My new queer sci fi book is out: “The Rising Tide”!
Earth is dead.
Five years later, the remnants of humanity travel through the stars inside Forever, a living, ever-evolving, self-contained generation ship. When Eddy Tremaine and Andy Hammond find a hidden world-within-a-world under the mountains, the discovery triggers a chain of events that could fundamentally alter or extinguish life as they know it, culminate in the takeover of the world mind, and end free will for humankind.
Control the AI, control the people.
Eddy, Andy, and a handful of other unlikely heroesâpeople of every race and identity, and some who arenât even humanâmust find the courage and ingenuity to stand against the rising tide.
Otherwise they might be living through the end days of human history.
Series Blurb: Humankind is on its way to the stars, a journey that will change it forever. Each of the stories in Liminal Sky explores that future through the lens of a generation ship, where the line between science fiction and fantasy often blurs. At times both pessimistic and very hopeful, Liminal Sky thrusts you into a future few would ever have imagined.
Giveaway
Scott is giving away two prizes with this tour – a $25 Amazon gift card, and a signed copy of âThe Stark Divide,â book one in the series (US winner only for the paperback). For a chance to win, enter via Rafflecopter:
Direct Link: http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/b60e8d4734/?
Excerpt
Eddy Tremayne rode his horse, Cassiopeia, along the edge of the pastures that were the last official human habitations before the Anatov Mountains. Several ranchers along the Vergeâthe zone between the ranches and the foothillsâhad reported losses of sheep and cattle in the last few weeks.
As the elected sheriff of First District, which ran from Micavery and the South Pole to the mountains, it was Eddyâs responsibility to find out what was going on.
He had his crossbow strapped to his back and his long knife in a leather sheath at his waist. Heâd been carrying them for long enough nowâthree years?âthat they had started to feel natural, but the first time heâd worn the crossbow, heâd felt like a poor manâs Robin Hood.
He doubted heâd need them out here, but sheriffs were supposed to be armed.
Heâd checked with Lex in the world mind via the South Pole terminal, but sheâd reported nothing amiss. In the last few years, she had begun to deploy biodrones to keep an eye on the far-flung parts of the world, but they provided less than optimal coverage. One flyover of this part of the Verge had shown a peaceful flock of thirty sheep. The next showed eight.
The rancher, a former neurosurgeon from New Zealand named Gia Rand, waited for him on the top of a grassy hill. The grass and trees shone with bioluminescent light, and the afternoon sky lit the surrounding countryside with a golden glow. The spindleâthe aggregation of energy and glowing pollen that stretched from pole to poleâsparkled in the middle of the sky.
The rancher pulled on her gray braid, staring angrily at something in the valley below. âTook you long enough to get here.â
âSorry. The train was out of service again.â Technology was slowly failing them, and they had yet to come up with good replacements.
She snorted. âOne helluva spaceship we have here.â
He grinned. âPreaching to the choir.â Forever didnât have the manufacturing base yet to support anything close to the technology its inhabitants had grown used to on Earth. Which wasnât necessarily a bad thing, if you asked him. With technology came new and better ways to kill. Heâd seen it often enough in the NAU Marines. âWhat did you find?â
âLook.â Her voice was almost a growl.
Eddy looked down where she was pointing. âOh shit.â Her missing sheep were no longer missing. They had been slaughtered.
He urged Cassiopeia down the hillside to the rocky clearing. A small stream trickled down out of the mountains there. He counted ten carcasses, as near as he could tell from the skulls left behind. Someone had sheared a couple of them and given up. It looked like they had skinned and cut the rest up for meat, the skin and bones and extra bits discarded.
Gia rode down the hillside behind him.
âDidnât you report twelve sheep missing?â
She nodded. âBastards took the two lambs. Probably for breeding.â
âThat actually might help us.â
âHowâs that?â
He dismounted to take a closer look at the crime scene. âTheyâll have to pasture them somewhere. May make it easier to track them down.â
âMaybe so.â She dismounted and joined him. âThis was brutal work. Look here.â She picked up a bone. âWhatever cut this was sharp but uneven. It left scratch marks across the bone.â
âSo not a metal knife.â
âI donât think so. Maybe a stone knife?â
He laughed harshly. âAre we back to caveman days, then?â It wasnât an unreasonable question.
She was silent for a moment, staring at the mountains. âDo you think they live up there?â
âWho?â He followed her gaze. Their highest peaks were wreathed in wisps of cloud.
âThe Ghosts.â
The Ghosts had been a persistent myth on Forever since their abrupt departure from Earth. Some of the refugees had vanished right after the Collapse, and every now and then something would end up missing. Clothes off a line, food stocks, and the like.
People talked. The rumors had taken on a life of their own, and now whenever something went missing, people whispered, âItâs the Ghosts.â
Eddy didnât believe in ghosts. He personally knew at least one refugee who had disappeared, his shipmate Davian. He guessed there must be others, though the record keeping from that time had been slipshod at best. He shrugged and looked at the sky. âWho knows?â It was likely to rain in the next day or so. Whoever had done this had left a trail, trampled into the grass. If he didnât follow it now, it might be gone by the time he got back here with more resources.
Gia knelt by one of the ewes, staring at the remnants of the slaughter. âCould you get me some more breeding stock? This⌠incident put a big dent in my herd.â
âIâll see what I can do.â He took one last look around the site. It had to have taken an hour or two to commit this crime, and yet the thieves had apparently done it in broad daylight. Why werenât they afraid of being caught? âIâm going to follow the trail, see where it leads.â
Gia nodded. âThanks. Weâre taking the rest of the herd back to the barn until you get this all figured out.â
âSounds prudent. Iâll let you know.â
Slipping on his hat, he climbed back up on Cassie and followed the trail across the stream toward the Anatov Mountains.
Author Bio
Scott lives between the here and now and the what could be. Indoctrinated into fantasy and sci fi by his mother at the tender age of nine, he devoured her library. But as he grew up, he wondered where the people like him were.
He decided it was time to create the kinds of stories he couldnât find at Waldenbooks. If there werenât gay characters in his favorite genres, he would remake them to his own ends.
His friends say Scottâs brain works a little differently â he sees relationships between things that others miss, and gets more done in a day than most folks manage in a week. He seeks to transform traditional sci fi, fantasy, and contemporary worlds into something unexpected.
A Rainbow Award winning author, he runs Queer Sci Fi and QueeRomance Ink with his husband Mark, sites that bring queer people together to promote and celebrate fiction reflecitng their own reality.
Website: https://www.jscottcoatsworth.com
Facebook (Personal): https://www.facebook.com/jscottcoatsworth
Facebook (Author Page): https://www.facebook.com/jscottcoatsworthauthor/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jscoatsworth
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8392709.J_Scott_Coatsworth
QueeRomance Ink: https://www.queeromanceink.com/mbm-book-author/j-scott-coatsworth/
Author Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/J.-Scott-Coatsworth/e/B011AFO4OQ/
