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The Dakotaraptor Riders #1
Incursion
Looking for a thrilling tale with lesbian dakotaraptor riders, were-brachiosaurs, Slavic witches, triceratops cowboys, carnivorous cacti, and invaders with machine guns mounted on deathreaper tyrannosaurs?
If you’ve been looking for a series like that, Stant Litore has your back. In Incursion, join Sasha Nightwatcher and her wife Yekaterina on a wild dash across the violet prairie to save their alien homeworld.
REVIEWS:
"Straight for the heart and delightfully weird." - Joseph Brassey, author of Skyfarer and Dragon Road
"Stant Litore's work blends an array of singular characters, prehistoric creatures, and an imaginative landscape into a dazzling vision, The Wild Wild West meets Jurassic Park meets Sucker Punch - but beautifully weirder, exploring a frontier that is at once alien and yet familiarly human. His writing is deft and delivers, drawing a perfect balance between the real and the fantastic, whisking you away on a fast-paced journey with characters you will feel deeply for. Mythical and marvelous, this is storytelling at its very best." - Samuel Peralta, The Future Chronicles
"Stant Litore's Incursion brings a new and fantastic universe alive, packed with vivid characters and colossal beasts - yet amidst the story's intense action and swirling dilemmas, he never loses sight of his raison d'être: the power of human connection." - Richard Ellis Preston, Jr., author of Romulus Buckle and the City of the Founders
"A story that charges as hard at the heart as the fierce, raptor-riding heroines whose passion and mission make Incursion a deeply satisfying read. I can't wait for the next book in what promises to be a much larger tale." - James van Pelt, author of Pandora's Gun
"Masterful worldbuilding, immersive prose, and authentic characters create a tale of adventure and love you won't want to put down." - L. J. Hachmeister, author of Triorion
"An exuberant romp filled with dinosaurs and colorful characters, brimming with Litore's trademark big heart. It also carries shades of Anne McCaffrey's Pern, and is sure to please any lover of interplanetary adventure." - Travis Heermann, author of The Ronin Trilogy and The Shinjuku Shadows Trilogy
"Stant Litore has created a story about a fascinating world with brilliant characters, superb action, and a mystery I want to read more about. Also dinosaurs. Lots of dinosaurs." - Steve McHugh, author of The Hellequin Chronicles
"In these dark days, we need reminders of what makes us human: community and song, collaboration, story and hope. The Dakotaraptor Riders gives us those reminders. Woven onto the warp and weft of a rich folklore that feels completely authentic, and yet contains threads that will make contemporary folklorists grin, this tale of clashing philosophies, racing dakotaraptors, and abiding love is a salve for a wounded soul. It reminds us not only that the fight can be won, but that the fight is worth waging against the forces of destruction, of cruelty and colonialism. This book is The Dark Is Rising for science fiction. Read it, and let it braid your frayed threads whole again." - O.E. Tearmann, author of The Hands We're Given
If you’ve been looking for a series like that, Stant Litore has your back. In Incursion, join Sasha Nightwatcher and her wife Yekaterina on a wild dash across the violet prairie to save their alien homeworld.
REVIEWS:
"Straight for the heart and delightfully weird." - Joseph Brassey, author of Skyfarer and Dragon Road
"Stant Litore's work blends an array of singular characters, prehistoric creatures, and an imaginative landscape into a dazzling vision, The Wild Wild West meets Jurassic Park meets Sucker Punch - but beautifully weirder, exploring a frontier that is at once alien and yet familiarly human. His writing is deft and delivers, drawing a perfect balance between the real and the fantastic, whisking you away on a fast-paced journey with characters you will feel deeply for. Mythical and marvelous, this is storytelling at its very best." - Samuel Peralta, The Future Chronicles
"Stant Litore's Incursion brings a new and fantastic universe alive, packed with vivid characters and colossal beasts - yet amidst the story's intense action and swirling dilemmas, he never loses sight of his raison d'être: the power of human connection." - Richard Ellis Preston, Jr., author of Romulus Buckle and the City of the Founders
"A story that charges as hard at the heart as the fierce, raptor-riding heroines whose passion and mission make Incursion a deeply satisfying read. I can't wait for the next book in what promises to be a much larger tale." - James van Pelt, author of Pandora's Gun
"Masterful worldbuilding, immersive prose, and authentic characters create a tale of adventure and love you won't want to put down." - L. J. Hachmeister, author of Triorion
"An exuberant romp filled with dinosaurs and colorful characters, brimming with Litore's trademark big heart. It also carries shades of Anne McCaffrey's Pern, and is sure to please any lover of interplanetary adventure." - Travis Heermann, author of The Ronin Trilogy and The Shinjuku Shadows Trilogy
