Release date: October 10, 2021
Subgenre: Space Opera
About Exiles' World:
Rann McGaran and his older brother Gerald are the heirs to the McGaran
dynasty, the traditional rulers of Garan, a small but wealthy city on
the recently re-discovered world of Carnelian.
Rann’s telepathic abilities are weak, while Gerald is a prodigy. Gerald is the Director of the Garan Corporation, and he intends to keep his position, no matter what it takes. In three weeks, Rann will attain his majority, and must fight his brother for control of the Corporation, a fight he has little hope of winning, or leave Garan forever.
Thaddeus Franklin is the Imperial Ambassador to Carnelian, charged with bringing the new world into the Second Empire, and if that proves unfeasible, to help destroy it. The Empire is at war with an alien race that has so far proven to be unstoppable. Franklin is expendable, and he knows it.
Behind the scenes, plots are being hatched and ambitious men are weighing the odds, and Franklin and Rann McGaran find themselves suddenly major players in an unexpected game.
Garan seems an unlikely place to serve as the center of an Empire wide conspiracy, but what happens here could prove to be the Empire’s salvation…or its destruction.
Rann’s telepathic abilities are weak, while Gerald is a prodigy. Gerald is the Director of the Garan Corporation, and he intends to keep his position, no matter what it takes. In three weeks, Rann will attain his majority, and must fight his brother for control of the Corporation, a fight he has little hope of winning, or leave Garan forever.
Thaddeus Franklin is the Imperial Ambassador to Carnelian, charged with bringing the new world into the Second Empire, and if that proves unfeasible, to help destroy it. The Empire is at war with an alien race that has so far proven to be unstoppable. Franklin is expendable, and he knows it.
Behind the scenes, plots are being hatched and ambitious men are weighing the odds, and Franklin and Rann McGaran find themselves suddenly major players in an unexpected game.
Garan seems an unlikely place to serve as the center of an Empire wide conspiracy, but what happens here could prove to be the Empire’s salvation…or its destruction.
Excerpt:
Prologue
It was cold in the valley. Snow clung to the branches while a sharp,biting wind blew down from the North. Gray clouds scudded across the sky, promising more snow before morning.
The Imperial troopers at the top of the ramp held their weapons tightly and stared with suspicious eyes at the frightened prisoners spread out across the snowy field. There were nearly ten thousand prisoners—men, women and children who had nothing in common with each other except a genetic heritage that the Empire considered both valuable and suspect. Many of the prisoners were crying. Most of the rest stared with hopeless eyes at the roiling clouds overhead and tried not to think of what the night would bring.
Snow was unusual at this time of year. The seasons had changed early. Of all the bewildered, weary crowd, only one man knew this, but the knowledge could do nothing to help them. The soldiers had their orders and Imperial soldiers obeyed orders. Period.
The Empire had always been ruthless but the lack of efficiency that this enterprise displayed was new, and frightening. The Empire valued competence. Whatever it did, it did well…but not this time. Not now. This operation had been carried out with a minimum of forethought and planning, almost an afterthought. High Command had other things on its mind, like civil war.
/Bastards/, he thought. He rubbed at the corners of his eyes where tears had frozen and straightened his back. He was tall and could see over the crowd to the edge of the trees. /We’re too civilized for this. We’ll have to gather wood. Maybe we can start a fire/. He looked at the huddled crowd. /Many fires/. Except that green wood did not burn well, if it burned at all, and rubbing two sticks together only worked in stories.
Each prisoner had been issued a blanket and a jacket, both more suitable for Spring or Fall. Piles of ready-to-eat rations and crates full of light machinery and computerized instruction chips stood in one corner of the landing field. The planet had been seeded with an assortment of Earthly life. Fat lot of good it would do them now.
Near him, a woman tried to comfort her baby. The baby was crying weakly, its skin blue. The tall man felt his heart twist in his chest and he thought for a moment of offering the woman the jacket that he had no use for, but rejected the idea. He was anonymous in the middle of the flock. If they knew who and what he really was, they would tear him to pieces.
The ramp retracted. The ship slowly lifted on its AG, floating upward until it could barely be seen, hovering in the sky, and then it vanished with a flash.
