By Michael Grossberg
Science fiction novelist Travis Corcoran is gearing up to publish a new novel in his Prometheus-winning Aristillus series.
Corcoran has launched a Kickstarter campaign for Aristillus: Escape From Io, his first new Aristillus novel in almost ten years.
“The manuscript is complete,” Corcoran said.
“The campaign determines how ambitious the limited print run physical edition can be,” he said.
THE NEW NOVEL’S SETTING AND CHARACTERS
Uplifted dogs fight for survival in the hard-SF novel, set in the same fictional future universe as Corcoran’s The Powers of the Earth and its sequel Causes for Separation, respectively the Prometheus Best Novel winners for 2018 and 2019.
Escape from Io takes place in 2165, one hundred years after the events of Corcoran’s first two Aristillus novels.
According to Corcoran’s Kickstarter description of the novel, “much has changed in the universe of Aristillus: the uplifted Dogs have emigrated from Mars to the Trojan asteroids in the Lagrange point of Jupiter’s orbit and their society has evolved in many ways, both seen and unseen.”
The novel opens as three Dogs – Roch, the mission commander, Eli, the pilot and engineer, and Bollstadt, the geologist mission specialist – arrive at Jupiter’s innermost moon Io, scouting for a resource their society needs for The Great Project: helping the humans of Mars.
THE KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN
According to Corcoran, the Kickstarter campaign will fund a signed and numbered limited edition: a premium hardcover with cloth binding, dust jacket, foil stamping, illustrated end papers, sprayed edges, and other features that cannot be produced as an ordinary print-on-demand edition…or even as a book-store hardcover.
The Kickstarter will fund the premium limited edition…which Corcoran pledged will never be reprinted. (There will be e-books and lower quality print-on-demand trade paperbacks via other channels after a noticeable delay).
The campaign is expected to continue through September, after which the book will be sent to the printer, Corcoran said.
Meanwhile, Corcoran’s latest novel is Red State Mars, published earlier this year by Ark Press and now nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
For more information, visit Corcoran’s Kickstarter page for Aristillus: Escape from Io.
Stay tuned for more authors’ updates.
ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS
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