Month: November 2024

So, I realize I didn’t do an official post celebrating the relaunch of Dronefall One last week. This was due to a sudden opening of a portal to the Void, which I rapidly accelerated through on my computer chair after breaking through the last technological barrier before publication. I was tired when I escaped the Void, too tired, unfortunately to report. But, now that I’ve recovered, I thought I had better write a post.

I don’t know if you’re already a reader, or if you stumbled across this blog post by chance maybe years after the fact. Either way, I want to introduce you to the Dronefall Series—a Christian cyberpunk story in six installments.

You’ll be following a 24-year-old woman named Halcyon Slavik—but you’re not the only one following her, it turns out. In chapter one, book one, she discovers she’s being tracked by a drone. I’ll warn you right now, if you can’t stand suspense, don’t get involved. It’s going to take her the course of the series to find out who’s watching, and why.

What to expect

The series begins with the reader more or less being handed a box of mysterious artifacts, or a file of intriguing, if seemingly unrelated documents. I’m going to need you to trust me. All of this is important. It will come back up later. Everything in book one is set-up for a hopefully entertainingly complicated tangle of events and reveals leading up to quite an escalation at the end. And boy, does it escalate.

I think it’s mainly the slowness of the slow-burn plot that made me classify this series as adult rather than young adult. It’s cleaner than the average pg-13 action movie you would probably see. I didn’t compromise on language, there’s no sexual content (there’s actually no major romantic thread in the whole series), and most of the violence is man vs. machine. I should probably write a full content guide for each book and post it somewhere. But for now, I’m just trying to communicate it’s not classified as “adult” due to not-younger-audience-appropriate content.

I tend to market the Dronefall Series more on the plot and concept elements than on themes. That’s not because there are no themes. It’s because I want you to find the themes for yourself and interpret them your own way. The whole cast has a lot going on. But I don’t like to make my characters into object lessons or personifications of values. They need to be real people, or I won’t be able to care about them.

This has led to the Dronefall cast being a bunch of weirdos with problems and opinions of their own. They all have some growing to do, like all of us. Halcyon, you’ll discover, is a very special case and is actually doing pretty well, considering. Not everyone is going to like Halcyon. I didn’t make her to be universally liked. She’s a dystopian heroine—those tend to be a bit polarizing.

How Christian is it?

Maybe you’re wondering, “okay, but what does the Christian element in this series look like?” I know a lot of people—even Christians—are wary of fiction that might end up being too preachy. No one wants to read a story where the faith message was awkwardly shoehorned in. Neither do they want it just sprinkled over the top like powdered sugar.

The Christianity in the Dronefall Series is absolutely essential. You couldn’t take it out and leave the plot and characters intact. It deals with a world where Christian beliefs might not be persecuted, but if those beliefs lead to action, no one is safe.  Questions arise about exactly what actions are necessary, required, or acceptable in order to effectively stand up for the truth in a world full of lies.

This causes division among the Christians in Dronefall. At some point, anyone might find themselves in a position where their open resistance will be the only correct response to the powers and authorities that believe they hold claim to the world. These questions cause rifts even between the pastors featured in the story by the end. I didn’t want to shy away from the extremes. That would defeat the purpose of writing dystopian fiction. As the head pastor’s wife has taught her daughters in the books, we need to know our boundaries before anybody dares to cross them. Where do you draw the line?

I’m eager to have people read the series for this reason. I want people to think about these questions. Should we remain silent? Should we say something? When does our pretense of humility hide our fear of asserting the truth? What if resisting damages our witness? What are we called to do when time is running out?

There’s so much to explore here. It’s a six-book series. I’ve been working on it for most of my twenties, and I’m just getting around to finishing the last book. I think about this story every single day. I see it in the headlines and in conversations around me. I’ve been called to share it, even though I feel a bit under-equipped and short on skills and certainly resources to produce something impressive or professional. I know there’s a reason for this story.

Still, I can’t say I’m great at marketing it. And this book for sure will never make it big on TikTok. What are you supposed to do? Oh yeah, tropes. I should mention tropes before I sign off. Guys, I’m not good at writing tropes. I don’t know why. I guess it’s probably easier when you write romance. But I’ll try.

These are tropes, right?

• Cameras everywhere
• Autonomous robotic…things
• High-tech underworld
• Mysterious powerful organizations
• Information control and manipulation
• Altered memories
• Loner protagonist
• Secret identities
• Is it real or is it staged?
• Cyborg enhancement
• A variation on the villain/hero mind-link
• Unethical experiments gone wrong
• Massive conspiracies
• Moral dilemmas

Wow, I did it. I found a bunch of tropes once I started thinking about it. They’re just not very BookTok-y. That’s probably not a bad thing, though. Some people are kind of tired of TikTok’s disappointing recommendations at this point. Maybe this sounds like a better time to you.

