How far can Love travel?

The continuing glut of romance novels in our society bears testimony to the desire of so many women to know a love that will endure all things for the sake of the beloved.  But romance isn't the only kind of love, and the continuing onslaught of action movies featuring the camaraderie of buddies who will risk death to save each other says even tough guys crave love.

 

Humans are born with a need to be loved with an enduring love.  The problem is that the road to mutuality in love is often so full of potholes, injuries, and unexpected twists that many of us turn back and settle for the safety of cheap imitations that we call "love" but are nothing more than a fulfillment of our selfish desires.

 

When it comes to the love of God, people may want to be the recipients of His deep love, but when it comes to giving it, not many get past the sticker shock of seeing the cost up front.

 

In my series, Scions of the Aegean C, I wanted to show the many faces of what we call love and the long-term impact each kind can have upon people, their families, communities, and the world.  Yes, there will be some sweet love stories, but there will be threads of sacrificial love, familial love, deep bonds of friendship, and even dysfunctional "love."  All along the way, there will be adventure, exploration, discovery, and the unfolding mystery of faith.

 

While the series contains no graphic descriptions of sex or violence, it does at times address these topics, and it also portrays the consequences that some characters face as the result of their choices.  It's written for readers 16 and up who relish stories with complex characters and richly-textured settings.

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About the genre of Scions

 

If you get annoyed by people or some aspect of life today, you can pack up and move to Chicago, or Shanghai, or Antartica.  I wanted to put my characters in a place where, they couldn't easily escape their situation or each other—so I used the means of space/time travel to crash them in a place where they must depend on each other—like it or not.  This placement of characters also gave me the means of removing some of the technology that so often becomes another "place" where people try to escape real relationships and real problems.  In the world of Aegea (where the story takes place) there are social structures, and people who dare to veer from the pattern must be willing to face harsh consequences.  These factors all place the Scions of the Aegean C series in the Steampunk* sub genre of Scifi—but I hope the name of the genre won't put off some general fiction readers since the series isn't about space, or robots, or an apocalypse.  :-)

 

My goal in writing the series is to cause people (individually and perhaps as groups) to ponder the ways we think about "love," the ways we define it, the ways we degrade it—and what it truly costs us.

 

*Steampunk is a sub genre of science fiction and fantasy literature that commonly has several distinct features.  It . . .

 

• Is often set in an alternative history (the "path not taken")

• Usually features some aspect of retro-tech—machinery one might have seen in the era of steam engines, and inventions such as H. G.Wells or Jules Verne might have pictured them

• Often depicts at least some portion of society with distinct moral sensibilities

• Shows that society in conflict

 

In the Scions of the Aegean C  series, people leave Earth . . . and end up in an alternate timeline with nothing but what they have on board their ship to start life in a new world.  A century later, what the descendants of the "Firstlanders" have is retro-tech that only a few people know how to build/use . . . and a society that's begging for a shakeup.  :-)