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Evolution and Biology
Shadow of the Sun follows humanity’s brutal war with the Shaksorians as soldiers, journalists, and aliens uncover unsettling truths that could transform mortal enemies into reluctant partners. What excited you about writing this book?
This book was inspired by the three novels written by different authors, Robert Heinlen’s Starship Troopers, Robert Buettner’s Orphanage series, and David Weber’s Honor Harrington series. The first two novels dealt with interstellar war between humans and aliens, and the third one told a tale of humanity’s war against itself, as multiple colonies, kingdoms and republics controlled entrie star systems, and were in conflict on economic, political and religious ground. I found the idea about humanity’s conflict with other species, because I believed it would make a good story if I presented it right from the point of view of both aliens and humans. This novel shows the war from both sides, without demonizing or favoring either. Wars are only just when you defend your home against brutal aggressor, threatening your family and your way of life. Shadow of the Sun is a cautionary morality tale, that clearly shows that when diplomacy fails, ears cannot hear words because of the sound of the cannons.
What inspired you to make the Shaksorians a crustacean species, and how did their biology influence the culture and technology you created for them?
On our planet Earth, according to the theory of evolution and biology, all life came from water. There were species living on our planet that had existed for hundreds of millions of years before the first humans evolved. Today, we are aware of many intelligent species living in the oceans, such as shales, orcas, dolphins and octopuses, who exhibit signs of intelligence, enabling them to survive and solve complex problems. As far as the alien civilization goes, I designed the Shaksorians to be similar to the Earth’s crustaceans, but possessing intelligence that resulted in them transforming from a purely aquatic species to amphibian. Such a species would be more adaptable to their environment, and I thought, why not make them be more than giant crabs and more like species who have developed deep curiosity about their world, a curiosity and the desire to explore not only their planet but other worlds as well. The Shaksorian technology is a unique fusion of inorganics and biology, enabling them to harness new forms of energy and materials that eventually opened for them a road to the stars. Their biotechnology is also vastly superior to humans, and used in the times of war and peace.
Ren Col Fer plays an important role in humanizing the Shaksorians. How did you approach writing an alien character who feels genuinely nonhuman while still being emotionally relatable?
I had a great time designing Ren Col Fer’s character for this story. He is a member of a unique and enigmatic species with their own language, customs, technology, morality and traditions. As intelligent beings able to travel between the stars, they had undergone a long and complex technological and biological evolution similar to that of the humans. Unlike the humans, the Shaksorians are not divided into nations or corporations. They are presented as one race that would unite against any existential threat. They are beings who, just like the humans, would defend their homes and protect their economic interests, and do it in such a way as not to waste resources to achieve the maximum effect. The true reason for the war between humans and the Shaksorians is not explained in the story. This is a deliberate move that would allow the readers to see between the lines and imagine their own reason why humans and aliens went to war. The moral of the story lies in understanding why species fight. Humans are the same species and yet they fight each other.
The novel raises questions about propaganda, profiteering, and who may have truly started the war. How important was it to you that the conflict remain morally complicated rather than having a clear villain?
I am a history buff, and as an amateur historian, I often asked myself, why do we fight? Why war became such an important part of our evolving civilization, and what conflicts could have been avoided if the leaders came together and talked it through. One of my very good friends, who also likes history, liked to say that all wars begin because of the bad leadership. I agree with his statement, but there are other things to consider: what makes nations of Earth, and in the case of my story, what makes intelligent, technologically advanced species fight for the planets for resources if there is so much unclaimed real estate lying around? The answer lies in the ability of both the humans and the Shaksorians to terraform planets to their liking, and change their environments and ecology to suit their colonization needs. The story deliberately does not have a clear villain, because its purpose is to show that war is a very expensive and very bloody business, that has winners and losers, and also those who will go to any length to start a conflict for profit. Our human history is full of examples where greed, religious fanaticism, and national desire to reshare the borders made wars that, in their majority, were totally unnecessary. In Robert Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers, we can clearly see how humans view aliens. But no one asked how intelligent aliens see us.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Shadow of the Sun
Shadow of the Sun is a military science fiction novel built around a large-scale first-contact war between humanity’s Breton Empire and the Shaksorians, an intelligent crustacean species whose technology and military power can match, and sometimes surpass, humanity’s own. The story opens with soldier Frank Mason and military journalist Gina Miller waking as prisoners aboard a Shaksorian vessel, then steadily widens its scope to admirals, intelligence officers, political figures, alien civilians, and entire fleets. That episodic approach gives the book the feel of a compact space opera, with the conflict over planets such as Maria and Eden serving as the backbone for a much broader look at two civilizations trying to understand the enemy they’ve already begun killing.