"Stant Litore has created a story about a fascinating world with brilliant characters, superb action, and a mystery I want to read more about. Also dinosaurs. Lots of dinosaurs." - Steve McHugh, author of The Hellequin Chronicles
"In these dark days, we need reminders of what makes us human: community and song, collaboration, story and hope. The Dakotaraptor Riders gives us those reminders. Woven onto the warp and weft of a rich folklore that feels completely authentic, and yet contains threads that will make contemporary folklorists grin, this tale of clashing philosophies, racing dakotaraptors, and abiding love is a salve for a wounded soul. It reminds us not only that the fight can be won, but that the fight is worth waging against the forces of destruction, of cruelty and colonialism. This book is The Dark Is Rising for science fiction. Read it, and let it braid your frayed threads whole again." - O.E. Tearmann, author of The Hands We're Given
369 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 1, 2021
5 people are currently reading
23 people want to read
About the author
Stant Litore
49 books216 followersStant Litore is the author of Ansible, The Running of the Tyrannosaurs, The Zombie Bible, and Dante’s Heart. Besides science fiction and fantasy, he has written the writers’ toolkits Write Worlds Your Readers Won’t Forget and Write Characters Your Readers Won’t Forget, as well as Lives of Unstoppable Hope and Lives of Unforgetting, and has been featured in Jeff Vandermeer’s Wonderbook: An Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction. He has served as a developmental editor for Westmarch Publishing and holds a Ph.D. in English. He lives in Aurora, Colorado with his wife and three children and is currently at work on his next novel.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 12, 2022
HIGHLIGHTS
~purple grass
~dinosaurs!
~guns = clocks
~warrior-women riding dakotaraptors
~lassos are sexy
~there are bad guys coming out of the sky
I wasn’t a dino-fan as a kid – I got bitten by the Ancient Egypt bug instead – but it would take a stronger person than myself to resist ‘sapphic raptor-riding warriors kicking ass on a purple planet’. HI YES THANK YOU, I’LL TAKE TEN!
Incursion more than delivers on its promises. Written in first-person present-tense from the perspective of Sasha, a Nightwatcher of the Humming People, this is an introspective but still quick-paced adventure story, and the only thing wrong with it is that there’s no sequel yet!
The planet Peace is far from the world we know, in more ways than mere distance: the grass is purple, the sky delivers an unpredictable and deadly ‘red rain’, and whatever native wildlife once existed have been replaced by…dinosaurs.
I know it sounds silly. The thing is, it isn’t.
Whimsical, yes – there are definitely elements of the worldbuilding that are wonderful and make you smile, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that; especially since Litore is very careful to make it all fit together. Even though Incursion features multiple cultures and points of view coming into contact (and sometimes conflict), it doesn’t feel like a jumble. Nor do the elements of the book feel random and disjointed – dinosaurs, spaceships, and clocks sound like they couldn’t possibly all go together in any cohesive way, but in Litore’s hands, they absolutely do!
The Humming People are one of the many societies living on planet Peace; descended from a long-ago Founder who brought her people here from another world entirely. The Founder was the one to populate the planet with lab-grown dinosaurs, and the only mammals around seem to be the terrifying hyaenodons – once-real animals that lived on our world roughly 42 million years ago.
Protecting the Humming People from hyaenadons and other threats are the Nightwatchers, extremely badass women who ride raptors raised by hand from the egg, wielding kopyes – think double-bladed lightsabres – with deadly precision. Nightwatchers must run far and fast, in tightly-knit packs, to guard their semi-nomadic people, fighting off slavers and dangerous fauna, and always on the lookout for the red rain.
The main character Sasha is one of these Nightwatchers, and so is her wife Yekaterina (aka Katya). But they don’t hold quite the same position in their pack – because while Katya is from a strong, widespread family, Sasha is the last of her line. And to the Humming People – who value community over all – that makes her a ‘weak strap.’ A family is many lives braided together, but Sasha is a single one, an individual alone. Braided rope holds under pressure, but a single strand will snap. So how can Sasha’s pack depend on her?
Awareness of her pack’s dubious uncertainty about her is definitely one of the reasons Sasha is so quick to separate from the group, running off with her raptor and her wife to patrol apart from their pack. There’s nothing very odd about this – the Nightwatchers aren’t a strict, regimented military unit; they have a great deal of individual freedom, and so long as Sasha and Katya are at the meet-up point days from now, no one minds.
