Christopher L. Bennett's Blog

Back at the end of 2023, I mentioned that my favorite quiet thinking spot from my days at the University of Cincinnati, a small enclosed courtyard that I always called “the Alcove” because I didn’t know the correct term for it at the time, had been torn down as part of the demolition and replacement of the deteriorating 1930s extension of the 1917 Old Chemistry building. This morning, I went for a long walk and wandered over to that part of campus for the first time in a while, and I discovered that the new Old Chemistry building (it’s still called that) was complete. So I wandered around its outside and inside for a few minutes, getting a sense of the place, which seems typical of the modern interiors of the newer campus buildings in the perpetually “Under Construction” UC. Even the interior of the original Old Chemistry building has been fully remodeled, though the exterior is basically the same.

When I came out into the plaza that had overlooked my courtyard, there was just the side of the new building filling up the space where it had been. I went back inside to find out what was occupying the Alcove/courtyard’s footprint and see if I could at least stand where it had been, but there’s a large room labeled “Engineering Lab” where it was. But there is a small study lounge one floor above it, so I guess that carries forward the spirit of the Alcove in a way.

Meanwhile, I see they’ve closed off the area around Crosley Tower for its impending demolition, which is slated to begin in January. Apparently many consider it an eyesore, and it’s sinking or tilting or something due to foundation problems, but I’ve always found it quite striking, and the concrete plaza skirting it was another favorite study/thinking spot for me over the years. It’s been a dominating part of the campus skyline all my life (it was built in 1967, about a year before I was born, though some sources incorrectly say ’69), and it will be strange and sad to see it gone.

I’ve just posted a new entry in my Patreon’s Behind the Scenes tier for the first time in a while. As a supplement to the release of “Aleyara’s Flight” in the current issue of Analog, I’ve posted a series of excerpts from my worldbuilding notes about the Nilyoru, the ground-dwelling Biauru culture introduced in “Flight.” As with my earlier notes for the rainforest-dwelling Rularu, these notes cover their historic origins, their mythology, and the basis of their language. In time, I’ll probably post them here along with the earlier notes, but for now, they’re a Patreon exclusive.

The new page can be found here, available at the $5 subscription level:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/aleyaras-flight-144007427

As usual, the folks at Analog Science Fiction and Fact asked me to write an essay for their blog, The Astounding Analog Companion, to accompany my new novella “Aleyara’s Flight.” Rather than do the kind of Q&A piece I’ve generally done before, it occurred to me to adapt some of my extensive history notes about Aleyara’s species, the Biauru, and the world they inhabit, to give some extra insight into their world and culture. Check it out here:

In an Alien Past: The History Behind “Aleyara’s Flight”

Meanwhile, I’ve added a bit more info to my annotations for “Aleyara’s Flight,” copied from my story notes — a list of the various animal species in the Aleyara stories, with names and brief descriptions. I belatedly realized it was a good idea to include those.

With “Skin in the Game” coming next year, and hopefully more to follow, I’m eventually going to have to create a dedicated page for everything pertaining to the Biauru. I haven’t quite decided what form it will take, though.

Since the November/December 2025 Analog is definitely out now (although there seem to be some delays in getting print subscription copies out in the wake of the magazine’s recent sale to a new publisher), I’ve posted the story annotations here on Written Worlds. The page numbers are based on the proofreading galleys, which I hope are still accurate to the final edition.

“Aleyara’s Flight” Annotations

Meanwhile, artist Eldar Zakirov has posted the cover painting and a couple of his early sketches on his site, as he previously did with the “Aleyara’s Descent” cover.

https://eldarzakirov.com/Aleyara-s-Flight

I’d expected the cover artist to depict a scene of Biauru flying on dragonback from the climax, since that seemed like it would be the most visually interesting scene and would fit the title, but this is a striking interpretation of Aleyara’s audience before King Gorlai. Zakirov’s interpretation of the Biauru’s anatomy is still somewhat different from my own, but what surprises me is that it also differs from his “Aleyara’s Descent” cover in the anatomy of the crests and Aleyara’s coloration. I guess he’s refining his ideas as he goes. Differences in detail aside, the image conveys Gorlai’s character effectively. And I like how Aleyara’s body language suggests that she’s matter-of-factly giving a talk about her findings, rather than showing obeisance to the king on his throne, as he seems to expect from his pose. It fits the dynamic of the story quite well. The smallest Biauru is presumably Paira, the Nilyoru scientist introduced in this story, and it’s appropriate that his attention is fully on Aleyara.

