Locations featured in The Lancer:

Baho District
Pop: 562,000
Regional Governor: Tak Marcas
Insurgent factions: Zeta Dawn

EastSec District
Pop: 740,000
Regional Governor: Lovva Shiri
Insurgent factions: X-10 Rebels

Salvage Sector
Pop: n/a

Exill District
Pop: 853,000
Regional Governor: Jed Wills
Insurgent factions: BTU Bloc / Phoenix Brigade

So, I wrote a novelette. Slapping such a delicate-sounding label to this gritty sci-fi story doesn’t feel right, but it is what it is. A very few of you may remember my play BURNERS, produced in Los Angeles in 2017. The play was set in a future where “a resistance movement rising from the slums of the impoverished masses fights back against high-tech drones and genetically enhanced soldiers using burners; humans bio-engineered to become living bombs.”

This year I returned to the dark, dystopian, techno-authoritarian world of BURNERS (as if we don’t get enough of that shit irl). There were more stories I wanted to tell, other characters to explore, layers of the world that were only touched on in the play.

THE LANCER is the first of three short stories I’m writing set in that world, each featuring a different cast of characters. Writing prose is kind of a new thing for me, and a fairly big leap from writing scripts for theater and TV. But it also and freed me to really explore this world without worrying about budgets, cast size and other production challenges.

If you read on Kindle, it’s available for under a buck (or free if you do Kindle Unlimited). And for the OGs, there’s a paperback version as well. If you like it, it’d mean the world to me if you left a rating or review (and the algorithm digs it).

Serialized chapters of THE BEACON will be rolling out on this site. It features different characters but takes place in the same timeline as THE LANCER. There’s some overlap with big-picture events, but you don’t have to read the stories in any particular order.

Peace! — Terence