What gives this military science fiction story its personality is the amount of attention it pays to the people, and aliens, behind the machinery of war. Ren Col Fer is especially important because he turns the Shaksorians from battlefield monsters into a recognizable civilization with families, beliefs, ethics, curiosity, and internal disagreements. His conversations with Mason and Miller gradually reshape the Human-Shaksorian conflict from a simple struggle for victory into a story about propaganda, cultural assumptions, prisoners of war, profiteering, and the strange intimacy that develops when enemies finally start talking to each other. The battle scenes still deliver armored combat suits, warships, hyperspace technology, planetary campaigns, and brutal casualties, but the book keeps returning to the idea that both species have considerably more in common than either side expected.
The novel also has a strong political and strategic side that should appeal to readers who enjoy military space opera with plenty of worldbuilding. Admirals discuss fleet losses and economic pressures, aristocrats maneuver inside the Breton Empire, and the Shaksorians pursue plans that depend as much on intelligence and biotechnology as raw firepower. The takeover of Eden is probably the book’s most memorable strategic turn, especially once the apparent Imperial soldiers fighting alongside the Shaksorians are revealed to be human clones created through advanced alien biotechnology. That twist connects several earlier details, including the Shaksorians’ interest in recovering human bodies, and gives the final stage of the war a suitably unsettling edge.
Shadow of the Sun is a first-contact science fiction story about what happens after first contact goes catastrophically wrong. Its battles, powered armor, alien fleets, imperial politics, and Zero Space travel give it the recognizable pleasures of military science fiction and space opera, while its real subject is the slow movement from fear toward understanding. By the ending, peace comes because both civilizations finally recognize the cost of continuing, and Gina’s determination to discover who truly started the war leaves a lingering question about how much of the conflict was accidental and how much may have been engineered for profit. The final image, with Mason admitting that he fears facing an enemy wearing his own face, closes the book on exactly the right science fiction note: the shooting may have stopped, but the discoveries made during the war have changed the relationship between humans and Shaksorians forever.
Pages: 75 | ASIN: B0H9GP1T9K
A Character’s Voice is Unique
Fangs for Hire follows a resistance fighter who, after being executed during WWII, is resurrected as a vampire and transforms personal tragedy into a lifelong quest for justice. What inspired you to combine wartime history with vampire fiction?
I am a history buff as well as a science buff, and I enjoy reading historical magazines, historical novels, and watching fascinating documentaries about World War II. I was inspired to write this novella by several influencing creative forces, such as the TV series Forever Knight, about a 13th-century vampire who became a 20th-century cop to save as many innocent humans as possible and redeem his past sins when he fed on the innocent and guilty alike. Another inspiration came from reading about the resistance against the Nazis in occupied Belarus, from 1941 to 1944. I thought: why not combine the dark fantasy and realism of real military conflict to tell a story of an ordinary teenage girl who fought for her country and was presented with a unique opportunity to strike at her enemies after her moral death? The result was Fangs for Hire, and I am very proud to be able to see this project from start to finish. Larisa Tokar is a unique character who is a survivor and a vampire with a human heart that is no longer beating.
Larisa balances confidence, compassion, and ruthlessness throughout the book. How did you approach creating her voice?
