The Cosmos of Despair

I wanted to let the community know I have completed a sequel to my story The Valley of Despair that I hope to publish February 2017. This work was begun in July 2016 after a discussion with a reader on Amazon who wished a sequel. After thinking about that, I realized I did indeed have additional, despairing ideas and thus was born The Cosmos of Despair.

As a result of that decision a new conclusion was conceived for Valley with the addition of an entirely new chapter (entitled Encounter on the Plains) and the excising of a few paragraphs from the original final chapter. In the event a reader may have read the earlier version I have decided to make this newly added chapter available at the end of Cosmos.

This story will continue to follow the acts of derring-do of our intrepid adventurer, Erik von Mendelsöhn, as he travels to the furthest edge of the cosmos. Their vessel, Draconis IV, fueled by the detonation of living bodies in the Denebian-designed light-igniters, stretches backward in time as it surpasses velocities beyond Erik's wildest imaginings.

Teamed with friends from among the crew of the slave craft, crewmen who have lost everything to the despots who now control the many populated galaxies that have fallen to their merciless rule, they conceive a mutiny to end all mutinies. Because if it is not successful the reach and grasp of the beasts will extend to every populated planet, with darkness falling to forever en-shadow humanity and all the other races who now shiver beneath their cruel dominion.

How can one man deliver the planets orbiting a trillion suns? What does he know that can turn what is almost certain destiny, remaking the past and reshaping the future? Does his mind indeed hold a secret, a secret the masters of the known cosmos would give much that he didn't know? Will they divine who he really is, and what he has already accomplished in The Valley of Despair?

From the back of the book:

Trapped in a Cosmos of Despair

When Lieutenant Erik von Mendelsöhn led a band of refugees from a lost city buried in a dark valley hidden in the African jungle he believed the worse was behind them. They had destroyed the portal that gave passage to the gray-backed beasts of Deneb to Earth, sundering at the same time the evil grip of their grim, orange star.

But after weeks of pilgrimage, reaching at last a savannah upon which they encamp, a strange, immense ship descended from the sky out of which a force issued, taking them captive. Only then does Erik learn that ages had passed outside the strange influence of Deneb while he and the others slaved in the mines for their cruel taskmasters.

Once again their captives, he is scanned by their strange science during which they discover his mind to be highly suitable for assignment as replacement for their navigation assistant – a position they are desperate to fill, lacking as they do any among their contingent of crew with the requisite properties.

Erik now finds himself conscripted to serve aboard a Denebian slave vessel – a vessel on which he and his friends are now prisoners – captives destined for food and labor on distant worlds - worlds subservient to…. Deneb.


The Valley of Despair