COEXISTENCE on the Obsidian Rim by SF Romance Author Shree C. Aier

COEXISTENCE
Pipettes and Plows 1

Science is my jam! I think it is important to not just say you support science but do something concrete. I love to make science approachable and I thought sci-fi rom is a perfect sub-genre to introduce sci-fi to romance readers and romance to sci-fi readers.

I believe that the perfect future will be equitable for all genders, ethnicities, and disabilities and abilities. Also, I felt that a part of an equal future, is that every single person has the flexibility to be themselves. Women don’t have to smile, or be nice. Men don’t have to be ultra-macho; they are free to be as they want to be.

So, if you notice my cover, my main character who plays the feminine role, does not smile, and her nickname is Grumpy Gomez. The main character who is a masculine role with feminine shadows, smiles brightly. He is a genuine ray of sunshine to the point where his niceness is a form of annoyance to the aloof and self-centered Grumpy Gomez. I absolutely love him. Gomez is a reflection of myself – if someone tells me to smile? Well … let me just leave that sentence unfinished.

Writing within a shared world/universe was a fabulous experience. Working on the details with Elsa Jade and Maggie Lynch, was great. All the writers added their own flare to the universe and it was interesting to learn the various processes. This was my debut book and I learned so much from everyone. I am super grateful for this experience and the incredible kindness and confidence that all the writers had in me.

Book blurb

After a disastrous laboratory accident, exobotanist Dr. ShaylaRam Gomez is desperate to redeem herself in the eyes of the scientific community, and more importantly, her beloved father. But now, with her carefully nurtured study of new black bean seeds in tatters, Shayla is banished to a dishonorable tour of the Obsidian Rim worlds with the man responsible for destroying her reputation – the brawny farmer from some backwater planetoid, Dr. Rahim Xie.

The people who freed Rahim from a lifetime of slavery are struggling under crushing debt to the Earth’s Conservatory, and Rahim has vowed to save these destitute Prithvi and Rim farmers. He’ll even steal classified research on sustainable crops from his irascible mentor Grumpy Gomez. When he discovers that meticulous Shayla has a hidden maverick streak, Rahim is tempted to enlist her aid. He needs more than her secrets; he needs her and her brilliant mind to help his cause. But how can he ask Shayla to join a revolution that will pit her against her own father – a man known for his political ruthlessness?

Forced together with their dogbot and humanoid companions, they'll travel to the edges of a decaying galaxy to fight the corporate greed that is slowly starving the worlds of the Rim. Are these scientists planting the seeds of their own destruction – or will their reluctant collaboration blossom into something beyond mere coexistence.

AUTHOR SHREE C. AIER
AND FRIEND

Bio

Shree is, and always will be a perpetual student, and takes joy in learning new things. She is an avid reader and shares her love of books with her mother, and late grandmother. Her Amma was a voracious reader despite being educated only till the 8th grade. Shree dedicates her books to her Amma and her mother.

Shree is writing books to share her interest and awe of the world in its entirety – of animals, and plants, of invertebrates, of the living and the non-living. She also enjoys writing about relationships through light romance and fantastical worlds, as well as science -fiction.

Website and Links

www.wonkyperspectives.com

shreecaier.com

obsidianrim.com

Futuristic Fun with Old Ideas by Elsa Jade

Fall 2019 marks the fourth season of the Intergalactic Dating Agency—a sprawling multi-author universe of science fiction romances featuring aliens who’ve come to Earth searching for love. At the start of this season, the IDA universe was already 63 books strong, and I’ve penned a dozen of them!

From the beginning, the IDA universe was meant to be big, adventurous, romantic fun—for the readers and for the authors. Strangely, science fiction romance hasn’t really had its breakout moment. Because it’s a sub-genre of romance not yet as familiar to a wide audience as some other sub-genres, the first season of IDA authors landed on “alien mail order brides” as our core concept. Mail order brides is a favorite trope for many romance readers, and we thought it would be an easy crossover from lonely men looking for convenient companionship to lonely aliens seeking same!

Tropes sometimes get a bad rap in genre fiction when tropes are confused with clichés. Tropes are commonly repeated and readily identifiable story ideas—including characterization, plot points, themes, and more—that have proven their appeal over time. Clichés are badly done tropes! Done right, a trope signals to readers who enjoy that particular story idea that a new story might appeal to them as well.