If you’re interested, the buy links for the first three ebooks are all here.

#1 Dronefall

#2 Lightwaste

#3 Rainchill

And, if you want to know even more, (plus get my comic adaptation of Dronefall Chapter One to download for free) please join my email list! I don’t do social media, so my email newsletter is the best way to keep up with me online. Highly recommended.

Dronefall is a six-book series following a young Christian woman wo chooses not to be conformed to the ways of her dark twisted world, but instead to seek out the truth behind its web of lies and manipulation. It’s a futuristic world, but under its trappings of drone-swarmed skies, autonomous surveillance technology and centralized information control, it’s a familiar place.

I most often describe Dronefall as “Christian Futuristic Fiction” to laypeople, because I think that’s a genre everybody can understand without further definition. But at the same time, does that put it in the same genera as Left Behind? Is Dronefall “End Times Fiction?”

How would I classify “End Times Fiction?”

While End Times Fiction is Christian Futuristic, not all Christian Futuristic is End Times. Let’s nerd out about this a bit.

In this diagram, you can see I did something a little controversial. Here’s my logic. I find it easiest to categorize the broader genera of Christian Fiction by their time-periods—their settings on the timeline. Contemporary, Historical, Biblical, Futuristic. But if you think about it, End Times Fiction actually falls under Futuristic and Biblical.

Okay, so this graph isn’t perfect. You could group Biblical under historical, but I think most people who are looking for books would prefer it be its own thing. The events of the Bible occupy a different category in most people’s minds than some random story set in ancient Greece, for example. And in the same way, End Times fiction and Futuristic fiction are different things, in a way. End Times fiction, once again, deals with the events of the Bible.

The Rapture, The Tribulation, the rise of the Antichrist, Armageddon—actually, I would probably more accurately classify End Times Fiction as the intersection of Biblical and Speculative. Because, try as we might, we’re going to have to simply study and speculate to portray the events of Revelation in a literal fiction-story form.

But How Would I Classify Dronefall?

Well, the short answer is, it isn’t End Times Fiction, technically. It’s focused on a smaller scale, and doesn’t try to interpret the events of Revelation. Not because I don’t think we should try, but simply because I didn’t choose to build it around that. Here’s my chart-placement for Dronefall.

Speculative Fiction covers everything from fantasy to sci-fi to horror, in some cases. (Not all horror is speculative, unfortunately.)  There is a growing Christian booklist under all these categories. Futuristic spec fic would be any of these genres set significantly into the future. Dronefall is set in 2043-’44. That’s coming up fast, but it’s still futuristic enough for me.

Then there’s Dystopian. Now, there is, of course debate on what makes a book truly Dystopian. Some argue that it has to be a society that is built on Utopian ideas taken to the extreme to the point of becoming a terrible place to live. If you go with this belief, an apocalyptic story isn’t dystopian, but a post-apocalyptic one could be, if, in the wake of the world falling apart, society rebuilt around a rigid order that, while originally meant to solve a problem, ended up creating plenty more of its own.

The looser definition is just a nasty broken society, typically with too much control by the elites, whoever they may be. Dronefall easily falls under this umbrella.

So, if you ascribe to the second definition of Dystopia, most all cyberpunk would be a dystopian subgenre.   

What is cyberpunk?

When you look up what cyberpunk is, the phrase “high tech lowlife” comes up pretty often. Cyberpunk is a technology-saturated but typically run-down and chaotic world full of hackers, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and, notably crime. Cyberpunk typically focuses on a technologically advanced underworld with complicated confused morals and a lot of gray-area characters. Dronefall’s labyrinthine cityscape, overrun by semi-autonomous drones and fog-breathing trains, creates a fantastic backdrop for the questions and dilemmas Halcyon and her friends have to face.

Bringing Christianity into the cyberpunk world puts a whole new spin on it. While the genera is typically inhabited by antiheros and characters who will do what they can get away with by whatever means they have, the presence of an absolute moral right raises even more questions. Halcyon sees the oppression and injustice in her world and she knows there is a right and a wrong way to fight it. But where to draw the line? And when?

And who’s with her and who’s against her?

Is Dronefall set in the End Times?

Getting back to this question. Yes. Am I going to end by having all the characters Raptured out to escape their problems, so I don’t have to solve them? No, don’t worry. I wouldn’t do that to you. But people within the story aren’t afraid to talk about it.

Oddly, out of the Christian Dystopian books I’ve read, there’s very little to no mention of Jesus’s return, or the hope of Earth’s redemption ultimately being in His hands. I’m not sure why. It’s not natural for a Christian cast to not look for hope in the future that way. I want to bring that discussion back into the story.

Because when it gets dark, God shows up.