Merry Christmas and happy holidays, everybody! This week I’m back to telling you a little bit about how my various novels came to be and sharing some insights about what it’s been like to work in shared-world fiction. It turns out that when you gripe about Star Wars, you get a lot of attention—we’ll see …
Star Wars is Bad Sci-Fi
This week I’m taking a brief digression from dishing out some of the background and inside-story on my career as a novelist to examine something a little more current: the new Star Wars movies. Specifically, I’m looking at Episodes VII and VIII, The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. And I’m going to pick on …
17 Novels: The Birthright Years
Welcome back! Today I’m continuing with my retrospective on the novels I’ve worked on over the course of my career. So here’s the story of my adventures with the Birthright book line and The Falcon and the Wolf, my second novel. The Falcon and the Wolf In October of 1991 I started as a game …
17 Novels: Kingslayer
A couple of years ago over on my blogspot.com page, I devoted a few months to exploring the RPG adventures I’d written during my game design career one by one. I called the series Twenty-Eight Adventures because at the time I started that was my count on adventures I’d written. Anyway, it proved to be …
AMA on Thursday 11/30
Here's a quick bit of news that might constitute the shortest post I've ever written. I'll be participating in a AMA (that's Ask-Me-Anything) over on Reddit/fantasy this Thursday, November 30, 9 am to 5 pm Pacific time! Here's the link: https://reddit.com/r/fantasy
Writing Ranks, Justice League
When I set out to dive into military-themed SF with my Sikander North books, one of the obstacles that I really didn’t anticipate was the sheer murkiness of naval ranks and forms of address. If someone’s in command of a ship, he or she is the captain. But there’s a rank called commander and there’s …
Release Week Essays
It's finally here! This is release week for Valiant Dust, the moment when a couple of years of work (well, off and on, a month here and a couple of months there) sallies forth to meet the reading public. Naturally, I've been doing what I can to talk up my new book in various articles and formats …
Warp Drive in Breaker of Empires
Remember when I said I'd explore a few of the world-building assumptions of my Sikander North stories? Well, here's a big one: In the 31st century, humans have a FTL (faster-than-light) drive, so we can zip from one star system to another in a matter of days or weeks. Let's be clear: As far as …
Who Wants a Planet?
As promised in my introductory post, I'm going to use this space to dive into some of the worldbuilding behind my new Breaker of Empires series. Valiant Dust, book 1 of the series, comes out in just a couple of weeks, so this seems like a great time to talk a bit about the hidden skeleton of assumptions and …
News and Thoughts
A Sci-Fi Writer Joins the 21st Century Welcome to my new website! I’ve been meaning to set up a decent author page for some time now and be a little more diligent about keeping up with news, thoughts, and general observations about things that my readers may find interesting. If that’s what you’re looking for …
Richard Baker 