This is a very good and interesting question. A character’s voice is unique, and since Larisa is the main protagonist of the story, she has a unique voice and actions that define who she is. Born as an average human female with no special powers and no particular or unique talent, she nevertheless is an honest, kind, and compassionate person. The brutal Nazi invasion of her country and her desire to fight back against a brutal oppressor make her a person not only influenced by Soviet propaganda, but also a young woman who learns not only how to survive but also strikes at the enemy from a unique angle. She narrates the story with strong personal feelings based on her life experience. Her execution, death, and resurrection as a vampire alter her perspective about the war and the dark truth that was hidden from her. Born again as a vampire, with inhuman abilities that make her into a unique warrior, Larisa navigates through years in prison, during and after the war. She survives and adapts to her condition, and learns new skills to help those who deserve her love and respect. Larisa Tokar is a unique kind of time traveler.
The Urtama functions more like an international society than a traditional supernatural clan. How did that idea evolve?
Fangs for Hire is a novella that is related to my other vampire novels such as Beyond Sunlight, Eighteen Forever, Innocent Eyes, Heatseeker, and Before the Dawn. All of them feature a secret race of nightwalkers who call themselves Urtama. They are a very ancient species that have been living alongside mankind before the dawn of recorded history, stretching all the way back before the time of the last Great Ice Age. My idea about vampires came from the realization that, as a secret species, they had to remain in the shadows while adapting to the new times, as humanity had evolved from hunters and gatherers to farmers and eventually to city builders. Urtama represents a secret race of immortals who depend on human blood to survive, and therefore human lives are precious to them. And while I liked reading about supernatural clans and traditional vampire fiction, I imagined a different and secret world of vampires with their own rules and traditions and system of punishments for the crimes against humanity and their fellow immortals. No society can exist without rules and regulations, and Urtama has their own.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
I am currently working on a sword and sorcery story, which has evolved from a short story I wrote in my experimental science fiction and fantasy writing group in the year 2012. It will most likely be a novelette-length, but with a rich, dense, and hopefully interesting story about kingdoms, battles, knights, love, ambition, and ancient super weapons. This is a unique project, because I seldom work on fantasy tales involving warriors and magic. I hope to complete and present the next book for review sometime in the early Fall. For me, writing is a labor of love, and I want to make this story a unique tale that is not only about action, adventure and magic, but also a morality tale with values that remain true both in the real and magical realm. The best part is that my work schedule permits me two days per week to work on my novels, and each novel I write, I want to make it interesting and informative for my readers. Please stay tuned. A new book is coming!
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Fangs for Hire: A Story of the Vampire Larisa Tokar
Fangs for Hire is a fast-moving blend of vampire fiction, wartime drama, and espionage thriller. Its narrator, Larisa Tokar, is a century-old vampire who works as a freelance operative for intelligence agencies, using her supernatural strength, heightened senses, voice imitation, and access to blood memories to pursue dangerous targets. The story alternates between her present-day missions in Paris and her youth in Nazi-occupied Minsk, where she joins the resistance, is betrayed, publicly executed, and resurrected through the intervention of the ancient vampire Andrei Rumin. That structure gives the novella two distinct energies: the brisk confidence of a supernatural spy adventure and the heavier emotional pull of an origin story shaped by war, loss, and survival.
Larisa is the book’s center of gravity, and her blunt, self-assured narration makes her easy to understand even when her actions are ruthless. She enjoys money, travel, history, good company, and the practical advantages of immortality, but she also carries lasting grief over her parents, her friends, and the destruction of the life she expected to have. Her moral code is simple and consistently applied: protect innocent people and reserve violence for those she believes have earned it. That certainty gives the action a pulpy, vigilante quality, while her memories of occupation and execution add a more personal motive beneath the swagger. Her confrontation with Roman Starenko, the officer who betrayed her, brings those sides together in a scene driven by anger, political disillusionment, and long-delayed revenge.
The novella is especially interested in building a complete vampire society. The Urtama have elders, laws, banks, donors, safe houses, political networks, and punishments for anyone who threatens their secrecy. This world feels less like Gothic folklore and more like an international organization that has quietly adapted to every century. The book also spends considerable time on military and political history, often pausing the immediate story to discuss Soviet repression, the German invasion, Napoleon, resistance movements, and the changing shape of Europe. Readers who enjoy historical detail may find this scope rewarding, though the amount of explanation sometimes slows the suspense. While the story could benefit from careful editing, its directness gives it the feeling of Larisa telling her remarkable life story exactly as she remembers it.