The wind began to howl. Bitterly, the tall man wondered how many of them would be dead before morning.
Amazon
About Robert I. Katz:
I
grew up on Long Island, in a pleasant, suburban town about 30 miles
from New York City. I loved to read from a very early age and graduated
from Columbia in 1974 with a degree in English. Not encouraged by the
job prospects for English majors at the time, I went on to medical
school at Northwestern, where in addition to my medical degree, I
acquired a life-long love of deep dish pizza. I did a residency in
Anesthesiology at Columbia Presbyterian and spent most of my career at
Stony Brook University, where I ultimately attained the academic rank of
Professor and Vice-Chairman for Administration, Department of
Anesthesiology.
When I was a child, I generally read five or more books per week, and even then, I had a dim sense that I could do at least as well as many of the stories that I was reading. Finally, around 1985, with a job and a family and my first personal computer, I began writing. I quickly discovered that it was not as easy as I had imagined, and like most beginning writers, it took me many years to produce a publishable work of fiction. My first novel, Edward Maret: A Novel of the Future, came out in 2001. It won the ASA Literary Prize for 2001 and received excellent reviews from Science Fiction Chronicle, InfinityPlus, Scavenger’s Newsletter and many others.
My agent at the time urged me to write mysteries, as mysteries are supposed to have a larger readership and be easier to publish than science fiction. Since I have read almost as many mysteries as science fiction and fantasy, and since I enjoy them just as much, I had no objection to this plan. The Kurtz and Barent mystery series, Surgical Risk, The Anatomy Lesson and Seizure followed between 2002 and 2009. Reviewers have compared them favorably to Patricia Cornwell and Robin Cook and they’ve received positive reviews from The Midwest Book Review, Mystery Review Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Lady M’s Mystery International, Mystery Scene Magazine, Library Journal and many others.
In 2014, I published a science fiction short story, To the Ends of the Earth in the Deep Blue Sea on Kindle for Amazon. Since then, I have made all of my previously published novels available for purchase on Kindle. A new science fiction novel, entitled The Cannibal's Feast, was published in July 2017. The next, entitled The Game Players of Meridien, a tale set far in the future after the collapse of the First Interstellar Empire of Mankind, is the first in a projected seven book science fiction series, and will be published on December 16, 2017. The second novel in the series, The City of Ashes, will appear early in 2018. In addition, a fourth novel in the Kurtz and Barent mystery series, The Chairmen, will also be published in the first half of 2018.
When I was a child, I generally read five or more books per week, and even then, I had a dim sense that I could do at least as well as many of the stories that I was reading. Finally, around 1985, with a job and a family and my first personal computer, I began writing. I quickly discovered that it was not as easy as I had imagined, and like most beginning writers, it took me many years to produce a publishable work of fiction. My first novel, Edward Maret: A Novel of the Future, came out in 2001. It won the ASA Literary Prize for 2001 and received excellent reviews from Science Fiction Chronicle, InfinityPlus, Scavenger’s Newsletter and many others.
My agent at the time urged me to write mysteries, as mysteries are supposed to have a larger readership and be easier to publish than science fiction. Since I have read almost as many mysteries as science fiction and fantasy, and since I enjoy them just as much, I had no objection to this plan. The Kurtz and Barent mystery series, Surgical Risk, The Anatomy Lesson and Seizure followed between 2002 and 2009. Reviewers have compared them favorably to Patricia Cornwell and Robin Cook and they’ve received positive reviews from The Midwest Book Review, Mystery Review Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Lady M’s Mystery International, Mystery Scene Magazine, Library Journal and many others.
In 2014, I published a science fiction short story, To the Ends of the Earth in the Deep Blue Sea on Kindle for Amazon. Since then, I have made all of my previously published novels available for purchase on Kindle. A new science fiction novel, entitled The Cannibal's Feast, was published in July 2017. The next, entitled The Game Players of Meridien, a tale set far in the future after the collapse of the First Interstellar Empire of Mankind, is the first in a projected seven book science fiction series, and will be published on December 16, 2017. The second novel in the series, The City of Ashes, will appear early in 2018. In addition, a fourth novel in the Kurtz and Barent mystery series, The Chairmen, will also be published in the first half of 2018.
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