EUROPA DEEP is out, now, in Kindle ebook, hardback, and paperback. Here’s a selection of links where you can read more about it or buy it. Note that the ebook is exclusive to Amazon, but the hardback and paperback are not.
Amazon UK (ebook, paperback, hardback)
Amazon US - (ebook, paperback, hardback)
Barnes and Noble - (paperback, hardback)
The isbn's are 978-986-06770-4-1 (Paperback) and 978-986-06770-5-8 (Hardback) in case you want to visit other sites. The best prices and shipping, however, are almost always with the big online companies.
If you read Europa Deep and you like it—or even if you don’t!—do consider leaving a written review if you have the opportunity. The more reviews I have, the more likely that readers new to my books will take a chance on them.
I also wanted to take the opportunity to write a few words about the book and how it came into existence.
In the past, I’ve sometimes written novels in just a few weeks. But EUROPA DEEP took far longer to complete than any other.
The title of the first working draft was Europa Door, and it was intended to be hard sf, but with a touch of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. Europa Deep, however, is not that book-not by a very, very long shot.
Why? Well, sometimes, you start writing a book, then realise it isn’t working. This is not unusual: most working writers have books that started out one way, then either became something entirely different or got put to one side-usually forever.
So I completely revised the outline, abandoning a two-thirds completed first draft, and started a mostly-new draft of Europa Door—now called Europa Deep—and got about two-thirds into that before it, too, was abandoned. Again, for reasons too complicated and perhaps too personal to really make any sense, it wasn’t working.
Then I started on a brand new third draft—even while some part of me wondered if I was better of just junking the whole thing.
By now, any hint of horror, cosmic or otherwise, was long gone. I put together another outline and felt much more satisfied with it.
As it turned out, the third version was the one: it felt right in a way the others hadn’t. What it also had was an idea I hadn’t seen before.
I should stop here and say just because I haven’t seen a particular idea done before doesn’t mean it hasn’t, in fact, been done before. Probably, it has. But if it feels new to me, then that’s the impetus I need to complete a novel.
SF of the type I write is often defined by specific tropes—for example, interstellar civilisations linked by spaceships travelling at faster-than-light speeds. There are any number of writers who’ve brought, and continue to bring, something new and fresh to these tropes, but in Europa Deep, I wanted to subvert them and come at the idea of interstellar travel and communication from a completely different angle. Why should the focus always be on meatsacks in tin cans—living, embodied humans transported from interstellar point A to interstellar point B inside pressurised spaceships at faster than light speed?
In Europa Deep, I’ve tried to suggest an alternative approach. I can’t say any more than that without risking spoilers. But whether I’ve succeeded is something you, the reader, will have to tell me.
At the same time, I also wanted to write a story full of action and intrigue. The story is set almost a century from now, at a point where humanity is just beginning to expand into the outer solar system. Cassie White, the protagonist, is an ‘Opt’—meaning, her genetics have been optimised prior to her birth. It’s a gift that quickly becomes a burden. She, and the crew of the deep space exploration vessel, the Veles, must discover the fate of an expedition that went missing beneath the ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa, where lies, or so it’s long been speculated, a vast ocean of liquid salt water.
I started on the first draft in 2020 and only finished the final draft a few months ago. Despite all the time and trouble it took to get to the finished article, it feels completely worth it.
I hope you enjoy the heck out of it.
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