I’d recommend Fangs for Hire most strongly to readers who like alternate-history adventures, powerful antiheroines, detailed vampire lore, and action stories with a firm moral divide between predators and their chosen prey. It should also appeal to military-history fans who enjoy seeing real events woven into supernatural fiction. The violence is graphic, and the book includes sexual material, so it’s best suited to adult readers. At heart, this is the story of a young woman whose first life is destroyed by war and whose second life becomes an ongoing campaign against cruelty. By the final pages, Larisa’s immortality feels both like a weapon and a responsibility, leaving her with endless time to remember the past, enjoy the present, and decide what kind of future she’ll help create.
Pages: 145 | ASIN : B0H68MHWVP
Influential Personalities
Ghost Blade follows a former model who enters a dangerous new world when she is given a second chance after she is left disfigured following a violent acid attack. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
The idea for the Ghost Blade was heavily inspired by the cyberpunk novels by William Gibson, and the Japanese anime series Bubblegum Crisis, which featured the city of Tokyo in the year 2032. In the series, advanced robots called Boomers, became an integral part of human society. Their intelligence and superhuman abilities caused glitches, as they tried to evolve past their original programs and went rogue. In Bubblegum Crisis, the task of dealing with the rogue cyborgs was given to a team of four young women with different backgrounds but united in the common cause to stem the tide of the Boomer crime. In my novel, the main character, Karen Gale, is a young model, whose life is violently altered, and who was given a second chance in life by becoming a warrior who fights for justice.
What interested you most about the psychological side of Karen’s transformation into Ghost Blade?
Karen Gale is a character many people could relate to. She works hard to advance her modeling career, but she is also honest and would never stab anyone in the back. Being a good person, she was deeply hurt by the violent attack that disfigured part of her face and destroyed her human eye. Deeply hurt but unbroken, she searches for answers to her condition, believing that there is a solution to every problem. When offered the opportunity to turn her life around and reexamine her potential, Karen discovers that she has the heart and soul of a warrior, with the help of a mysterious billionaire, who wishes to keep the balance between light and darkness in a high-tech city under corporate control. I wanted my character to succeed and make a difference in the world of the future where nothing is guaranteed.
Norman Gray is both benefactor and mystery. What fascinated you about that kind of morally ambiguous mentor figure?
In some ways, the character of Norman Gray is a combination of several influential personalities, powerful men and women who live today. Living in a future society, where intelligent machines became a part of everyday life, Norman Gray is a part of the social elite, an inventor and an entrepreneur. He is a very rich man, but he also has a strong moral compass when it comes to dealing with problems facing not only his kind but the common men as well. He is an honorable person, who remembered his debt to Karen’s grandfather, who had saved his life twice when they both served in the military as young and idealistic men. His willingness to help Karen Gale comes from his altruistic nature and pragmatism. He is a part of the corporate system but he is a positive force that can come to the rescue.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
Good question and which I would be happy to answer with confidence. I am currently working on a new vampire novel, featuring a young female protagonist who comes from a country and the society where I was born 55 years ago. It will be a story about a young woman, whose life changes forever at the age of 18, as she manages to survive the horrors of the Second World War, and emerge as a new being with powers beyond human comprehension. I plan to publish this novel this summer, and currently it is proceeding smoothly just as I intended. Please stay tuned when it is ready!
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Karen Gale was a successful fashion model and a rising star, until a brutal attack disfigures her beautiful face and blinds her in one eye. Deeply hurt, devastated and contemplating suicide, Karen is approached by a mysterious man of great wealth, power and influence, who promises to change her life by restoring her good looks and turns her into a highly trained warrior. Unable to return to her former life, Karen accepts the offer to become a Cyber Hunter, a licensed urban soldier who hunts down rogue Reflectors and their criminal human masters. Partnered with an experienced Cyber Hunter Alex Rem, Karen enters a new life of high technology, corporate secrets, human greed, cold Reflector violence and discovers within herself a hidden power that lay dormant until awakening. Welcome to the America of the future. Machines and Artificial Intelligence are an integral part of our society. They are just tools, or are they something more?
