Shards Universe

What you see before you is your gateway into the Shards Universe. It is composed of short stories, novellas, novels, and an ever growing body of research. While the characters, events, and technologies are fictional, reality is in the details. Although the planets man will settle in this Universe are fictional, the stars themselves are accurate in location, distance and class. For the true science fiction buff, there is a cornucopia of hidden accuracies.

And yet, for the newly initiated science fiction reader, or even for the casual reader, you will discover a Shards Universe filled with believable characters, engaging relationships, heart breaking tragedy and exciting action. And while the short stories may occasionally have a sad or bittersweet ending, in the novels, good always wins over the bad.

Well, I'm back from Astronomicon, up in Rochester, NY and am pretty tired. The con was fun, though the numbers didn't seem as high as in years past.

The guest of honor was Mike Resnick, whom I was able to meet for the first time. It was Mike who selected my novel Horizons as the Winner of the Draco Award in 2003, which started my career in the published author world. Mike was a very pleasant and personable guy, and of course his writing is legendary (and much lauded) for both its vast quantity as well as its high quality.

The panels were interesting, fun and well-attended. My thanks to those of you who complimented me on making the various panels I sat on entertaining. I'm glad I could help make your con experience even nicer. The last panel, abut dystopia's and whether they were still viable subjects/settings, was pretty depressing. (Think George Orwell's 1984, or Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel, Watchment.) As always, the panelists and attendees were great. But talking about dominating, broken society's at 2:00pm on Sunday afternoon is a bit of a downer.

I had a table in Dealers Room that was along side the table of fellow Double Dragon author Rick Taulbold and his wife Rose. Good thing we had that company, too, because the Dealers Room was dead, Dead, DEAD. No fault of Astronomicon; it was just one of those things. Still, we (meaning myself and two of my sons, Timothy (18) and Samuel (13)) gave out a number of my novel samplers and even sold a few novels. One good thing about the all but non-existant traffic in the Dealers Room was that I had plenty of time to talk to friend and fellow author Mike D'Ambrosio and his wife Mary Jane. They had a table across the aisle from me. We both live in the Philadelphia area and started day dreaming about our organizing and running a SciFi Lit Con in the King of Prussia area. (King of Prussia - named for a tavern which had been named for the royalty - is about 20 miles north of Philly.) Obviously, Philcon is the big gun in this area. But they're in Cherry Hill, NJ now, which is about 40 miles away. It's something to think about...

And, hey, check out the work of graphic illustrator Mitch Bentley. He was in the Dealers Room with us and his posters gave me some pretty cool ideas about having him design some stuff for the Shards Universe.

AAAArgh! Has it really been that long since I updated? I REALLY need to find myself a real webmaster. I completely fail at it. If I had someone design it, I could keep the updates coming at a far more reasonable rate. As it is, I just look at how oversimplified and clunky my site is right now and click away very quickly. *sigh* You guys deserve much better than that.

NEWS! I've included my NEW AND UPDATED CONVENTION SCHEDULE BELOW. Sorry it took so long.

NEWS! Remember that (what happened to #2) thing I mentioned earlier this month? Well, here's your chance to see a tiny bit of it and give me feedback. If you email me at PeterPrellwitz (at) ShardsUniverse.net and ask to take a peek, I'll email you back the link and you can go see for yourself. Oh, and don't be shy about emailing me. You'd be surprised how very, VERY few emails I get from readers.

I'm really anxious to see what you all think of this new idea and if I should pursue it. Oh, and it'll be updating a LOT as I develop it, so checking in to the new link every few days would probably be a good idea.

INSIDE THE STORY: I'm too much the Trekker! If you've read Horizons, you'll see an "oops" I made in there: I referred to a planet as being "Class M", which means Earth-type. But that's a Star Trek term! My bad. I was so used to looking up stars, which really DO use Letter-Number classifications, that I slipped back to what I know and assumed "Class M" was real, too. Of course, to everyone else I'll just say, "Oh, that's a nod to one of my favorite TV shows." Don't tell anyone I goofed, okay?

LIBRARY UPDATE: Some of the text in my stories is "invisible" in some browsers. I'm going through and resetting it to black.

