FRIDAY SF & FANTASY – The Airagos Complete Series
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About the Book
Get the book FOR THE LOVE OF AIRAGOS and its prequel novella THE FALL OF AIRAGOS in one value priced collection. FOR THE LOVE OF AIRAGOS features Heather Candor, who grew up playing RPGs with her friend Abe and a regular group of college friends. One day he mysteriously disappeared, but tried to keep the game going as Play By Mail turns – until one day those turns also mysteriously stopped. THE FALL OF AIRAGOS follows Dishe, and the events that set the series in motion.
Behind the Scenes of THE AIRAGOS COMPLETE SERIES
I wrote two pieces in this particular series and self published them as e-books, one is a novelette and the other a full novel. They are now collected in one e-book “box set” for the same price as the novel. This collection puts them in the order they should be read, which is actually the opposite of their release order.
THE FALL OF AIRAGOS is a prequel novelette set generations before the events of FOR THE LOVE OF AIRAGOS. It tells of crucial moments in the life of Dishe, the slave breeder who rises to become Queen Consort of Airagos and mother to the characters that will ultimately rip the planet apart. I actually hadn’t heard of THE HANDMAID’S TALE when I started the notes for this years before the Hulu series, and obviously Atwood’s books preceded those but I wasn’t aware of them. Now I can’t help thinking of them when I look at some of the societal structures I set up for Airagos. An early sampler of the first part of the novelette appeared as a tease on Goodreads before this was completed in 2018.
FOR THE LOVE OF AIRAGOS takes place on contemporary Earth, and was originally written about 2010. I’d been experimenting with a way to crossover with an area I tried to break into at the time – the contemporary women relationship audience – with SF and Fantasy topics. The results of the work are very mixed in my opinion, and I would call it at best an intriguing experiment.
The description of FOR THE LOVE OF AIRAGOS is this: “Destined to be a pawn in a game without even knowing it, Heather Candor grew up playing RPGs with her friend Abe and a regular group of college friends. One day he mysteriously disappeared, but tried to keep the game going as Play By Mail turns – until one day those turns also mysteriously stopped. Years later, as a freelance journalist, Heather ends up in a strange encounter with a journalistic source that leaves her pregnant and befuddled. Hiding away from the world and getting immersed in MMOGs, she’s put in contact with friends old and new that start reviving the mysteries of the past. They come to learn they’ve been pieces in a larger game for a race from another world to come to Earth, and there’s more to what’s going on that meets the eye. Ultimately it takes an acceptance of love, at times lust, and destiny to stay one step ahead of those using her and do what is needed to save the present and shape the future of two worlds in this story that blends gaming and the games of interstellar interaction.”
The one thing that might be seen in the future of this experiment is one character that appears in THE FALL OF AIRAGOS. That character would appear in the capacity of her job elsewhere in the cosmos, as her appearance on Airagos is transient and tied into the same job to a degree. To say more would be a significant spoiler.
If you’re interested, THE AIRAGOS COMPLETE SERIES e-book is available for Kindle, for Nook through B&N, as well as Kobo and Smashwords.