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.
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.