Venus Inferno
Originally posted on Champagne Books Blog
Click cover for an Excerpt from Chapter One
Venus Inferno comes out very shortly and I’m very excited by it. It represents a couple of firsts for me and one second.
It is my very first - but probably not my last - novella. I rather enjoyed this shorter format, although at times it was difficult to restrain myself from dropping an element into the story that would come up later. There wasn’t going to be a later so if I wanted to say something, I had to say it now. I also didn’t get the chance to interweave very much social commentary into the story, which I missed more than the chance to expand on the storyline.
It is also the very first story I wrote in the first person, which was very usual. I’m used to the third person and being able to provide different vantage points to allow the reader insight into what is happening. It is also odd using the personal pronoun ‘I’ all the time. One can’t help but to identify with the main character. Admittedly this is an occupational hazard for writers but even more so in this case.
Venus Inferno represents my second published work with Champagne books. Hopefully there will be many more but having a second story accepted and published make it seem all the more real.
One of the things that I really enjoyed about Venus Inferno was that all of the main technology there is real.
Ion drives are real. They are slow compared to chemical rockets but they do exist.
Tellurium is real. It really is one of the nine rarest minerals on earth and it really does fall as snow on Venus.
Thermoelectric Materials are also real. And tellurium - in the form of bismuth telluride and lead telluride - really is a working element of thermoelectric devices.
Who knows? Maybe one day in the future they will be as commonplace as they are in Venus Inferno.
Let’s hope so.