But they run straight into a very unexpected…adventure.
Read the rest at Every Book a Doorway!
~purple grass
~dinosaurs!
~guns = clocks
~warrior-women riding dakotaraptors
~lassos are sexy
~there are bad guys coming out of the sky
I wasn’t a dino-fan as a kid – I got bitten by the Ancient Egypt bug instead – but it would take a stronger person than myself to resist ‘sapphic raptor-riding warriors kicking ass on a purple planet’. HI YES THANK YOU, I’LL TAKE TEN!
Incursion more than delivers on its promises. Written in first-person present-tense from the perspective of Sasha, a Nightwatcher of the Humming People, this is an introspective but still quick-paced adventure story, and the only thing wrong with it is that there’s no sequel yet!
The planet Peace is far from the world we know, in more ways than mere distance: the grass is purple, the sky delivers an unpredictable and deadly ‘red rain’, and whatever native wildlife once existed have been replaced by…dinosaurs.
I know it sounds silly. The thing is, it isn’t.
Whimsical, yes – there are definitely elements of the worldbuilding that are wonderful and make you smile, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that; especially since Litore is very careful to make it all fit together. Even though Incursion features multiple cultures and points of view coming into contact (and sometimes conflict), it doesn’t feel like a jumble. Nor do the elements of the book feel random and disjointed – dinosaurs, spaceships, and clocks sound like they couldn’t possibly all go together in any cohesive way, but in Litore’s hands, they absolutely do!
The Humming People are one of the many societies living on planet Peace; descended from a long-ago Founder who brought her people here from another world entirely. The Founder was the one to populate the planet with lab-grown dinosaurs, and the only mammals around seem to be the terrifying hyaenodons – once-real animals that lived on our world roughly 42 million years ago.
Protecting the Humming People from hyaenadons and other threats are the Nightwatchers, extremely badass women who ride raptors raised by hand from the egg, wielding kopyes – think double-bladed lightsabres – with deadly precision. Nightwatchers must run far and fast, in tightly-knit packs, to guard their semi-nomadic people, fighting off slavers and dangerous fauna, and always on the lookout for the red rain.
The main character Sasha is one of these Nightwatchers, and so is her wife Yekaterina (aka Katya). But they don’t hold quite the same position in their pack – because while Katya is from a strong, widespread family, Sasha is the last of her line. And to the Humming People – who value community over all – that makes her a ‘weak strap.’ A family is many lives braided together, but Sasha is a single one, an individual alone. Braided rope holds under pressure, but a single strand will snap. So how can Sasha’s pack depend on her?
Awareness of her pack’s dubious uncertainty about her is definitely one of the reasons Sasha is so quick to separate from the group, running off with her raptor and her wife to patrol apart from their pack. There’s nothing very odd about this – the Nightwatchers aren’t a strict, regimented military unit; they have a great deal of individual freedom, and so long as Sasha and Katya are at the meet-up point days from now, no one minds.
But they run straight into a very unexpected…adventure.
Read the rest at Every Book a Doorway!
February 18, 2021
This book pulled me in and didn't let me go until I finished it. A fun concept, an emotionally-rich story, action and more action make this a great tale. On a world distant from humanity's birthplace on Earth, peril stalks the prairie and falls out of the sky. The Nightwatchers, mounted on raptor back, guard their community against ever present danger. When Sasha Nightwatcher and her wife Katya, on their way to rendezvous with their sister Nightwatchers, find a murdered woman, they follow the trail to her killer. They gain an unlikely ally and find the most dangerous enemy they have ever faced. Sasha, heavily burdened by the ghosts from her past and overflowing with stories, is uncertain of her place in the world. This chapter in her life explores universal questions: How do we fit in? What makes us who we are? Who are our people, our family? My main quibble with the story is that it left me wanting more, more stories about the characters and their world, and more of the story at hand. The cliffhanger ending ensures I will read the next installment as soon as it is released. If you like stories with dinosaurs, strong women, Slavic mythology, or settlers in hard places, this is a book for you.
March 21, 2022
This is nothing but a fuck novel with dinosaurs. So many hands held, sweet kisses, pounding hearts, burning thighs, etc., etc., etc. A male-written hot and horny, can’t keep their hands off each other lesbian novel, which seriously creeps me out.
Strip out the sex and this would be a much slimmer book. And much less creepy for being written by a man.
Strip out the sex and this would be a much slimmer book. And much less creepy for being written by a man.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews