Star Rebels: Stories of Space Exploration, Alien Races, and Adventure

Fallen Empire #2.5 incl

by C. Gockel, Christine Pope, Pippa DaCosta

There are rebels among the stars...

Meet eleven protagonists battling to save themselves and the ones they love. Human, cyborg, clone, or alien, they'll find themselves pitted against intergalactic crime bosses, interstellar mercenaries, a quantum-wave-riding collective mind, and the universe itself. Along the way, there's plenty of action, adventure, humor, and even some romance.

Written by the freshest voices in science fiction, these stories are short, but they'll light your imagination like a solar flare. Strap yourself in and join the rebellion! Download this collection today. 

About the Star Rebels Stories:

A Tale of Two Ships by Audrey Faye
A KarmaCorp Story
Two ships crash into an unimportant digger rock. The first carries a newborn baby. The second will rewrite her destiny.

Carl Sagan's Hunt for Intelligent Life in the Universe by C. Gockel
An Archangel Project Story
Sometimes intelligent life is right in front of your whiskers.

Blood Ties by Christine Pope
A Gaian Consortium Story
On the outlaw world of Iradia, Miala Fels and her computer hacker father discover that taking the wrong commission can have unexpected consequences.

Passage Out by Anthea Sharp
A Victoria Eternal Story
Street rat Diana Smythe has long since given up her hopes of escaping Earth, but that doesn't mean she can't watch the ships fly in and out of the spaceport and dream...

Arcturus 5 by D.L. Dunbar
A Twenty Sectors Story
Xella went to Arcturus 5 to mediate a simple trade dispute between the Mol and the Dark, but now she's not sure she'll get out alive.

Treason's Course by L.J. Cohen
A Halcyone Space Story
In the midst of Earth's first off-planet war, a soldier is given a covert assignment and must decide if treason lies in carrying out her orders or disobeying them.

Falling by Pippa DaCosta
A Girl From Above Story
Trapped in a scrappers rig with a woman he's been hired to kill, Caleb Shepperd is beginning to wonder if this job could be his last.

Starfall Station by Lindsay Buroker
A Fallen Empire Story
After the empire falls, cyborg soldier Leonidas Adler must avoid the Alliance operatives who want him for secrets only he knows, but that's easier said than done. Worse, his past threatens those he's traveling with, including Alisa, the freighter captain he has come to care about.

Luminescence by Patty Jansen
An ISF-Allion World Story
Hadie learns the price of being an artificial human when her partner has an accident and becomes unresponsive.

Glome by James Wells
A Great Symmetry Story
Humanity's first interstellar colony ship has arrived at its destination, only to find an inhospitable death trap of a planet. Crew member Amanda Bowen wishes that was the biggest problem she faced.

Unfinished by Kendra C. Highley
An Unstrung Story
In a world where genetically-engineered humans serve as slave labor to "real humans," two prototype children, designed to be the most superior models ever created, look to each other to find a way to escape their fate.

Genres: Science Fiction, Anthologies, Short Stories, Fantasy, Aliens, Amazon, Fiction

552 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 16, 2016

About the author

C. Gockel got her start writing fanfiction, and she is not ashamed! Much. She received emails, messages and reviews from her fans telling her she should 'do this professionally'. She didn't; because she is a coward and life as a digital designer, copywriter and coder is more dependable. But in the end, her husband's nagging wore her down: "You could be the next '50 Shades of Gray' and I could retire!" Unfortunately, the author isn't much for writing smut. She is sad about this; she'd love for her husband to be able to retire and just work for her so she could nag him.

At the moment, Ms. Gockel is working on the next installment of her Archangel Project series.

Ms. Gockel loves to hear from readers. She can be reached by email at: cgockel.publishing at gmail.com

Her Facebook page is: https://www.facebook.com/CGockelWrites

Reviews

[Tammie · Rating 4 out of 5]

My rating is for the story Starfall Station.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining space listening 🎶🔰

This is a free novel on Amazon. Oh those free books 📚 I love 💘 them!

