Control: Spaces Eternal — My New Novella

I, Dalton Lewis, wrote Spaces Eternal, a sci-fi romance novella. It’s set in the same universe as V Max One — my space opera about being okay with being a guy and normal and not perfect and being around successful and talented women. This next novella continues many of those themes by showing a possible romance between a geeky engineer and a beautiful woman. In it Malachi Talon, the brave action hero, is an engineer who doesn’t believe in violence and doesn’t punch anyone or shoot anyone in the entire story. He doesn’t believe in it. He adventures through a war with his beloved Ella Aerin, a beautiful engineer intent on developing a device which will end a terrible war with a demon invasion.

Malachi has a terrible time with the war. He loses people and doesn’t like the results of the war, and Ella offers him the adventure of a lifetime: be her engineer on the Kokoro, a high-tech battlecruiser, on its trip to Pluto and back. He says yes and immediately begins to have space adventures.

I wanted to develop Malachi into a hero that one could love and appreciate for his moral compass and intellectual mastery as well as admire for his choices during terrible and unfathomable situations. I wanted to really throw all of life’s worst problems at him and see what he said and how he responded to them. He repeats that he hates war and violence over and over, as a mantra, in the book, and I wanted to encourage people to understand that there are bad sides to all those adventures in all those superhero stories one watches at the local cinema every weekend.

Ella is smart, dedicated, and flawed. She loves learning and is whip-smart and totally dedicated to stopping a war and becoming a major success. She just drinks a little too much a little too often, and she sometimes dates dangerous and powerful men instead of the men who care for her and love her…like many women in the world around us. I thought that the character would really resonate with people.

I wanted the demons to have admirable characteristics as well as flaws. I didn’t want them to just be mindless creatures trying to kill every innocent in existence. I wanted to show some interesting and intellectual villains who would challenge Malachi instead of just twirling moustaches and shooting pulse rifles at him. I wanted someone to hate him and want to destroy him without being totally evil, just unhappy and desperate. Thus Silzeman was born, a demon who wants to get information and is more and more frustrated with Malachi’s ability to win every conversation — which leads to regrettable violence.

I didn’t want to have a conventional story arc in which the characters must save reality from a great threat in a huge battle. That scene has been written over and over…too often, if you ask me. I wanted to show some other scenes that would develop the war in new and interesting directions. I didn’t want just happy or unhappy endings — I wanted some good consequences and some bad at the end of the story. That makes for a more mature tale, I think.

I worked for three months on a sci-fi romance novella. I really cared about these characters. I hope you take a chance on them and care about them, too.

Thanks, and take care, friends.