Moons, Myths, and Monsters

Cover art by Chris Barrie

Did you know I have a collection of stories available on Kindle?
You didn't? well, I'm not surprised, I haven't mentioned them here, and I don't have a writers website, and they haven't even received a review yet.

Let me tell you about Moons, Myths, and Monsters.

This is a collection of thirty stories. There's Sci-Fi & Fantasy, there's robots, aliens, a were-bear, and bird people. If you like imagined worlds, or far future Earths, or things which might just happen in the here and now, there are stories for you.

If you use the link to Amazon embedded in this sentence you can read a couple of the stories, and see the full list of story titles.

These stories were written over a period of about eight years, some of them were published by other venues first - though of course to be included in this, all rights had reverted.

Let me tell you about a couple of the stories that are my particular favorites - though don't tell the other ones I have favorites.

First up, and one you can read via the link, is Fishing Lake Tanganyika. This tells the story of a man who, having lost his job, takes to fishing the lake to support his family, and prevent having to move to the city or back home. He discovers something in the lake, I'll say no more here.

One of the reasons I love this story so much is that it was accepted for inclusion in Afromyth: A Fantasy Collection Volume 1 (it, and a second story, The Black Birds of White Oaks, appeared under my former pen name, Clive Tern).

To have a black African American woman select a story written by this white British man as representative of the tales she wanted to be told made me feel my writing had achieved a level of going beyond my own experiences and culture for which I could be proud. There's a chance J.S Emuakpor just didn't receive submissions of a sufficient number and quality, but let me hold on to my pride, please. And definitely go read the two Afromyth collections.

The second story I'll mention is The Betrayal of Stormville Epsilon D'vore. This is a story which started with a name, Stormville Epsilon D'vore. It is an epic name, evocative, forceful. A name of someone who does and achieves! But what kind of story does such a name occur in? Initially i thought it would be steampunk but, while there is a steampunkish story in the collection, this is a tale of swords, sorcery, and treachery. Who betrays Stormville, and why? You'll need to read it to find out.

Lastly, both in terms of stories I'll give a teaser on and in terms of position in the collection, is When There Were Whales. This is an unusual story for me as it includes Time Travel. I'm not a fan of time travel in stories as people always forget that time is a dimension of space, and never factor in distance travelled while time occurs - but I digress. I also ignore such things in this tale, and use a hand-wavium 'natural' phenomena to achieve the time travel. At the heart of the story is the question of what would happen when a 21st century Nigerian-American woman finds herself on a 20th century Norwegian whaling ship.

If you have Amazon Prime, you can read the collection without extra charge. Otherwise it costs less than a Starbucks Pumpkin Vanilla Latte to purchase and download. At this point no IRL version of the book is available.

I'd love for you to go have a read, and I'd really love some reviews.