A number of short stories will written by various authors. Each story is part of a series. Each story is different with interesting well developed characters lots of action and misdirection leading to each conclusion. As with multiple story books 📚 some of them you will like better than others but that is normal and personal. I would highly recommend this novel and various authors to readers of fantasy space opera adventure novels 👍🔰. 2023 👒😀😡😮

I have listened 🎶 to a number of the authors individually, series, and in box 📦sets. Happy reading 📚 and have fun 🌙😀.

I am still working on cleaning up ☝ the 2k+ stories on my kindle fire 🔥. Have a great week.

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I purchased this novel because of the contributions from Debra Dunbar and Pippa DaCosta, two of my favorite writers. Loved both stories. Can't judge the others as I haven't read the entire book, but from what I've read, this anthology gives you great value for your money.

[Faith Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Star Rebels: stories of space exploration, alien races and adventure" is a fairly good idea, with some imaginative high points that make it memorable. From a project construction point of view, I think the idea here was to give you tasters of a few long chapters from each of a series of middle-ranking sci-fi authors, to introduce their writing style and capacity for original ideas. You might read this and then want to buy the rest of their book or join their online following – or you might move along and be captivated more by the style of the next one. There’s sure to be something that appeals, although obviously you’ll have to dig for it.

Negatives? There were some overly extended sections where not a lot happened, or perhaps I failed to engage with sections of plot, but perhaps the editor didn’t feel confident enough to haul in the slack and upset any authors. After all, it must have been quite enough effort to bring all these writers together.

The best bits for me were:

A Tale of Two Ships, by Audrey Faye, right at the beginning and very unusual. This one did make me guess there’s plenty more good stuff still to come from this author’s universe.

Carl Sagan’s Hunt for Intelligent Life in the Universe, by C Gockel, a story where the smallest of creatures is not what it seems, as it holds power of which humans are ignorant. This is probably the deepest and most self-questioning short story in the collection, although how the author kept typing Hsissh without accidental variations, I’ll never know.

Passage Out, by Anthea Sharp, where a science fiction steampunk heroine makes good. Steampunk fans, this is for you.

Glome, by Kendra C. Highley, my favourite and placed toward the end, where colony ships travel through ‘glomes’ and emerge immense distances away – but watch out because the temporal context changes unexpectedly too. The character who persuades her to do wrong reminds me of someone.

Falling, by Pippa da Costa, although I had read and reviewed the full novel this was extracted from (Girl from Above) before I opened the anthology and maybe I added it because I received a double dose. The male character turns out to be a dick when you read the whole novel, but the short story is a good introduction to the writer.

In summary then, most collections of this many authors will inevitably have highs and lows. People also have different tastes, for example those that have already decided they love or hate squaddie sci-fi (only one in this set, thank god). There’s always one story which will cause you to read more by that author, then find yourself a month or two later scrabbling for their collected works. Then again, it’s often the case that the best half a dozen delicious stories carry the other people’s, which would struggle to be published if they didn’t have talented friends. As an average of all the contributions though, it’s in the middle – about a three or three and a half out of five – although some of the individual works are better than that and I don’t mean to insult those authors.

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're looking for a new sci-fi/space opera series to try out, this collection of 11 short stories, each set in a sci-fi universe explored more deeply in a series it accompanies, is a good start to see if anything grabs your attention. As is always the case with such anthologies, some of the stories were more, some less interesting to me. In addition to the Lindsay Buroker story, which I had already read but certainly enjoyed revisiting, the ones that intrigued me most and made me interested in reading more from each respective universe were Audrey Faye's A Tale of Two Ships and Christine Pope's Blood Ties.

[Joan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A cracking good collection of space stories. None too long, none too short and several 5 star ones in the mix.

I enjoyed pretty nearly all of them and found more than one 'new-to-me' author whose style I enjoyed.

