Now We're Talking Space Opera!

Once upon a time, two young people who lived in the same apartment building in Hollywood and shared a love of science fiction, Dorothy Dunnett, and The Three Stooges, went to see Star Wars, came home and said, "We can do better!" And they did.

That's the shameless promotion bit. Here's the disclosure. The result was a five volume series called Exordium by Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge, who is also my husband.

I didn't meet Dave until well after the series was published (in the 1990s, by Tor) and I'd missed them when they first came out. I picked them up as part of getting to know him, slogged through a difficult opening to the first book, and then got utterly carried away by the story. Rich and complex and intelligent. And not at all predictable. Dramatic and funny (an alien race who venerate The Three Stooges?), touching and gritty and romantic and irreverent. FTL battles in space (done right, according to physicist and Navy-type fans), puns and tragedy and Dangerous Liaisons intrigue. Politics (also done right). Did I mention the tri-partite aliens? Yes, I did.

Now the series is being re-issued as ebooks and that beginning has been rewritten (so even if you've read the print books, you should read these!). The first one, The Phoenix In Flight, is just out from Book View Cafe. It's in multiple formats, including those you can download for your Kindle or Nook.

Dave holds forth on "Space Opera and The Siege of Vienna." and Sherwood tells her own story of how Exoridum came to be written.