Where Do We Go Now? (Part 4)
Not content to strike out purely in horror, I also set my sights on science fiction and fantasy, and crafted up pen names to allow me to do that without crossing the proverbial literary streams with my D.T. Neal horror offerings.
That led to Dean and Dane Vale, my erstwhile SF&F genre selves. I had high hopes for these books to find the audience that just wasn't there for my horror books.
As a fan of SF&F, I couldn't imagine that people wouldn't want to read such books. And yet, here we are. I had originally jotted out a range of Dean Vale SF books, and have several written, waiting to be published.
However, the lack of performance of the two Dean books to date has given me pause. I think they're both good books (and since I know you haven't read my SINGULARITIES collection of SF short stories, it's perhaps meaningless to mention that these two books below embody my approach to SF, influenced by particular authors (Ray Bradbury, William Gibson, Ursula K. LeGuin, Roger Zelazny, and others).
SF NOVEL
FARTHER was yet another labor of love for me, another source of professional heartbreak. I did a lot of worldbuilding for this one, creating a SF interstellar (and intergalactic) critique of corporate imperialism, along with the tropes of explorers finding something fairly cosmic-horrible in the Source. I liked this novel, and even started a sequel to it, but when nobody read this one, I quashed it. Why bleed for it when there's no audience? FARTHER is a ghost echo for me.
SF NOVELLA
THE CHARGE OF THE WOLVERHINO was another failed experiment, a sort of SF Hemingway adventure story involving a parodic "great white hunter" tasked with evaluating a hunt of a monstrous chimera created by Gaiacon, my go-to bad guy company that shows up in other books of mine. I liked the elemental purity of this novella, which had the socio-eco-political points I was trying to make in it, while telling a creature feature type of story. Nearly nobody read or liked this book, so it's just out there, in the weeds, hopefully finding audience someday.
And there it is, the two SF books I wrote under the Dean Vale pen name. I have some cyberpunk books that'll come out under Dean's name in the future, but we'll see how that goes.
I'd be lying if I wasn't sad about the failure of these books to find their audience. They channeled a lot of the social commentary I love about the genre, so their failure still bums me out.
Next up, fantasy world...
That led to Dean and Dane Vale, my erstwhile SF&F genre selves. I had high hopes for these books to find the audience that just wasn't there for my horror books.
As a fan of SF&F, I couldn't imagine that people wouldn't want to read such books. And yet, here we are. I had originally jotted out a range of Dean Vale SF books, and have several written, waiting to be published.
However, the lack of performance of the two Dean books to date has given me pause. I think they're both good books (and since I know you haven't read my SINGULARITIES collection of SF short stories, it's perhaps meaningless to mention that these two books below embody my approach to SF, influenced by particular authors (Ray Bradbury, William Gibson, Ursula K. LeGuin, Roger Zelazny, and others).
SF NOVEL
FARTHER was yet another labor of love for me, another source of professional heartbreak. I did a lot of worldbuilding for this one, creating a SF interstellar (and intergalactic) critique of corporate imperialism, along with the tropes of explorers finding something fairly cosmic-horrible in the Source. I liked this novel, and even started a sequel to it, but when nobody read this one, I quashed it. Why bleed for it when there's no audience? FARTHER is a ghost echo for me.
SF NOVELLA
THE CHARGE OF THE WOLVERHINO was another failed experiment, a sort of SF Hemingway adventure story involving a parodic "great white hunter" tasked with evaluating a hunt of a monstrous chimera created by Gaiacon, my go-to bad guy company that shows up in other books of mine. I liked the elemental purity of this novella, which had the socio-eco-political points I was trying to make in it, while telling a creature feature type of story. Nearly nobody read or liked this book, so it's just out there, in the weeds, hopefully finding audience someday.
And there it is, the two SF books I wrote under the Dean Vale pen name. I have some cyberpunk books that'll come out under Dean's name in the future, but we'll see how that goes.
I'd be lying if I wasn't sad about the failure of these books to find their audience. They channeled a lot of the social commentary I love about the genre, so their failure still bums me out.
Next up, fantasy world...
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