Ghost Blade
David Crane’s Ghost Blade follows Karen Gale, a former model whose life is violently derailed after an acid attack in Paris, leaving her disfigured, injured, and stranded between grief and rage. When the wealthy and enigmatic Norman Gray offers to restore her face, replace her lost eye, and train her as a Cyber Hunter, Karen enters a dangerous new world of rogue Reflectors, corporate secrets, anti-machine extremism, and moral compromise. What begins as one woman’s reconstruction becomes a wider story about technology, power, vengeance, and the thin line between protection and control.
I was drawn most strongly to Karen’s transformation, not because it is neat or glamorous, but because it feels deliberately forged. The novel gives her pain room to breathe before turning her into Ghost Blade, and that makes her competence feel earned rather than ornamental. Her cybernetic eye, weapons training, and armored missions are exciting, but the more interesting machinery is internal: the slow recalibration of a young woman who has lost beauty, safety, and trust, yet refuses to become only a victim. I appreciated that she doesn’t hate the machines themselves; she understands that the true danger often sits behind the controls, wearing a human face.
The worldbuilding is dense, sometimes almost encyclopedic, but it gives Newland City a hard, metallic texture. The class-divided sectors, corporate governance, Social Sanitation, Reflector technology, and the Outer Sector all create a future that feels polished on the surface and septic underneath. I found the action sequences most effective when they were tied to ethical unease, especially when Karen and Alex confront not just malfunctioning machines but the human systems that create disposable people and convenient monsters. The prose can be blunt, but that bluntness often suits Karen’s voice; she narrates like someone who has stopped trusting decorative lies.
This book will appeal most to readers who enjoy cyberpunk science fiction, dystopian action, techno-thriller adventure, and stories about augmented heroes fighting corporate corruption. Fans of William Gibson’s cyberpunk atmosphere or the action-driven moral machinery of Altered Carbon may find something familiar here, though Ghost Blade is more direct, combative, and revenge-tempered in its storytelling. It’s best for readers who want futuristic weaponry, rogue AI-adjacent machines, social collapse, and a heroine rebuilt by trauma without being softened by it. Ghost Blade is a riveting revenge-and-redemption story that asks whether humanity can control its machines when it has barely learned to control itself.
Pages: 216 | ASIN : B0GXT4L56C
Gravitational Anomalies
Cold Earth follows a deep-space commander and a far-future doctor whose memoirs collide when a black hole mission sends one crew 50,000 years ahead, where they become accidental saviors of a war-torn Earth. What inspired the idea of linking a deep-space mission with humanity’s world in 50,000 A.D.?
I have always been a big fan of science fiction involving space travel. The idea about linking a deep space mission commander and a far-future doctor came to me during a lunch break at work, after I recalled watching a science channel video about the black holes in deep space. These powerful gravitational anomalies are so powerful that even light cannot escape their gravitational pull. The science program also explained that time would drastically slow down when a spaceship gets close to the black hole, even if it will not cross the Event Horizon, which would be fatal for the ship and the crew, because there will be no escape. I thought, why not make a near-future spaceship experience the same phenomenon and accidentally travel forward in time? And thus, the idea for the Cold Earth novel was born. The rest of the setup involved the character design and the list of events in the story.
Why did you choose to tell the story through alternating memoir-like timelines?
This is a very good question. By choosing to tell the story through alternating timelines, I wanted to tell the readers about the two very different worlds: the world of a science expedition commander, Martin Hall, of the year 2248 A.D., and the far future scientist, Dr. Antares Lang, of the year 50,000 A.D. The world of Martin Hall, in many ways, is similar to our own. He is a professional astronaut, a family man, a husband, and a father. He lives in a time where humanity has finally developed the means to bend space and time, thus ensuring faster-than-light travel without violating the fundamental laws of physics. In comparison, Dr. Antares Lang lives in the distant future, on planet Earth gripped in the period of a New Ice Age. Like Martin Hall, Antares is a former soldier who has a family but lives deep underground in one of the high-tech exotic cities where humans hide from the elements and battle rogue and highly evolved ancient cybernetic organisms on the surface.
