About The Moon and Beyond (The Lunar Free State Book 1):
Ian Stevens, director of the Deep Space Research Institute, isn’t interested in conducting research just for the sake of research. While the rest of the world—including the U.S. government—thinks that’s the DSRI’s sole mission, Stevens is actually interested in more—he wants manned space travel and the colonization of the moon.
With NASA defunct, few scientific probes are being launched, and no one even talks about human spaceflight anymore. Stevens is out to change that. A billionaire in his own right, Stevens has assembled a crew of the best scientists and engineers he can find, and the DSRI is secretly building and testing gravity-powered spacecraft.
There’s just one problem—the project would be widely condemned worldwide, especially since there’s no government supervision. Everything they do has to be kept out of sight and away from the prying eyes of the NSA, Homeland Security, the IRS, OSHA, and a half-dozen other government agencies. They’ve got the world’s smartest computer on their side, but will it be enough?
As the government gets ever closer to figuring out what the DSRI is doing, Stevens’ plan to establish a permanent settlement on the Moon nears fruition. The race is on—will the government find out and shut down the project, or will Stevens be able to implement…the Lunar Free State?
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Author Bio:
My writing inspiration started with Neil Armstrong’s first footsteps on the Moon. I was serving in the U.S. Air Force in 1969 when Apollo 11 touched down, and I remember thinking that we had finally made it. I’d been reading science fiction since grade school, and now all those wonderful stories of space travel –as told by Heinlein, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke — were about to come true. We’d soon be on Mars and have manned missions going to the asteroid belt and the outer planets. Star travel? Well, why not — we’d already met and conquered so many scientific and engineering challenges we’d probably figure out how to get around Einstein as well.
Of course, that didn’t happen. 1972 saw the last landing on the Moon, and when another decade saw no attempt to return I felt like a dream had been lost. That’s when I started writing, and the Lunar Free State series is the result — stories about people who didn’t lose the dream.
There’s no limit to what we can achieve if we put our minds to it, and so far there’s no limit to the stories I want to write. The original series is now eight novels published to date and another one in the works. Meanwhile, I’ve been doing something I never thought I’d do — writing stories in someone else’s “universe.” I’ve got two novels in the raw and gritty urban fantasy series known as Hit World, created by William Alan Webb and Larry Hoy. That series begins with Webb’s The Trashman and my two are titled The Ferryman and The Dragons of Styx. I’ve promised Bill Webb another one in that series, hopefully to be out in 2023.
… and then, I’ve got two short stories in the anthologies Standing Fast and Standing and Standing Defiant, stories in Webb’s Last Brigade series. For those who like post-apocalyptic SF, these are two great collections of stories by a bunch of great writers. If you want to get started in the Last Brigade, look for Standing the Final Watch by William Alan Webb.
Check them out. I hope you enjoy reading my books as much as I enjoyed writing them.
John E. Siers, Author, Oakland, Tennessee