My Escape from the Abyss series gets an occasional “so, like BG, right?” and it does have some similarities to Battlestar Galactica, especially the reimaged one (2004-2009) that included the Book of Pythia. The Abyss series has the “feel” of Battlestar Galactica, and it has an obsolete battleship (with fighters, which really means it’s an aircraft carrier) that is escorting a group of civilian ships to a destination. Most people think BG is about an old warship escorting civilian ships. Technically, BG is about the remnants of a society escaping from annihilation and discovering there is an ancient home world (called Earth) that they must get to in order to survive (or start over). This theme is the same for the original BG and the reimagined one. The old BG and new BG also have an enemy named the Cylons, but that differs a bit. In the old BG, the Cylons were an alien race that used robots for their soldiers (and pilots). In the reimagined one (if you haven’t seen it yet), the Cylons are intelligent robots and androids that look like humans who have gained some sort of self-awareness and turned on the humans.
In the Escape from the Abyss series, there are humans who use gates to move from civilized planets to other civilized planets. They use the gates because jumping directly is dangerous in an area with high traffic. But, the jump gates occasionally glitch (like any technology, no surprise there). In the first book, The Archons, the fleet uses the gate, along with hundreds of other ships. Some military, some civilian. When the gate glitches, it dumps a bunch of civilian ships as well as three military ships at some random location in the universe. Now they’re lost. Why? Because they are so far away that the star patterns don’t line up with anything in their databases. They’re in a part of the universe that their modern society has not surveyed yet.
This is where the story moves into the next phase. Their society has several religions, just like any society, and one of their oldest religions has a bible called The Tome of Revelations (you can get a free eBook copy by signing up to the email list on the right or a soft-cover version from Amazon). Inside the Tome are stories about how God created another life form to pit against humans for not behaving themselves (in a manner of speaking). The Tome calls them the Demons. Well, there is a reference in the Tome that mentions that the word “Demons” might be mistranslated from the Ancient language that the original copy was written in. It says that they could be called the “Archons.” The Archons conquered the original colonies that humans used to live on. When they reached Banchin, the last remaining colony, a fleet of ships struck out to find three habitable planets that God had promised them. All of this happened 3,000 years ago, and it’s recorded in the Tome under The Exodus. The people that were in the Exodus took a couple of generations to arrive, but they managed to lose the Archons and start new colonies. They had to rebuild their society from the ground up (reinvent almost everything).
Now, 3,000 years after the Exodus, there are new colonies of planets, and the humans have rebuilt their society. People look at the Tome as a religion that very few actually believe is true. Nobody has run into aliens near the colonies, so they don’t believe aliens exist in the universe. Very few believe there were ancient colonies because the old colonies are so far away that nobody has discovered them.
So, back to the current fleet that just got dumped someplace in the universe. They’re lost. They have no idea how to get back home, and they run directly into the Archons. Because, of course, they do. You knew that was coming, right? The story wouldn’t be much fun if THAT didn’t happen.
From this point, without giving away too many spoilers, you can kind of see where the story is going. I went deep into how some people become religious. Others are in denial and try to wave away everything as though it was a coincidence. But, this is where the Tome becomes a history book. Because the ancients managed to blaze a path from the old colonies to the present colonies. Unfortunately, the words written in the Tome are vague and translated from another language. That means that the Tome has locations that mark off where the people from the Exodus traveled, but it doesn’t have detailed star maps for most things, and there are some secrets embedded in the Tome that give clues to how they can get to each temple.
Is it BG? Some of it feels like it’s BG, but the Archons are more insidious than the Cylons. There are temples in BG, but the humans fleeing the Cylons seem to randomly stumble onto them and use them as signposts or just confirmation that they are on the right path. BG has scenes where Adama and others study the book of Pythia to glean information about how to get to Earth. In The Abyss series, they actively try to find the temples. That is the only way to find their way back. They are also headed directly into their colonies, which we know have advanced tech and warships. What happens if they make it back with the Archons on their heels? It’ll be a confrontation… or will it? There is little in the Tome that explains how the Archons were able to take over the original colonies so fast (they knocked over a planet every year, on average). That secret of how that happened won’t be revealed until the last book in the series.
Personally, I don’t have any skin in the game if people want to believe it’s BG and enjoy the story. It doesn’t matter to me. I only wanted to elaborate a bit to make sure that anyone who thinks this series will be nearly identical to BG will be disappointed when they get into the story. Think of it as BG with a twist (or two).
The Abyss, Progress
I’m into Act III of the story, so this is the final stretch. As I mentioned in the previous post, this story is going to go long, and I’m going to let it be long. I’m still not sure how long it’ll be, but it will probably exceed 100,000 words. Right now, there are several sub-plots that I have in progress, and I’m working on the details of bringing them all together.
The Daphne Books
I spent some time a few weeks ago analyzing the keywords on my books. I use KDP Rocket to get my Amazon stats, so occasionally, I poke around and see what’s selling and what’s not. KDP Rocket introduced this insight into what keywords are being used on various book types and how my books are organized with other books (like “also boughts”). I discovered that the Daphne books fit better under a subcategory of humorous sci-fi. After I changed the keywords, there was a noticeable uptick in KU readers who were consuming those books. Yay. Someone is enjoying those books. Nice.
Anyway, I had previously written off that series as something that nobody cared about, and I just kind of moved on. Now that people are reading the books, I realize I left some unfinished business in those stories and decided I might want to revisit those stories. One of the plots I mentioned in two of the stories (The Nav Computer and Supercomputer) involved some memories that RUSTY has that he doesn’t know about. In fact, nobody knows what those memories are. Plus, they are encoded the way that RUSTY remembered them, so the only way to find out what they are is to activate them and let RUSTY tell them what they are about. Which could be hazardous (of course, you know they’re hazardous, Which is why I stuck them there).
What this means is that I must tie off loose ends! Somewhere down the line, probably later this year, there will be a book titled “RUSTY’s Memories.” I already put down some scene descriptions and I’ll be spending some time polishing what the story will be about before I start writing. I can’t start a rough draft until the last Abyss book is complete, but I could write it soon afterward.
There are other things I’ve mentioned in some of the books. Daphne had parents at one time (and maybe a sibling). There was also a backstory about how the military killed her parents. All of that would be wrapped up in one book I tentatively titled “Family.” That story may end up appearing sometime next year. No promises.
I had originally hacked together a list of 15 potential stories for the Daphne series. Some of these could show up in the future. I’ll probably write one and drop it on Amazon every once in a while. The books are arranged in a Chronicle, and I purposely wrote them so they can be read in any order, though there are hints of future stories in earlier stories, so it’s fun to read them in order.
Of course, the hazard of writing new books for this series is that I’m a much more advanced writer than I was back then (can you believe it was two years ago?). People are going to demand I rewrite the first five books, which will probably not happen. I have re-read them (that happened earlier this year) and fixed all of the grammar, spelling, and awkwardness in each of the books that I ran into. The quality of those books is much better than before. It helps to have some distance in time from when I wrote them to when I re-read them. Things came back to me as I was going along, and other things were sort of new. Fighting the urge to rewrite each of the books was hard, but I managed.