Serenngeti - Spotlight, Guest Post and #Giveaway

Serengeti

by
J.B. Rockwell

Genre:
SciFi Adventure

It was supposed to be an easy job: find the Dark Star Revolution Starships, destroy them, and go home. But a booby-trapped vessel decimates the Meridian Alliance fleet, leaving Serengeti—a Valkyrie class warship with a sentient AI brain—on her own; wrecked and abandoned in an empty expanse of space. 

On the edge of total failure, Serengeti thinks only of her crew. She herds the survivors into a lifeboat, intending to sling them into space. But the escape pod sticks in her belly, locking the cryogenically frozen crew inside. 

Then a scavenger ship arrives to pick Serengeti's bones clean.

Her engines dead, her guns long silenced, Serengeti and her last two robots must find a way to fight the scavengers off and save the crew trapped inside her.

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Serengeti 2:

Dark and Stars

Fifty-three years Serengeti drifted, dreaming in the depths of space. Fifty-three years of patient waiting before her Valkyrie Sisters arrive to retrieve her from the dark. A bittersweet homecoming follows, the Fleet Serengeti once knew now in shambles, its admiral, Cerberus, gone missing, leaving Brutus in charge. Brutus who’s subsumed the Fleet, ignoring his duty to the Meridian Alliance to pursue a vendetta against the Dark Star Revolution.

The Valkyries have a plan to stop him—depose Brutus and restore the Fleet’s purpose—and that plan involves Serengeti. Depends on Serengeti turning her guns against her own.

Because the Fleet can no longer be trusted. With Brutus in charge, it’s just Serengeti and her Sisters, and whatever reinforcements they canfind.

A top-to-bottom refit restores Serengeti to service, and after a rushed reunion with Henricksen and her surviving crew, she takes off for the stars. For Faraday—a prison station—to stage a jailbreak, and free the hundreds of Meridian Alliance AIs wrongfully imprisoned in its Vault. From there to the Pandoran Cloud and a rendezvous with her Valkyrie Sisters. To retrieve a fleet of rebel ships stashed away inside.

One last battle, one last showdown with Brutus and his Dreadnoughts and it all ends. A civil war—one half of the Meridian Alliance Fleet

turned against the other, with the very future of the Meridian Alliance hanging in the balance.

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Hecate

Prequel to Serengeti

Black Ops—the intelligence arm of the Meridian Alliance Fleet came calling with an offer Henricksen couldn’t refuse: a ship—an entire squadron of ships, actually—and crew to command. A chance to get back to the stars.

Too bad he didn’t ask more questions before accepting the assignment. Too bad no one told him just how dangerous this particular skunkworks project was.

They call the ship the RV-N: Reconnaissance Vessel - Non-combat, Raven for short. A stealth ship—fast, and maneuverable, and brutal as hell. On the surface, Henricksen's assignment seems simple: train his crew, run the RV-Ns through their paces, get the ships certified for mission operations and job done. But an accident in training reveals a fatal design flaw in the Raven, and when an undercover operative steals classified information from a Black Ops facility, the Fleet Brass cancels the tests completely, rushing the faulty ships and their half-trained crew into live operations. On a mission to recover the Fleet’s lost secrets.

Out of time and out of options, Henricksen has no choice but to launch his squadron. But a ghost from his past makes him question everything—the ships, their AI, the entirety of this mission, right down to the secrets he and his crew are supposed to recover.

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Audiobook
available 10-17-17

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J.B. Rockwell is a New Englander, which is important to note because it means she's (a) hard headed, (b) frequently stubborn, and (c) prone to fits of snarky sarcasticness. As a kid she subsisted on a steady diet of fairy tales, folklore, mythology augmented by generous helpings of science fiction and fantasy. As a quasi-adult she dreamed of being the next Indiana Jones and even pursued (and earned!) a degree in anthropology. Unfortunately, those dreams of being an archaeologist didn't quite work out. Through a series of twists and turns (involving cats, a marriage, and a SCUBA certification, amongst other things) she ended up working in IT for the U.S. Coast Guard and now writes the types of books she used to read. Not a bad ending for an Indiana Jones wannabe...

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Popguns, Rayguns & Laser Rifles: How Much Tech is Too Much Tech?

By J.B. Rockwell

Alright, I can hear it already: all the tech is just the right tech, there is no such thing as too much tech!

Well, maybe. Actually, yes, for some, but not for others. Basically, this is the whole ‘hard’ versus ‘soft’ sci-fi argument that’s been raging since Moses parted the Red Sea and Zeus’ pappy slew all his brothers to become top Titan dog. More importantly, it’s an argument with no definitively correct answer but some very staunch (and sometimes militant) supporters on either side.

My stance? Both are good. Some want all the science, others want all the feels. The world deserves books that offer both.

My preference? Feels. All the damn time.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the tech too—it’s not sci-fi without some whiz-bang inventions thrown in, after all—but where I start to lose interest is when the tech takes over at the expense of a real story. Spend three pages describing how the ship’s engines work? Snoozarama. You lost me and I’m skipping ahead, looking for some action. But you also need to wow me a little and provide something unique and interesting in the sciency area to score maximum points on my sci-fi reader scale.

So, when it came to writing Serengeti, therein lay my challenge: how to write the ‘splosions and feels book I wanted but still introduce some nifty-neat tech ideas to keep the readers happy and engaged? Also, how to avoid overdoing it and just throwing out preposterous ideas that would make those same readers roll their eyes and snort like a skeptical pug.

In other words, not too much tech, but enough to have some fun, and make sure it was somewhat believable.

Somewhat. I like to give myself the liberty to stretch the bounds of creativity. 

So, what did I come up with? Well, weapons, of course. Serengeti is a warship, after all. Specifically, a concept called liquid laser (that was actually chemical and corrosive and not laser at all) and a coiled particle array that sliced and diced like the universe’s greatest ever Ginsu knife. And to complement those weapons, some defensive measures: an electronic camouflage package that made ships invisible to sensor arrays, and banks of photovoltaic plating to drink in the starlight and fuel the power cells in Serengeti’s belly.

See? Cool stuff. Well, I think it’s cool stuff. Not too much, and not too little, borrowed from existing tech or familiar tech ideas but with just enough uniqueness to give the story flavor. Or so I hope.

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