Violent Love and Quick Death with a Beautiful AI Construct in Star City, Russia

Mark here. My story “The Bonebreaker” has a strange germination. It grew out of my first novel  Fevreblau in that I cherry-picked a few parts from the book and expanded them into a story. Writers do this a lot in case you didn’t know. We write a story about a character and then we might go back and write another story that revolves around a secondary character. It’s a good way to generate new ideas and themes. I use it often. You simply have to be careful you are not telling the same story over and over again.

Another nice thing about this story is I set it in Russia. I have always been fascinated by Russian history because there is so much to work with there. I have written a lot of stories set in Russia and I think it might have helped my sales a little in this regard. It’s a setting you don’t see all the time so it has an exotic flavor to it, especially among western readers. Anything that might make your story stand out to the editor always helps, and I think having written stories in this Future History of Russia definitely helped me.

The story was first published by Challenging Destiny in September, 2005. It has been reprinted by Argo Navis Publishing on Kindle. I hope you like the story! 🙂

Product Description: As the Russian regime crumbles, a grim man who destroys AI simulacra for a living travels to Star City. There, he traps a young woman seeking freedom. Battered and betrayed by all sides, the Bonebreaker and the newly freed AI called Natalya fight to escape the reprisals and executions emanating from Moscow…and together find a new life in an Archipelago of worldlets orbiting Earth.

“Hoover never hesitates to go deep and find what it means to be human.” –Richard Parks, fantasist & SF author