4.5 stars rounded up.

[Kathrine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read Lindsay Burokers story ♥ loved hearing this story from leonardises pov ♥

[Stan Hutchings · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even the stories I liked least were pretty good, and the stories I liked best were great. Certainly worth reading.
After reading "A Tale of Two Ships" I bought "Destiny's Song.
After reading "Carl Sagan's Hunt for Intelligent Life in the Universe" again, I decided to read "Starship Waking", since I've already read "Archangel Down", and I was reminded what a good story-teller C. Gockel is.
"Blood Ties" is apparently a prequel to "Blood Will Tell". It's a kind of dark, sad story about a young programmer stuck on a backwoods planet with dreams of getting out.
"Passage Out" is a Victoria Eternal story, a steampunk tale about a young girl longing for the stars but finding her skills are of more use on the earth.
"Arcturus 5" featured three groups of aliens: arbitrators, disreputable finders-keepers scavengers and complainants of piracy by the scavengers. The outcome of the investigation was surprising.
"Treason's Course", as one can guess from the title, is about misplaced trust and loyalties.
"Falling" explores the relationship between a for-hire criminal on the lam and a hot-shot pilot running contraband in competition with the mob. He's hired to kill her to collect his bounty, but the best laid plans go oft awry.
“Starfall Station" takes place between Books 2 and 3 of the Fallen Empire series. Leonidas and Alisa have an adventure that brings them closer to understanding each other.
"Luminescence" has researchers in a remote station on Titan dealing with a medical emergency far from base. Back at the base, it turns the medical emergency was triggered by a massive information transfer that has disrupted the base electronics and created a genius.
"Glome" tracks the first manned trip through a cosmic phenomenon called a glome. The crew and colonists get a big surprise in a message recorded on Earth to be played on their arrival. They, along with the other 11 colonizing vessels, hold the future of Mankind.
"Unfinished" by Kendra C. Highley is a fascinating story of two genetically engineered humans, a boy and a girl, who find that their being engineered doesn't mean they cannot feel human emotions strongly, including anger and hatred as well as love.

[Dtsuneo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great story-telling, flawed writing

The drama, excitement, and plot twists were excellent, but the reader experience was dampened by various writers’ inattention to writing as a craft. Because the sloppy proofreading and editing were consistent within individual works and inconsistent across works, I’m guessing that no one felt responsible for quality control of the entire volume.
Troublesome is a general ignorance of the difference between the past tense and a past participle (shrank not shrunk, sank not sunk). Add the lack of understanding of “to lay” and “to lie” (transitive versus intransitive) and the grammatical naïveté becomes clearer. Other irritations abound.
Even more annoying are the spelling errors which are not typos. People fasten their hands with grips like sin (vice) rather than a tool (vise). “Affect” and “effect” seem interchangeable in both noun and verb forms.
Pronoun case (objective versus subjective) seems arcane knowledge for several writers, who produce, for example, “for he and I” instead of “for him and me.”
And punctuation rules are apparently mysterious, particularly comma usage (e.g., an embedded appositive phrase must be bound by commas; the name of a person being addressed in a direct quote must be set off by a comma). Quotation marks, hyphenation, colons, semicolons, em dashes versus hyphens, etc., are often used erroneously.
And all those dangling participial phrases…oy.
All these glitches disrupt the reader experience by preventing continued immersion in the story being told. Most of the stories in this anthology are compelling, yet marred by technical faults as small as one letter that changes word meaning or a missing comma.
Future respect and responsibility to the reader will, I hope, be more manifest.

[K. Lincoln · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with most anthologies, this is a mixed bag. As a straight-up read for pleasure, it might not be exactly what you're looking for. Most of the stories lead towards bigger, more complete stories for each author.

If you're looking to browse a variety of authors, this is perfect. You get a taste of what kind of story you're in for before committing to an entire novel.

For me, the two stand out stories were known-to-me-already Patty Jansen's Luminescence and new-to-me James Wells' Glome.