One fun game as a writer is grabbing a trope with both hands…and then running wildly amok. J That’s what I’ve done with each of my trilogies within the Intergalactic Dating Agency universe. On top of my original Big Sky Alien Mail Order Brides trilogy, I sprinkled historical romance Regency tropes—Dukes! Rakes! Lords!—into my second Black Hole Brides trilogy.

BLACK HOLE BRIDES TRILOGY

With the last complete trilogy (which is actually four books!) I roped in Western tropes for the Cyborg Cowboys of Carbon County. My most recent trilogy which launched earlier this month includes drops of Atlantis tropes—and thus was launched the Mermaids of Montana!

CYBORG COWBOYS OF CARBON COUNTY

When I was brainstorming my most recent four-book trilogy (hey, it’s alien math!) I knew my alien heroes had crash-landed their spaceship somewhere in Montana, not too near the Intergalactic Dating Agency outpost where the rest of my Big Sky Alien Mail Order Brides stories are based. Thinking about what a handful of sexy aliens might’ve done to fit in with the locals… Cowboys, of course! And because I love alliteration the cowboys became cyborgs—the Cyborg Cowboys of…of Carbon County, yeah!

Cowboys (at least the romance version) are strong, sturdy, silent types with gentle hands and big, um, belt buckles. And they take good care of their land and the creatures on it. Cyborg supersoldiers are also strong, sturdy, and silent. Okay, maybe their hands are more murder-y than gentle, but see how those tropes fit together sorta? And my alien cyborg warriors didn’t crash with horses on their spaceship, but they do have an alien beast they rode into battle. Almost the same, right? And since they’d escaped a bad situation in space, they are even more protective of their adopted home, Earth. How lucky they have the muscles for all that protecting. J

Splicing common romance tropes into science fiction is like when you were a kid crashing your Star Wars TIE fighter into the Barbie Dream House…and then Barbie and Ken fall in love and have a Jawa baby! Er, wait… Maybe that was just me? J Anyway! I use romance tropes in my science fiction romance stories to make the strange science-y, space-y parts more accessible.

And now with my Mermaids of Montana, I’m diving into all sorts of undersea tropes. (Confession: Mostly I’m thinking of Jason Momoa’s Aquaman…) All the mystery and beauty of the Earth’s oceans might seem like an odd overlay for the middle of Montana, but prehistoric Montana was once covered by the Sundance Sea, a series of invasions by the Earth’s waters over what we now think of as a place far from oceans. So making Montana a home for mermaids isn’t too out of this world.

Morphing the long-time beloved into something unfamiliar but hopefully beguiling sounds like an alien shapeshifter’s tricks. J But playing with tropes is definitely an author trick too. Unless authors are actually aliens… Maybe that would explain why our heads are always in the clouds!

If you are new to science fiction romance, the first book of the
Big Sky Alien Mail Order Brides series, ALPHA STAR, is available free at http://www.elsajade.com/book/alpha-star/

***

Bio: Elsa Jade is the paranormal romance and science fiction romance pen name for Jessa Slade. In addition to the Intergalactic Dating Agency, Elsa Jade has written the Wolves of Angels Rest paranormal shifter romance series and the Obsidian Rim space opera romance trilogy, the third book of which just released on October 15. The next two books of the Mermaids of Montana trilogy come out in October and November.

What is the Obsidian Rim? by SFR Author Jody Wallace

Early this year (2019), Jessa Slade (w/a Elsa Jade http://www.elsajade.com/) contacted me about a project she and Maggie Lynch (https://maggielynch.com/) were helming. Like Thieves’ World and Heroes in Hell, they envisioned a shared world concept set in the far future, after the devastating effects of war had destroyed nearly all of the “Salty Way” galaxy except for the outer rim. How would humanity have endured after achieving great heights of civilization and technology only to be forced back into hardscrabble survival on a limited number of M-class planets?

Obviously, humanity would have endured in part in the traditional way—via romances and making some babies! Thus the authors in the shared world would be writing adventurous romances (Not generally with babies, though, because adventure. And guns.) about the explorations, the danger, and the joys to be had by the humans inhabiting the Obsidian Rim .

