Armistice

The Inlari Sagas

by M.J. Kelley, Woelf Dietrich, Dana Leipold

Long ago, the aliens known as the inlaris lost their home world in a devastating attack. They traveled for eons searching for a new home. But their new home, Earth, was already taken. At first inlaris and humans brokered deals bringing Earth into a new golden age of collaboration. The golden age didn’t last long...

From hopeful stories of first contact and alien teamwork to tales of post-apocalyptic survival and brutal interspecies conflict, these narratives portray startling snapshots of peace and war with an intensity that only very short fiction can convey. Each author’s unique stories enrich the shared, singular vision of the Inlari Sagas.

This collection precedes the Interspecies Series—volumes of full-length stories—and presents 20 tales spanning the years of the inlaris arrival on Earth, the golden era, the Great War that eventually followed, and the interspecies conflicts that still rattle the world in the aftermath.

97 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 9, 2016

About the author

In 2015, I formed a team of authors, and we collaborated to create a shared-world, one where our stories could coexist and intersect in a single epic science fiction saga. We established Kōsa Press, LLC to produce the series, hired an editorial team, and commissioned famed Polish sci-fi and fantasy painter, Piotr Foksowicz, to paint the cover. Interspecies Volume 1 is the first shared-world anthology of a planned total of four in the series.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand nominated my co-author Woelf Dietrich's story "Babylon's Song," which appears in Interspecies, for the 2017 Sir Julius Vogel Award, Best Novella, one of New Zealand's most prestigious honors for speculative fiction. This year we published a prequel book to this series titled Armistice, and we're currently hard at work on Interspecies Volume 2.

Prior to this sci-fi project, my literary short fiction has appeared in various journals, including the Berkeley Fiction Review, the Porter Gulch Review, and NANO Fiction. In January 2017, I was humbled to have my short story "Victor Mula's Earth Dream" published in the popular anthology series, The Future Chronicles. I also offer my services as a developmental fiction editor and writing coach and have been helping authors and new writers realize their highest writing potential for over fifteen years.

Reviews

[Deanne Charlton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Armistice: The Inlari Sagas Book 0

This book should not work, yet it does so—beautifully. The 20 stories by 4 authors involve characters that rarely show up even as mentions in more than one chapter. Even so, they weave silently throughout the rest of the tales, giving readers a fully rendered world, and together the stories are one overarching adventure in understanding that everyone is shaped by experience and circumstance.

The characters, whether human or inlari, experience many emotions and circumstances. They are heroic, flawed, despondent, optimistic, proud, curious, presumptive, frightened, spiritual, avaricious, pregnant, intuitive, bigoted, crossbred, pure blooded, tattooed, and horned. They are slaves, masters, children, explorers, stalkers, diplomats, berserkers, soldiers, scientists, searchers, and spirits. They suffer and benefit from hardships, kindness, injustice, epiphanies, ironies, and every type of loss.

I appreciated the preceding book Interspecies as an introduction to tattered Earth’s interactions with the inlari. The longer stories set the stage for the shorter works in Armistice to shine. There is plenty of sci-fi at its best in Armistice, the kind that creates a multiple POV lens focused on humanity with all its frailties, strengths, and perseverance. The mangled diplomacy and tangled cultures speak to our fears; the mingled hearts stay with us long after the book is closed.

[Brian Stampfl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is wild. What I thought would be a series of distinctly different stories, written by four authors, turned out to be something much more. While the stories are separate of each other, they are so well connected. The authors must have worked together to ensure that the environments, the emotions, and the struggles between the humans and the inlari were consistent. It reads like one big story with multiple characters and scenes.

The descriptions of the environments and the characters were amazing. I was able to immerse myself into the fictitious world and see the characters and their environments so clearly. I was also fascinated with how the authors were able to address all the highly probable social issues between the inlari and the humans such as prejudice, cross-breading, hatred, love, hope, war, power, government and industry. They did so in a manner that wasn't political or preachy, but just a fact of the situation these characters were placed in.

This book is quite fascinating and well written. It suspenseful at times, violent at others, and on a few occasions will make you pause before moving onto the next story as you realize that the future is not so different from the present.