The issue is on sale now. Here’s the direct ordering link from Magzter: https://www.magzter.com/US/Must-Read-Books-Publishing/Analog-Science-Fiction-and-Fact/Fiction/2226937

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Analog Science Fiction and Fact has just posted the cover to their November/December 2025 issue on their website, and here it is (sorry, it’s not very large):

I don’t know who the cover artist is yet, but it’s another striking image, and I’m amazed and honored to get two cover paintings in a row. I’m also flattered to see the Analog page call “Aleyara’s Descent” (and its cover) a “reader-favorite.”

As for the story inside — my fourteenth Analog story in 27 years, and my first published novella-length work outside of Star Trek fiction — you can read the first two chapters online here: https://analogsf.com/current-issue/story-excerpt1/ (Note to future readers: Once the next issue comes out in January 2026 or so, this link will presumably no longer go to the “Aleyara’s Flight” excerpt.) Here on Written Worlds, I have a description and non-spoiler discussion here. I’ll put up spoiler annotations before long. Info about the Biauru and their world is available on my Aliens page, and I’ll have an essay relating to the novella appearing on The Astounding Analog Companion blog soon, which I’ll post about when it comes out.

But there’s more Biauru news! One week ago, I signed the contract for the third Aleyara story, “Skin in the Game,” which is also novella-length. In fact, “Aleyara’s Flight” and “Skin in the Game” were initially conceived as a single novella with a time jump in the middle, but they turned out way too long for that and became two novellas written back-to-back, and they definitely work better that way. I expect it’ll probably be about another year before “Skin in the Game” sees print. And yes, it’s quite a change in my approach to the story titles, and I hesitated at first when the title occurred to me late in the writing process, but I realized it was just too perfect not to use.

And yes, I am working on a fourth installment, a climax for what I hope to collect into a fix-up novel afterward. Just this morning, though, I had an idea for what I thought was just a bit of character texture, but as its ramifications unfolded in my mind, I realized it was the key to making the whole story deeper and more emotionally potent, tying it together more and resolving a couple of big problems, except now I have to go back and redo at least half of what I’ve already written, and to rework my outline for the rest. One of those moments in a writer’s life that’s both exciting and intimidating, like getting an unexpected present that’s exactly what you needed, except there’s a lot of assembly required.

With the release of “Aleyara’s Flight” in the November/December 2025 Analog drawing near, I decided to post my general, non-spoiler discussion notes on my Original Short Fiction page, which I’ve also taken the opportunity to streamline now that most of its former entries are indexed under my story collections. I kept the duplicate “Aleyara’s Descent” entry there, though, since it makes sense to keep it paired with its sequel.

More overdue site maintenance: I’ve finally updated my Spider-Man: Drowned in Thunder Annotations page to reflect the page numbering in the Spider-Man: The Darkest Hours omnibus, the only version currently in print. I’ve also updated a few of the notes a bit.

This is something I should’ve done as soon as I finally got author copies of the omnibus, but sometimes these older pages slip my mind. But I’ve been relistening to GraphicAudio’s full-cast adaptation recently, and that prompted me to revisit the annotations. Hard to believe it’s been almost 20 years.

I just finished re-listening to the Tangent Knights audiodrama trilogy I did for GraphicAudio in 2021-22, my homage to Japanese tokusatsu superhero series with a hard science fiction twist. It’s still one of my favorite things I’ve ever written, the only trilogy I’ve ever done as a continuous, more or less pre-planned whole so that I could build an intricate, evolving narrative with things set up in one book and paying off in a later one. And emulating the rich character drama of toku shows let me achieve some marvelous complexity and depth with the characters and their evolving relationships, alongside the big, wild action and the balance of intense, dark drama and zany humor — and meanwhile I had fun thinking up relatively grounded scientific justifications for the fantastic powers of transforming heroes and the monsters they fight. I feel I outdid myself with this one. Now that I was able to listen to GraphicAudio’s adaptation of my story with a bit more distance from my occasional “Oh, that’s not quite what I expected/intended” reactions, it’s easier to hear that they captured what I was aiming for quite well overall. Hearing my stories brought to life by a talented cast of actors is a thrilling experience.

