The Screaming Void: Book 1 in the Chained Space Series

by D.N. Schmidt

Can a criminal crew of space junk salvagers really save the universe?

Jay Jordan and his crew travel the Domain, bending the law like a pretzel and sneaking their loot past wormhole security. The crew gets hired to retrieve a ship lost in the Screaming Void, the most dangerous place in space. Everyone wants the homicidal space gangsters, the tyrannical interstellar government, even the otherworldly Architect Church. Can the crew keep the ship from falling into the wrong hands? Are the Architects really guiding Jay, or are they just a myth? Should you really stop in the middle of a ray gun battle to fix your hair? And what’s so important about one junk ship?

172 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 6, 2025

About the author

D.N. Schmidt began performing magic shows at age thirteen. While his friends were earning extra cash with paper routes or mowing lawns, he was on stage telling jokes, reading minds, and walking on broken glass.

After a few years, he decided that writing was more fun than performing, and presented much less risk of being heckled. (This was before he found out about internet trolls.) He turned to writing stories. He writes science fiction, horror, urban fantasy, anything weirder than real life.

Although D.N. Schmidt mostly writes speculative fiction, his first novel was a mystery. “They Ate the Waitress?” is the story of a murder at a restaurant for wealthy cannibals. After that came a collection of science fiction short stories called The Doom Tapes, and then The Screaming Void and The Stolen Planet, two space opera novels. He also wrote Inspiration Overdose, a writing prompt generator.

Interested readers can find free stories and writing tips at https://dnschmidt.com.