Rogue Hunter: Gaia
 Book One of Rogue Hunter Series |
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During the holiday season of 2009, I published the first of a trilogy of short stories based on Rogue Hunter called Rogue Hunter Gaia. Since its publication there seems to be a bit of confusion among some readers concerning the nature of the books. Let me begin my explanation by giving a brief history on Rogue Hunter.
When I first conceived of Rogue Hunter, it was in response to my intense dislike (some might say hatred) of Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones. I'm a die-hard Star Wars fan and had been highly anticipating the sequel to Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Until the debut of Attack of the Clones, I was a frequent visitor of Star Wars.com and devourer of Star Wars Insider Magazine. All the talk of futuristic bounty hunters engaging Jedi Knights in deadly combat had me stoked. My imagination went wild with the possibilities such a story would entail. Nothing could prepare me for the disaster that was Attack of the Clones. Not only did Clones fail to feature the aforementioned promised 'bounty hunters' (Star Wars.com's usage of the term was plural), the action scenes featuring the film's sole bounty hunter Jango Fett vs. Obi-Wan Kenobi was hackneyed, uninspired, and downright boring. The film failed to appeal to me even on the basest level and the only way I could wipe the bad taste of 'Clones' out of my mouth was to spin my own tale of futuristic bounty hunters.
As it goes, blonde female bounty hunters from the future aren't exactly an original invention. Even though she wasn't originally portrayed as blonde when the video game Metroid was released on the NES back in 1987, Samus Aran owns that visual distinction. It was some years later that I conceived of my own Clint Eastwood style female bounty hunter. Although Zyra Zanr (inspired more by my love of Valkyries than Metroid) existed under another persona during my high school years, she had never been given her own feature story. Rogue Hunter was the vehicle by which I chose to introduce Zyra to readers. As often happens when it takes a while to produce one's art, over the course of the years in which I was constructing Zyra's epic, other artists and storytellers beat me to the punch and used many of the ideas I had intended for Rogue Hunter. I've been inclined on more than one occasion to throw popcorn at a movie screen in the theater when I saw my ideas being used). I was constantly challenged to alter Zyra's storyline to account for other people's ideas which mirrored mine. I was under a lot of self-imposed pressure to get my story out to the world before even female action heroes became cliché. Having to now share the same virtual shelf space that is now teeming with female-fronted action novels, I am not certain I accomplished that particular goal.
It took some time for me to bring order to chaos, but Rogue Hunter finally made its debut on Amazon Kindle in May 2009. When I first published Quest of the Hunter, it was a self-contained story that introduced readers to Zyra Zanr, the protagonist of the Rogue Hunter series. One of the things I learned from studying film and television was to use self-contained stories in order to tell a complete story just in case no sequels followed. I've made it a practice to wrap my stories up, so to speak, even though I intend to write sequels. In some respects, I believe I have accomplished my goal a little too well with Quest of the Hunter. Only during the process of writing the sequel to QotH did I realize that I had overlooked major plot points in the continuity of the overall story arc which extends beyond the pages of QotH. The as-yet unpublished sequels, as a result, suffered for my short-sightedness. Hence, I decided to reboot the series with a new introductory story line that would center around a mysterious weapon called Gaia.
As a student of film and television, I have always been fond of the use of pilot episodes to test if a TV show has an audience. Many popular TV shows such as Star Trek, Babylon-5, and Hercules were originally introduced to audiences as a single self-contained episode (or two-hour movie) before being presented in a serial format. This was part of my inspiration for Rogue Hunter Gaia. I intentionally chose to present Gaia to readers as the literary equivalent of a TV pilot episode, even with the format's shortcomings.
Although some readers have dismissed Gaia primarily because of its brief length, Gaia is a much larger tale than the sum of its parts. Gaia sets the stage for every new Rogue Hunter novel or related project that I plan to release. One reader who blasted the trilogy for its brevity remarked, "The series contains elements found in many other SF books, but there the authors take their time developing the story, using a couple of hundreds of pages per book. Rogue Hunter contains too many plots for 60 pages, or not enough pages for the number of plots." The reader is correct that there are a number of plots in Gaia, all of which are integral to forthcoming books. It is precisely the groundwork laid down by Gaia that future books in the cycle will expound upon. I am hoping that you, dear reader, will be open-minded, and check out Rogue Hunter Gaia, knowing that it is the foundation upon which the entire Rogue Hunter series will be built.
You can now download the Rogue Hunter Gaia trilogy via the links on My Books page.
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Rogue Hunter: Gaia Features:
Into the Abyss
Intruder
Legacy
Excerpts
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