How did you approach balancing scientific explanation with character-driven storytelling?
Before I began writing this novel, I wanted to make it grounded in a solid science of astrophysics without boring the reader with technical details. My idea was to present the scientific facts, and present them to the readers in an entertaining as well as educational manner. There is a genre called hard science fiction, where the exact science of today is applied in a very academic manner and woven into the story. I also wanted this novel to be character-driven, where each protagonist is given his or her voice that makes them unique. As for the black hole Gaila BH-1, which becomes the cause of the ship’s accidental travel into the very distant future, such an active celestial object does exist in the constellation of Snake Catcher, and although formidable, it poses no danger to us, being more than one thousand light years away.
Which part of the far-future Earth was the most exciting or challenging to build?
I am not a futurologist, but just like the highly educated people of science and people who are very familiar with human social dynamics, I tried to imagine the far distant future of humanity, where the situation is hard but far from hopeless. Just like we, in our own time, try to handle our own problems of political instability, environmental pollution in the name of profit, unrestrained corporate greed, corruption, and economic uncertainty, I thought that the world fifty thousand years from now would seem radically different from our own in languages, traditions, customs, and technology. I was excited to build the subterranean world, where the return to the deep caves was a temporary measure, and the struggle of men against a new race of intelligent, hostile machines that have evolved from ancient military robots, is presented in a realistic manner, but without many action scenes that readers might have expected. Cold Earth is a tale of evolutionary philosophy, as well as a high adventure beyond time and space.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Cold Earth
Cold Earth is a science fiction novel built around two memoir-like timelines: Commander Martin Hall in 2248 A.D. and Dr. Antares Lang in 50,000 A.D. The story begins as a deep-space mission to study the Gaia BH-1 black hole system, then turns into a time-displacement tale when the crew of the USS Phoenix is thrown into Earth’s far future. That future is cold, underground, technologically advanced, and still deeply human, with plagues, war, memory, family, and survival all pressing against one another. At its core, this is a sci-fi adventure about what happens when people from one age become accidental saviors of another.
What stood out to me first was the book’s scale. It thinks big. Very big. Black holes, ice ages, ancient DNA, underground civilizations, hostile machines, interstellar politics, and the long shadow of human history all crowd the page. Sometimes that ambition is exciting, because the author clearly enjoys building worlds and explaining how they work. I liked the sense that every kitchen, train, lecture hall, spaceship, and military detail belongs to a larger civilization. The writing is rich with exposition, and that becomes part of the book’s appeal. Characters often pause to explain history, science, social customs, or technology, which gives the world a layered, documentary feel. Instead of rushing through the plot, the book invites the reader to revel in the setting, understand its rules, and appreciate the scale of the future it imagines.
The author’s choice to use alternating first-person memoirs is interesting, and it fits the book’s concern with memory and legacy. Martin’s sections feel like classic space exploration science fiction, full of duty, family, risk, and the old “go farther than anyone has gone before” spirit. Antares’s sections feel more like far-future social sci-fi, where the question is not only how humanity survives, but what it becomes after thousands of years of adaptation. I appreciated that the book keeps returning to ordinary human needs: food, marriage, pride, fear, sex, children, friendship. Those details ground the huge ideas. They remind us that even in 50,000 A.D., people still want breakfast, affection, purpose, and a reason to believe tomorrow will be better.
I would recommend Cold Earth most to readers who enjoy idea-driven science fiction, especially space exploration, time travel, far-future societies, and survival stories with a strong world-building focus. Readers who like ambitious sci-fi that explains its worlds in detail will probably find a lot to enjoy here. It feels like a book written by someone fascinated with humanity’s long future, and that curiosity is the part that stayed with me.
Pages: 192 | ASIN: B0GP4QLWVT