Patty Jansen's story about an artificial human on Titan with her human partner who encounters a strange sphere hits all the right spots for my personal taste: believable futuristic technology helping human habitat, social justice issues, and a mystery. I would totally go and read more about the future she's created and how artificial humans and humans work out their issues. But I kind of already knew that since I've read and enjoyed Jansen's fantasy stories before.

James Well's Glome was super cool to me in the way really scientifically thorough depictions of space travel (in this story one way condensed space holes called Glomes) that feature protagonists with relatable conflicts can be. There's more than meets the eye to protagonist Amanda's worries about colonizing new planets and contacting Earth.

I'm also an Anthea Sharp fan, but felt the story of street rats breaking into a space station in her Victoria Eternal World didn't quite peak my interest enough for me to follow up. I go to science fiction for the coolness factor, and most of this story centered on social injustice and kind of futuristic steampunkery.

But for those looking for new science fiction series to start, I recommend this anthology. It has a nice variety from romance-heavy to science-heavy stories to choose from.

[Snotnose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Getting used to the whole Kindle/goodreads universe (got my Kindle late Feb/Early Mar 2018). I finished this book a couple weeks back so don't have good memories of the stories in it. Most anthologies have a lot of average stories, a few who's author I plan to look up, and 1 or 2 that were "you're joking, right?". For this book there were 2-3 authors I added to my "peeps to read" list and I think only 1 "yeah, I'll never get that time back" list.

I view anthologies in 2 ways. First, best $GENRE story of $TIME_PERIOD. Second, best of what we have to offer in hopes you'll find something you'll like and buy more. This book is firmly in the latter category, and if you're searching out new Science Fiction authors this should be on your best buy list.

Not giving it 5 stars cuz, well, it's an anthology. The whole point of an anthology is to throw a bunch of stuff against a wall and hope more stuff sticks than slides. This book succeeded in that, but still had sliders. That said, the stories in this book are all good enough that your sliders could very well be my slider.

[Roxie Klinksiek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic collection

This was a wonderful collection of stories. All of them were well written and riveting stories. Some I liked more than others but overall they were all interesting. My favorites were the stories written by Lindsay Buroker, DaCosta, Faye, Gockel, Highley, Pope, and Wells. These stories touched me emotionally or kept me thinking about them even after I finished reading them. If you like well written and thoughtful science fkction you will like this book.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Whitman’s sampler of Space Opera and science fiction, Star Rebels is a good anthology of authors and series. If you are thinking of stating a new series, this is a great way to decide. It is tempting to review each story individually , but it would be better if you read them all and then decided on your favorite universe. For me, Christina Pope, Anthea Sharp, Pippa Dicosta, James Wells, and the final author, Kendra Highley are all going on my follow list

[Debra Wenskovitch · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has been a long time since I have read a collection of short stories. I enjoyed the book, however, it was more like reading excerpts from novels rather than a short story. I always felt like I was dropped into the middle of a sci-fi universe that I didn't know much about and them left hanging at the end. It was a fun book that introduced me to the writing style of several authors though, so it was worth the time I put into reading it.

[William Bentrim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Star Rebels by Lindsay Buroker
This is a series of short stories. I’m not fond of short stories, I like something to sink my teeth into and short stories are not long enough to feed my scifi urge. These are pretty good though. The three I enjoyed the most were Passage Out by Anthea Sharp, Blood Ties by Christine Pope, and Carl Sagan’s Hunt for Intelligent Life in the Universe. A Tale of Two Ships might have made the top three but it was too short. Just as I became invested it was over. There are some excellent authors in this collection, and it is worth reading.

[Jenny Koch · Rating 2 out of 5]

As with all anthologies, there were some ups and some downs.

Some of the decent enough reads included:
1. Passage Out
2. Arturus 5
3. Luminescense
4. Glome

I rather liked Falling and Unfinished enough to want to read more from the authors. Also, Starfall Station by Lindsay Buroker is a story I've already read (and thoroughly enjoyed).

