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Lord of the Slaves: A Short Story
"Everyone secretly wants to be a slave. Those who deny it simply haven't found the right master."
With those words, Tamara finds herself plunged into a dark and treacherous world where she must question everything she thought she knew in order to restore her faith in humanity. Determined to rescue her sister from brutal slavery, she must decide carefully whom she can trust, because everyone has their own agenda—and not every slave wants to be free.
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Captive of the Falconstar is Published!
Captive of the Falconstar
When freedom is a fantasy, only revenge is real.
Sonya has lost everything to the Hameji raiders who carried her off across the stars. To make matters worse, her only friend has become a Hameji queen and treats her as a pawn. As rival brides scheme to bear the firstborn son and heir, Sonya is drawn into a ruthless world of power, secrets, and sex. But if she can survive the role she has been forced to play, she may finally have the chance to bring her captors to their knees.
About the Book
When freedom is a fantasy, only revenge is real.
Sonya has lost her home, her name, and her freedom to the Hameji raiders who carried her off across the stars. Her only friend has remade herself as a Hameji queen—and now treats Sonya as just another pawn in her desperate game for power.
Sonya tells herself that all she wants is to escape. But beneath that hope burns a hunger for revenge.
When Lord Khasan takes a second bride to secure a powerful alliance, the women of the Falconstar are drawn into a ruthless contest to produce the firstborn son and heir. As rival queens scheme for position and an old blood feud erupts into war, Sonya is pulled into a world where a woman’s worth is measured by the sons she bears, the favors she can trade, and the secrets she can exploit.
In the ruthless game of Hameji politics, captivity takes many forms. And if Sonya can survive the role she has been forced to play, she may finally have the chance to bring her captors to their knees.
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New shelves!
I hope you had a great 250th fourth of July! We had a bunch of family in town, so things were kind of crazy all last week. Then, on Monday and Tuesday, I buckled down and finally finished the ongoing home improvement project I’ve been working on for the last couple of months: installing new shelves in my basement office / writing den!
Those shelves are just common 10″x1″ pine board, bought at the local home depot. They each span 11’2″, which is the length of the wall. I sanded them down and stained them, then installed them all on shelving brackets that we bought on Amazon. Each bracket pair is rated for 100 lbs, so it may have been overkill to get three pair per shelf, but this way I don’t have to worry about the kids hurting themselves by doing something stupid like trying to climb up the shelves while I’m gone.
Total materials cost for the project was around $560. It would have been cheaper just to buy the BILLY shelves at Ikea, but from what I can tell from the recent online ratings, they’ve been using cheaper materials in order to keep the cost low, so nowadays those selves only have a lifespan of about a year. A new set of higher quality premade shelves would have been around $800 at Home Depot, so I figured it was better just to build them myself.
It feels so good to have all of our family’s books up and available to browse! Ever since we moved back into our Orem house, they’ve been sitting in boxes in the spare bedroom in the basement, taking up space. But with the way our family’s growing, we’ve been needing to get that de facto storage room set up as a girl’s bedroom. So the books needed to find a new home.
Next step: fix up the basement bathroom, and install a desk light in the spare bedroom, so that our oldest can move downstairs. I also want to get an easy chair, to turn this writing den into a reading nook. If we bring in a desk or an easel for the other side, we can use this room for homeschooling, too. It would be really convenient to be able to work on my writing while my daughter is in the other corner, working on schoolwork.
So yeah, things are taking shape very nicely. As far as the writing goes, I’m working hard on Lord of the Falconstar now, trying to get as far into it as I can before my wife goes back to full-time work. She goes back into the office next Monday, so I really need to buckle down and make as much headway as I can.
The Righteous Violence of In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight
Can violence ever be righteous? That is the central question behind In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight, a religious science fiction story about vigilante justice, human trafficking, corrupt empires, and the terrible cost of refusing to compromise with evil.
Zedekiah Wight is not a safe hero, and he is not meant to be. He is a prophetic privateer in a fallen galaxy, a man whose enemies call him a pirate, a terrorist, and a madman—but whose violence is aimed at the powerful men and institutions that have made themselves untouchable.
Where the Idea Came From
The idea for Zedekiah Wight came partly from my love of Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane stories, and partly from my frustration with the lies, hypocrisy, and gaslighting of the modern world. I wanted to take the idea of the grim, scripture-haunted avenger and put him in a far-future space opera setting: a galaxy of corrupt governments, predatory banks, human traffickers, decadent elites, and ordinary people who have learned to look away. Zedekiah became my answer to that world—a man who refuses to call evil good, even when everyone else does.