As of this writing, all three individual volumes and the series set are on sale at GraphicAudio at a 40% discount: https://www.graphicaudio.net/tangent-knights-series-set.html Meanwhile, Audiobooks.com has discontinued the half-off offer on Caprice of Fate that was supposed to run through October 11, but you can still get any individual volume or the trilogy set for free if you sign up for a 30-day trial of their service, and Audible has an equivalent trial offer of its own.

As I listened, I went back over the annotations I posted for the trilogy, which can be accessed from the main Tangent Knights page here. I’ve made some updates and corrections here and there, as well as fixing a few dead or broken links. I’ve actually made a couple of other updates in the past that I didn’t announce at the time, including an update of the spoilery Forms and Powers Index page to add color codings to the headings based on the characters’ armor colors, emulating the format that RangerWiki and Kamen Rider Wiki use for their character lists.

I would still love the chance to do a second “season” of Tangent Knights. Now that its main inspiration, Kamen Rider, has finally begun streaming internationally, I’m hoping it will spawn a larger Western audience for tokusatsu and maybe improve the odds of GraphicAudio asking me to do another trilogy. But the main thing that will make a difference is getting the word out about Tangent Knights and improving sales for the existing trilogy. So if you haven’t already bought it, please consider giving it a try. And if you’ve listened and enjoyed it, please don’t hesitate to spread the word in online fan communities.

Since I haven’t been earning much money from subscriptions to my Patreon — which these days has little to offer except my weekly reviews and very infrequent fiction posts, since I’m not a fast enough writer to come up with exclusive fiction content regularly — I’ve finally decided to take advantage of the feature that lets non-members buy individual posts or collections of posts for a one-time payment. I don’t know if I’ll sell much this way, but it’s worth a try. Some people might be more willing to pay a one-time fee for permanent access to a story or collection than to pay a subscription for monthly access, even though my subscription prices are extremely low.

The stories in my Original Fiction tier are now available to purchase for $3 each, which is more than I wanted to charge, but it’s the minimum Patreon will allow. Partly because of that, I felt it made sense to sell complete collections of my TV review series rather than individual review posts. The review collections are available to purchase for $12 each, or $10 for the shorter ones. My fiction collections — Troubleshooters, Arachne Universe, and General Fiction — are $18 each, and include access to annotations from the Behind the Scenes tier and artwork from the Tip Jar tier as well as the stories. This is quite a discount compared to buying the stories individually, but comparable to the price of a story collection, so it seemed reasonable. (It didn’t make sense to offer annotations individually if I couldn’t go below $3, particularly since the annotations for the Patreon stories collected in Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories are now available for free here on Written Worlds.)

Of course, a fair number of the stories on Patreon are now available in my print collections, but if someone’s curious about the collections, maybe they could buy a story there to see if they’re interested enough to buy the whole books. And the majority of the stories are still exclusive to Patreon (at least for now), as are my review series.

Unfortunately, Apple’s iOS app has set things up in a way that they charge a fee of about 45% extra if you buy through that rather than through other means like PayPal, and it seems that’s the only way to buy outside the US at the current time. Sorry about that.

Incidentally, Patreon has recently updated its software so that you can now offer the early part of a post as a free preview, so when I edited my fiction posts to add sale prices, I also moved down the “Paid access starts here” bar to give readers a little taste of the stories, which hopefully might spark a few sales.

One more weird little thing happened at Shore Leave that I forgot to mention. On Friday evening, my first night at the con, I noticed that my right little finger was sore around the knuckle, but I didn’t know why. Saturday morning, I was startled to look at it and see it was lividly bruised, since I still had no recollection of hurting it. My best guess was that I’d banged it on something while wrestling with my luggage.

On my trip back, though, I stopped for the night at a motel from the same chain I’d stayed at going out, and when I took a shower before bed, I pulled one of the shower’s heavy sliding glass doors shut and banged my left middle finger’s knuckle between the door and the wall. The same thing must have happened to my right knuckle at the other motel on the trip out. Although it could’ve also happened my first night or morning at the Shore Leave hotel, since it had very nearly the same shower design. I have to wonder why such dangerous shower doors are so popular.

On the plus side, though, my right knuckle’s bruise had cleared up by Sunday, and the left one never bruised at all, so I guess it didn’t get pinched as hard.