[Barry Edstene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great collection, if you love a good short story you may be a bit disappointed because most were just a glimpse of a series to come. The writing was crisp, the stories were great but now I need follow all of these great charecter's to the end. Writing great SciFi is a gift. Reading great SciFi may be a curse. We never get done.

[liberchiropter · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Tale of Two Ships: 3,5 stars
Carl Sagan's Hunt for Intelligent Life in the Universe: 3,5 stars
Blood Ties: 3,5 stars
Passage Out: 3,5 stars
Arcturus 5: 4 stars
Treason's Course: 2,5 stars
Falling: 1 star
Starfall Station: 3,5 stars
Luminescence: 2 stars
Glome: 3 stars
Unfinished: 4 stars

[Kyra Halland · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not a big science fiction reader though I enjoy dabbling in it sometimes, and this anthology of prequels, character back stories, and side stories was a fun way to dip my toes in without committing to one long book. I enjoyed all the stories, and was even intrigued enough by some of them to download samples of the series they're associated with.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

An anthology of short stories setting up universes for sci-fi series. There is something for anyone in the anthology, some stories form an appetite for more on characters while others one can essentially just leave as short stories. The book offers the reader tastes of what the individual authors have to offer. Read through and find authors to follow.

[Marianne Boutet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating for "Starfall Station" by Lindsay Buroker - hah! An add-on after Honor's Flight. Finally, we have a POV from Leonidas. Alisa (who is with him for this story) would be happy to know that he isn't completely unaware of her as a woman. Woot, woot!

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each of these stories provides an engaging glimpse into a sci-fi universe. From a scrapper's rig to AI's raised from childhood to leaping into a strange new world, well, these stories cover a myriad of wonders. Obviously some stars shine a bit brighter than others but none of these stories are a black dwarf. Come on in. You will find a universe you want to explore!

[Preston Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good way to browse new authors.
This is mostly prequels with a blurb to try and get you interested in the longer series. Considering the price, seems like a fair way to sample a lot of authors in a genre I love to see if I want to read more.
If you are looking for great stand alone stories I would give this 3 stars.

[Mark J. McArthur · Rating 4 out of 5]

great science fiction anthology!

This is a collection of short stories and novellas from some great authors of science fiction. Not a stinker in the collection, all are exciting reads, that pull you along long after you should put down your reading for the night.

I received a no cost copy of this book and am voluntarily leaving this review.

[Eunice · Rating 5 out of 5]

good selection to find your next fav author

Very pleased to see two familiar short stories I have enjoyed in such good company.
Engaging, entertaining, educational (learning so much about interstellar travel using different sciences is great) And all thoroughly believable make these a must read.

[Ken Whiting · Rating 5 out of 5]

prequels

I really like this idea of bundling prequels as a way of introducing series. Even better than an anthology of book one’s because you get the intro and the background! They tend to be shorter - sometimes a bit too short. This group also includes some non-prequels but I would recommend this book - especially for someone new to sci-fi series reading.

[Clinton Robert Oberholster · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gripping read

But for one story falling short, this book is an excellent read and a beautiful collection of stories introducing many brilliant authors and their own series of books.
Overall a worthy investment of time and money and a wonderful addition to any sci-fi library.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked these stories, and each one made me want to join the author's list to find more of their work. I found them all original, well written, and different viewpoints for the theme of caring for someone, sometimes for good, other times not so much. A worthwhile read! 5/5 on Goodreads

[Thomas Steffen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mixed stories and results.

Mixed stories...and results is usual for compilations. This one has some action, some characters, some science, and was a fun read. The authors have glimpses of there the and work which have good indications of whether to pursue the next book.

[Janet Wild · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great mix of SFI stories

Really enjoyed the selection of stories there are some hints about further stories from the authors. Make good addition to the wish list for birthday and Christmast