How Righteous Violence Shapes the Story
In In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight, righteous violence is not clean, polite, or comfortable. The story begins with Captain Victor Andrecek and his crew discovering crucified bodies drifting through space in EVA suits, each one fixed to a repurposed missile and marked with scriptural warnings from Isaiah. At first, Zedekiah appears monstrous: a religious madman leaving medieval punishments in the middle of a high-tech galaxy.
But as the story unfolds, Andrecek begins to see that Zedekiah’s violence is not random cruelty. Zedekiah does not kill ordinary crewmen for convenience. He does not murder indiscriminately for loot. His targets are the people responsible for trafficking, corruption, slavery, and institutional evil—the crime lords, financiers, and powerful collaborators who profit from human suffering while hiding behind layers of respectability.
That distinction matters. The story is not asking readers to enjoy violence for its own sake. It is asking what justice looks like when every official channel has been compromised. When Andrecek discovers that the sealed cargo he nearly smuggled was actually a shipment of cryofrozen slave girls, the moral center of the story snaps into focus. Zedekiah’s crusade is brutal because the evil he fights is brutal. His violence is terrifying because the system he opposes has made peaceful accountability impossible.
And yet, the story also draws a hard line between justice and revenge. When Andrecek finally has Saif Al-Da’ib in his hands, he wants to kill him out of rage, guilt, and hatred. Zedekiah stops him. “Revenge is not justice” becomes the key to the whole theme. Righteous violence is not anger baptized by a good cause. It must be restrained by moral purpose, aimed at the guilty, and guarded against the soul-destroying pleasure of bloodshed.
What Righteous Violence Says About Us
The theme of righteous violence resonates because most of us know, deep down, that evil is not always defeated by polite systems and respectable institutions. Sometimes the people who write the laws are the ones breaking them. Sometimes the people who claim to protect the innocent are the ones selling them. In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight gives voice to the anger we feel when justice is delayed, denied, or inverted—but it also warns that anger alone is not enough. If justice becomes revenge, the avenger risks becoming another monster in a galaxy already full of them.
Why This Theme Matters to Me
This theme matters to me because I believe there comes a time when the lies, hypocrisy, and gaslighting become too much to bear. At some point, a person has to take a stand. Zedekiah Wight is that stand for me. He is politically incorrect, scripture-soaked, uncompromising, and dangerous—but he is also a man who sees evil clearly and refuses to make peace with it. In a world where so many people are pressured to stay quiet, look away, or call darkness light, I wanted to write a character who does not flinch.
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Return to the book page for In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight.
And you thought fantasy names were hard…
“In a universe gone mad…”
In a universe gone mad, where evil was good and good evil—where truth was treason, democracy was empire, and slavery was the price of freedom—who else could be right but one whom everyone called a madman?
From In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight by Joe Vasicek
How I Would Vote Now: 2004 Hugo Award (Best Novel)
The Nominees
Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold
Humans by Robert J. Sawyer
Ilium by Dan Simmons
Singularity Sky by Charles Stross
Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson
The Actual Results
- Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold
- Ilium by Dan Simmons
- Singularity Sky by Charles Stross
- Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson
- Humans by Robert J. Sawyer
How I Would Have Voted
- Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson
Explanation
This was a decent year for science fiction (though I have to say, Fitzpatrick’s War came out in 2004, and it never got nominated for a Hugo at all, even though it’s far superior to any of the books that were nominated in 2004 or 2005). With that said, there’s really only one book on this ballot that I can positively vote for, and even that one isn’t Robert Charles Wilson’s best work.
I found it difficult to get into Paladin of Souls as a standalone, so I decided to start with the first book of the series. And I was enjoying it a lot, until midway through when the main character casually talks about how he was sexually initiated by a pederast, as the boy in a man-boy-love relationship. And while yes, I know that the ancient Greeks engaged in that sort of pederasty and though it was totally normal… but I don’t. So even though it was more of a passing worldbuilding detail, I decided to take a page out of that old 80s cockroach Mormonad and DNF the book:
That’s the thing about Louis McMaster Bujold: she’s a really great writer, and knows how to tell a really great story, but she also has a penchant for weird sexual stuff, which she indulges in by worldbuilding a culture that finds it totally normal. In her World of the Five Gods, it’s the pederasty, and in her Vorkosigan Saga, it’s the Betans with their free love attitude toward all things sexual. When I was younger, that didn’t bother me so much, but it bothers me now, and it’s enough to make me think twice before picking up one of her books—even one of her older books.