Legacy is a NEW story in the library. Occurring between the Prologue and Chapter One of my novel Promise Tide, it's an interesting look at Promise and Chrissy just after the death of Promise's grandfather. It's in the original draft (2001), so take a look as soon as you can. I'll be updating it at some point.

Grandma's Grandma is now restored in its entirety. And check out the "Inside the Story" below to find out more about this little gem.

Reëntry is now in black text. (Read this story! In my opinion, it's one of my best short stories.)

INSIDE THE STORY: Although it is a very short story, Grandma's Grandma has some interesting history and a number of very cool tie-ins. The main character, Betsy Trilwell, is mentioned in Shards: Book Four; Chapter Seven, along with the "Carl" in the story. She is the "lady friend" Abigail mentions. "Carl" is none other than Carl Woldheim, the creator of time travel in the Shards Universe and one of the great thinkers of his time. Carl and his work are mentioned in numerous novels and short stories, and is a founding member of NATech, way back in the closing days of World War II, as written in the unpublished story Startled Allies. THAT story sets the creation of NATech at Thursday, March 22, 1945, in the mountains of Austria.

Betsy and Carl were to appear in a novel entitled Future Youth, which will probably never see print. The reason is that I had started writing the novel about twenty years ago and had gotten a hundred pages finished when I shelved it. Only five years after that, I wrote Shards, and borrowed heavily from Future Youth. Betsy is a prototype of Abigail, and were you to read Future Youth, you'd see that I'd have to completely rewrite it to separate the two books. Even though Betsy is in her late 70s, time travel in the Shards Universe has an action/inverse reaction effect. The further into the future you go, the younger you get. The further back you go, the older you get. This "rush" of aging outside the time continuum is what makes time travel addicting - literally. This was hinted at in Horizons, and will be brought out again if ever I decide to rewrite Future Youth. And while in Shards, Abigail says no one knows what ultimately happened to "Carl and his companion" after they used his first time travel device, I DO know. And that is what Future Youth is about.

The house that Betsy is living in when this story takes place (and in the Future Youth opening chapters) does exist. I traveled to Morrisville, AZ and found a tiny derelict house out on the desert. I took pictures of it, which is probably a good thing, as I doubt it is still there after a decade. If ever Future Youth is finished and sees print, I'll bring the photos along to conventions.

Finally, note the first paragraph of Grandma's Grandma. If you look at the name and year, you'll probably figure out who the "new baby boy" is.

LIBRARY UPDATE: Some of the text in my stories is "invisible" in some browsers. I'm going through and resetting it to black.

Archimedes Eats is now in black text. And the date - which I'd somehow gotten wrong - has been set back 19 years to the correct time. (About 40 Terran years.)

UPDATE! I've UPDATED MY CONVENTION SCHEDULE FOR NOVEMBER 2008 through MAY 2009

NEWS! Well, I don't have a WHOLE lot to report. As many of you know, I have a web comic out based on my young adult fantasy, THE ANGEL OF ST. THOMAS vs. The Galactic Good Guys. The comic posts Tuesdays and Thursdays and is drawn by professional anime artist Steve Bennett. At least is DID post every Tuesday and Thursday. Steve's moving from Virginia to Japan in December and the comic is on brief hiatus while he and his wife relocate. You can read the first 80 pages at: http://AngelOfStThomas.com. Anyway, THAT'S where I've been spending a lot of my time this year.

On the upside, I'm still working on Redeeming The Plumb, plus a Roids Cavanaugh novel by H.K. Devonshire called The Bombala Mines Fast Draw. I'm also fiddling with something a little out of my normal area, a swords & sorcery novel that is looking to be a four book effort. All four books will be on the same events, but as seen from different characters point of view. Included are a princess who survives a coup attempt (that saw her raped and her family killed) to become the young ruler of her kingdom, forced to grow up far too fast. She enlists the aid of an enigmatic "pathmaker", who takes her on as an apprentice and trains her in the peculiar ways of his calling. In the second book, focus shifts to a much younger, much poorer girl who is sold into the princess's services because of a rare gift she possesses; the ability to conjure fire through her emotions. The third book will focus on another member of the princess's military, a priest who has seen too much death and too much sorrow and has become jaded about living. Yet he still holds a flicker of hope... The fourth book will bring the events of the first three together, as well as the characters, and send them to a climatic ending.