So far we have launched eleven books in the series, from revolts on mining plants to intergalactic shenanigans with princes and mob bosses to the discovery of sentient beings whose intelligence rivaled or possibly surpassed our own.

CATS ARE SENTIENT BEINGS
ON THE OBSIDIAN RIM

I’m talking about CATS, of course, in the Cat Ship Trilogy that is my contribution to the Obsidian Rim’s offerings. Though Jessa and Maggie were very firm about certain aspects of worldbuilding (stories would take place in the Rim itself, no alien intelligence, no messin’ up other people’s ideas), cats did not count as alien intelligence because they’re already among us, bossing us around. 

Thanks to the premise of Maggie’s books, wherein the q-bombs that destroyed the universe also enhanced a few humans with limited but useful abilities related to stellarship navigation, I decided that same effect could be extended to cats, who finally learned to communicate their superior intellect to their waitstaff, aka two-leggers.

I also decided that humanity in any civilization is going to need somewhere to take the trash, and thus Trash Planet was born.

CATALYST

Cats and trash. What more could you want out of an adventure romance series? Find out more about Catalyst at http://jodywallace.com/books/catalyst/ and encourage me to keep editing Catapult, which is the second in the series due to come out in a month or two.

So a little more about the various offerings. Maggie Lynch’s Cryoborn Gifts series and the first book, Gravity, instigates the whole world with a pirate heroine crashing on a mining planetoid and getting accidentally involved with an escaped miner who just wants to save his children. The next book (and series) belongs to Elsa Jade with Rock Rift  and the Edge of Sunrise series, wherein the miners who got crashed into in the first book plan and execute a revolt from their masters—that is, if the sexy secret agent from a doomsday type cult doesn’t spoil it for them. Third in the release list is Traitor’s Code  by Jane Killick (the Freelance series) where a sort-of innocent freelance stellarship captain gets involved with the prince of an agricultural planet in a deep conspiracy that may involve his entire family.

The fourth series we get to taste, Pipettes and Plows, is the science adventure from Shree C Aier, Coexistence  which relates, like Traitor’s Code, to the food issues that the inhabitants of the entire Rim have in the absence of places to raise plants and animals when a sheltered scientist and a farmer are sent to the edge of the galaxy for research. Next we delve into the world of mercenaries for hire, nanobot tech, and space royalty with Mercenary Royal and the Dead Suns series  by Shona Husk when a pampered princess must learn to become a dangerous mercenary if she’s to survive a plot by her family’s rivals.

Sela Carsen’s Fate’s Favor series begins with Ace’s Odds, set on the glitzy Gizem space station where the mob boss’s daughter and a desperate smuggler team up to keep her family safe—or tear it down from the inside. My own Cat Ship series involves a garbage picker on Trash Planet who finds a man in the garbage—and a talking cat. Last but not least in the series countdown we have the Ghost Planet series by CJ Cade and her book Hunter Green where a down on her luck waitress tries to hide on the strange planet of Vorona, but the leader of the only settlement there doesn’t want her bringing her bad luck to his attempt at a new life.

The Obsidian Rim adventures strike a rich balance between romance and science fiction, more Romancing the Stone than 9 ½ Weeks in space. As readers we love to read all across the romance genre, and as authors we are adoring the experiment of the shared world and larger-than-life intergalactic quests. Books from different authors have links to each other, sly little mentions and connections, but the Obsidian Rim novels do not have to be read in order to make sense. I hope you’ll pick up a book and visit some day soon!

Jody Wallace

Author, Editor, Cat Person, Amigurumist of the Apocalypse

www.jodywallace.com * www.meankitty.com

Jody Wallace grew up in the South in a very rural area. She went to school a long time and ended up with a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing. Her resume includes college English instructor, technical documents editor, market analyst, web designer, and general, all around pain in the butt. Ms. Wallace writes sf/f romance with occasional forays into contemporary romance. She resides in Tennessee with one husband, two children, four cats, one bearded dragon, and a lot of junk. When not writing, she crochets things she shouldn’t and drinks too much coffee. At all times she is ruled by the eternal Meankitty of the Soul.