I didn’t read Humans because I DNFed the first book, not because it was bad, but because it never really hooked me. After finding myself about 50 pages in, without really caring about any of the characters, I just didn’t bother reading any further. But the premise seems interesting, so I suppose I could be convinced to give it another go. After all, I’ve read other books by Robert J. Sawyer that I enjoyed (in fact, I’m reading one right now).
I really wanted to like Ilium, because Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos was so amazingly good. However, I found myself vacillating between being totally confused about the basic premise of the book (it’s like Homer’s Iliad… on another planet? But with real Greeks and Trojans? In a simulation, I guess?) and disgusted with the main character, who introduces himself in chapter 1 by talking about how he did the jailbait wait for this underage girl he really had the hots for, and describing her pubic hair in vivid detail the first time he saw her naked.
As for Singularity Sky, I didn’t bother reading it, because I’ve read enough Charles Stross to know that can’t stand his particular brand of edgy cyberpunk nihilism.
Which brings me to Blind Lake. It was a good book, and I enjoyed it quite a lot, though it fell a little too far on the “huh?” side of weird. I really like Robert Charles Wilson’s writing, and I’m slowly working through his entire body of work. His Spin trilogy is some of the best science fiction I’ve ever read, though I think The Chronoliths is my favorite book of his so far. Blind Lake is good, but I think I liked Mysterium better, though that also was a bit of a “huh?” novel at parts. Mostly, I think the Big Lie in Blind Lake was a little too big to swallow, and not quite as flashy or as interesting as some of his other ones, like Spin and The Chronoliths. But the story that followed from it was on par with his other books.
Two thousand four was one of the last years where I can honestly say that I wouldn’t vote No Award over any of the books on the ballot. The only other year since then that I can say that of is 2013—every other year has been a contest between the stuff that’s actually good, and the stuff that’s downright terrible. At this point, it seems like the increasingly small and irrelevant clique that votes in the Hugo Awards has gone completely off the deep end, which is why I’ve already posted my “How I Would Vote Now” post for 2026, even though the awards haven’t happened yet.
Why everyone is getting AI writing wrong
Apparently, there’s a lot of noise being made online right now by writers (and some readers) who are furious that anyone might us an AI tool in their writing process. I wouldn’t know, because I’m not on social media anymore, and I just haven’t had the time to follow that sort of ragebait nonsense. But this guy has a very well-reasoned take on the whole AI controversy, at least how it applies to books and writers. Worth hearing him out, especially if you’re a writer.
It’s done!
Last week, I finished writing The Unknown Sea, the sixth book that I’ve written so far in the Sea Mage Cycle. Here are the stats:
- Total Chapters: 16
- Total Scenes: 53
- Total Words: 50,069
- Total Process Words: 457,791
- Total Writing Hours: 91.1
- Total Writing Days: 71
This one went a lot faster than I thought it would, though it took nearly a year before I finally buckled down and did it. I had the initial idea for it way back in December 2024, and finished the outline in January 2025. But I put it aside until July, then worked on it off and on for the next three or four months, not really making much measurable progress. So it wasn’t until I buckled down in May and really sat down to finish it that I finally pounded it all out.
This is the sixth book I’ve written in the Sea Mage Cycle, but it’s the second book chronologically, taking place about ten years after the events of The Widow’s Child. As with all the Sea Mage Cycle books, this is a standalone. I will probably write at least another two books in the series, just so that I can round out another four book omnibus edition. It’s going to be a little while, though, as I really want to pivot towards the Soulbound King, releasing the first three books within a year of each other. Also, I need to finish my two open sci-fi trilogies: The Outworld Trilogy and the Falconstar Trilogy.
So my next big WIP is going to be Lord of the Falconstar, which I plan to release in May 2026. The outline and rough AI draft are already finished, so ten months should be sufficient to get that done, even with my wife going back to full-time work in a couple of weeks. We’ll have to start going to bed early, so that she can get more sleep, and I can wake up at 4AM to write. In the meantime, I plan to send The Unknown Sea off to my editor, and format and publish that as soon as he gets back to me with the edits.
By the way, The Unknown Sea is already up for preorder! You can get it here: