Tor.com Publishing is proud to announce that Executive Editor Beth Meacham has acquired three short novels from debut author Spencer Ellsworth. The Starfire trilogy, the first of which is currently titled A Red Peace, is an action-packed space opera in which the oppressed half-Jorian Crosses have risen up to supplant humanity and dominate the galaxy.
Spencer Ellsworth has been writing since he learned how. His short fiction has previously appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and many other places, including here at Tor.com. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and three children, works as a teacher and administrator at a small tribal college on a Native American reservation.
Beth Meacham had this to say:
One of the greatest things about being an editor is finding a writer with enormous talent, and working with her or him to develop the skills to go with that talent. I started working with Spencer years ago, at weekend workshops, and have had the pleasure of seeing him level up and up over time. This amazing sf adventure had its genesis in an overnight writing assignment I gave him three years ago—that was the first time I heard Jaqi’s voice, describing the alien fighting pit she’d been shanghaied into while innocently looking for tomatoes, and I knew that I wanted to hear her tell me the rest of her story.
Spencer Ellsworth had this to say:
This story’s first scene barreled into my head years ago: a galactic empire has fallen, celebrations ring outside, and the order rings out in the new corridors of power:
“Kill all humans.”
Once I found the characters, this story took off, a wild chase across the galaxy. I was raised on Star Wars and its five thousand licensed & unlicensed bastard children and as such, I have seen a lot of galactic empires fall, and a lot of Rebellions rise. But as this story took shape, inspired by that first scene, I gravitated toward the uglier revolutions of history. Starfire is about Russia 1918, not Rome 476. The questions the characters face—about martial loyalty, atrocity, state control and the meaning of combat—are the questions that haunt the 20th and 21st century.
Oh, there’s also space battles between giant bugs, sun-sized spiders, planets of cyborgs and a heroine with enough grit to bring down the galaxy’s newest warlord.
The Starfire trilogy was acquired from Sara Megibow at kt literary. The first book is scheduled for mid-2017.