What happened to #2? Well.... about that. I've got something in the works that may be coming out next year that could blow your socks off. But while its far along as a project, I'm still not positive it'll happen. So I'm keeping mum about it right now.

AND FINALLY: I'm going to continue expanding the free library here. I'll be reposting the short stories that are currently cut off, posting some finished ones you probably haven't seen, and writing some new ones.

INSIDE THE STORY: You all know that I enjoy sticking in the nifty stuff that if you find out about it, you'll most likely say, "Neat!" Well, here's one that's almost impossible to "detect". In TAU, Paul and Promise live for a brief time in a small row house in London. That street and house actually exist, which those of you who know my style won't find surprising. But the reason I chose that location is that the house is backed up (at least, as best I could place it) against another imaginary house of fictional fame: 221-B Baker Street; the home of the celebrated Sherlock Holmes.

SHARDS

Book One

John Wyeth was a successful man. At nineteen, he graduated at the top of his class at a respected university. By the age of twenty-two, he had survived three brutal years of warfare, serving as commanding officer for a behind-the-lines reconnaissance platoon. Now at thirty-one, he was the Senior Project Leader for the super secret think tank NATech, and he was very good at what he did. Everyone knew and no one doubted that within a few years he would be the Director.

And then he was killed.

Sort of.

SHARDS

Book Two

At the age of sixteen, Abigail Wyeth was thirty-three years old.

Born in the twentieth century, she now lived in the twenty-seventh. Having "died" in 2026 at the age of thirty-one, she was saved from all that and her memories restored in 2676. She had a new name, a new identity, new friends and a bright life ahead of her. All that remained of her past were the training and experiences of her original life…

…and the piercing shards of her false personas that were slowly destroying her mind.

SHARDS

Book Three

Abigail Wyeth was alone. Terribly, horribly alone.

Her friends lay dead. Her new life was destroyed; nothing more than a smoldering crater in the Sahara. She herself lay on the desert sands, seriously wounded and bleeding, utterly alone.

Alone with her thoughts.

The thoughts of a dozen false personas. Six and half centuries of despair, her mind controlled, programmed, used, by others. Thoughts no longer hers. Thoughts that were destroying her mind, racing her toward an inevitable, agonizing death.

SHARDS

Book Four

In this, the final book, Abigail Wyeth has reached the very bottom of her life. There is nowhere to go but up.

And up is where she goes. As things begin to finally, happily come together - her mind as well as her life - there still remains one thing left to do that may yet destroy her:

Face an entity that has survived for six centuries and will do anything - has done everything - to remain in existence and dominate Earth.

PROMISE TIDE

In a world dominated by humans, only the last Pisces can save them.

It is the early 25th Century. A century earlier, Earth had been a thriving planet of eight billion people. Now, with billions emigrating to other planets and a war with Mars that had cost another half-billion lives only thirty years past, Earth’s civilization stands on the brink of collapse.

The Pisces people were genetically altered humans who could breathe both air and water, had incredible strength, keen senses, and above all, a Purpose. Now only Promise Tide remains. And the Purpose to which her people gave their lives.

TAU

Sixteen years have passed since Promise Tide and Christine DuPries united the factions combating NATech into a cohesive unit know simply as the Resistance.

But now the Unbreathable is seeking to find and destroy the Groundfather, the human responsible for the creation of the Pisces three centuries earlier. The Groundfather must be found and saved!

And the two women must hurry before the traitor hidden deep inside the Resistance strikes...

HORIZONS

Winner of the 2003 Draco Award.

"HORIZONS is spot-on. It is written with a style and grace I would expect with someone of 20 years of writing under their belt, effortlessly blending scenes and dialog to weave a complete tapestry.
The characterization is flawless, the imagination untethered... great!"

Evo Terra - The Dragon Page
KFYI 550 AM - Phoenix, AZ

The Science of Magic

Consisting of ten short stories connected by a common thread of race capability, The Science of Magic covers the 110 year span (2950 - 2060) between the "birth" of the homo Magicus (Marks) race and the first trip by a Marks person to Earth.