineer of the Tyche. It’s from Tyche’s Deceit. The crew are on Earth because reasons, and Hope is alone in a very bad part of town. Add in some thugs, and you’ve got an easy mark. Right? Hope felt her arms grabbed by the two men behind her. Raccoon was laughing, enjoying her joke over a gullible child, and the man at her side was laughing along like this was the greatest show on Earth. The vibroblade came at Hope like a diving falcon, straight at her heart. A blow like that would have gone in, cutting through the shiny new rig. Reduced its value a lot, and coupled with the blood that would be everywhere — Hope’s blood — it would make it worth just a handful of coins. Read More …

When Good Drinking Goes Bad

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In today’s #RichardWrites, we’ve got Elspeth trying to track down Hope in a scene from Tyche’s Deceit. Hope is off doing … something important that I’m not going to tell you about because, you know, spoilers. El’s tracking her in the best way she knows how: spacer bars that serve hard liquor. Moses snapped his fingers. “Altman Razor.” El looked between Moses and the autobar. “That a drink?” “It’s a dude,” said Moses. “I mean, it might be a drink as well. But it’s a dude. Sells shit. Parts, machinery, that kind of thing.” “Sounds like the right kind of match,” said El. She twirled her empty glass, initially curious about how it got so empty, so fast. “Hell, Moses. My glass is empty.” “They do that,” said Moses. “One of the annoying things about the universe.” He shifted his Read More …

How we turn one car into a city block’s worth of destruction

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Today’s #RichardWrites is from Tyche’s Deceit, they second book in the Tyche’s Journey trilogy. I’m experimenting with points-of-view and types of exposition; it’s a little bit new, so I’d be interested in what you think 🙂 The two air cars screamed over the streets, engines burning hard. Citizens would have been looking up, wondering what was going on. Looking at what would cause a disturbance like this in their boring, safe lives in the very heart of the Republic. The lead car would have wobbled a little, the trained eye picking up a disturbance in the port thruster. Just a little noise in the burn, a bubble in the feed. Nothing serious under normal situations, something that might be rectified with ten minutes of maintenance by a skilled Engineer. The situation wasn’t normal, and there was no time for maintenance. The pilot Read More …