I’ve already told a few stories about POST – how I finally got use Cynthia Radthorne’s art, how the story started, and how it’s partly a conversation with another author’s work.  I’m telling these stories because eSpecBooks is currently crowdfunding POST and another novel by Jack Campbell (The Sister Paradox) on Kickstarter.  More about that choice later, but in the meantime, if you haven’t backed us yet, I’d appreciate your support.

POST feels different than my other books – its set in a closer time, and it’s lower tech. There’s not a robot in sight, and no AI.  There’s even very little cell phone coverage. For those of you who have been reading me religiously, you’ll know this is a pretty big departure from the books I have been writing (although…as a hint…if you took POST and mashed it up with Edge of Dark and set it on Earth, you’d have something like the next book I’m writing. The characters and the situation are different, and the world building is drastically different, but the time frame is the same).

I’m generally an optimist.  Most of my books are pretty much about technical optimism.  In some ways, POST is more about what might happen if the pessimists are right, and if really bad things happen.  How do you get optimistic after a time when many people dir, when storms and disease ravage the economy, etc?

It’s the optimist in me that got me started AFTER the worst is over.

POST is about restoring civil society if our economies get brought down by climate change.  The story begins just as the curve turns up from the bottom, as survival has happened (or not), and people are rebuilding.  That rebuilding, of course, doesn’t go evenly.  The world is not safe.  But there are friends along the way, and there are heroes, and there are saviors who were once needed, and who probably need to move on. Note that it is not graphically brutal or sexual, but its probably not for your seven year old.  I think of it for teen readers through ninety-year olds. My protagonists are female, but some of my heroes are men.

POST is not hopeless.  It’s set “Post” the really bad times, after “Before” and after “During.”

Like much of the good science fiction about the coming years on Earth, it shows our peril, and it also shows that we might get out of it.  I hope you back the book, and that you enjoy reading it.