My first ttrpg design, The Only Logical Solution Is Hijinx, is now available on Itch.io!
Here’s the description:
You are Tolvan, members of a people committed to logic above all else in order to constrain and channel your deep passions towards unity and innovation.
You are visiting or serve aboard the IGS Adventure! – a galaxy-traveling ship with an expert crew, dedicated to the missions of exploration and diplomacy.
Unfortunately, something deeply silly has happened and logic dictates that the best way forward is the embrace hijinx until you are able to resolve the predicament.
A game for 2-6 players inspired by the deeply silly science fiction adventures of deeply serious people.
I’ve been playing TTRPGs for about 30 years now, but only in the last couple of years have I gotten genuinely involved in game design with the Genrenauts TTRPG. But since that has become a large project, it’s not surprising that this game, created in one go over a weekend, would hit the finish line first. I’m still actively working on the Genrenauts game and playtesting more this weekend.
Today is also an Itch.io creator day, where Itch waives their fees. So it’s a great day to pick up this game (which is PWYW) and/or any of my other self-published books available on Itch (Genrenauts Season One, Genrenauts: The Wasteland War, Geekomancy, or Celebromancy).
The day long-awaited has finally come! Annihilation Aria aka [REDACTED NOVEL] is live and ready to purchase in ebook and paperback formats. The audiobook from Dreamscape Media will follow soon on July 31st.
Here’s what people have said about Annihilation Aria so far!
“[A] bright and exciting space opera […] Underwood’s
prose is brisk and funny without ever sacrificing his skilled sf world
building. Highly recommended for fans of action-packed space opera and anyone
else looking for a fun and fast-paced read.”
—Booklist, Starred Review
“This fantastically
fun series launch harkens back to Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy[…] The
interpersonal dynamics are delightful,
however familiar they may be, and the tightly constructed world, cinematic
fight scenes, and ambitious scope
combine to evoke a sense of wonder. This is a rollicking good time.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This is pure space
opera, wild and wacky and silly and strange, high-stakes and deeply
personal all at once. I could not be happier to have read this book.
Recommended for fans of AXIOM by Tim Pratt, TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE (the
RPG) published by R. Talsorian Games, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY (Marvel Studios),
and KILLJOYS (SYFY Channel).”
—Seanan McGuire, author of the
October Daye and InCryptid series
“Underwood takes us
for an intense ride through a cacophony
of alien civilizations in conflict. This is an exuberant space opera
that dares us to lose ourselves in battle songs and nonstop action. I can’t
sing its praises enough!”
—TJ Berry, author of SPACE UNICORN BLUES
and FIVE UNICORN FLUSH
“Fast, fun, inventive! ANNIHILATION
ARIA is a wild, delightful ride for fans of explosive space fantasy like Thor:
Ragnarok.”
—Valerie Valdes, author of CHILLING EFFECT
“If the characters of The
Mummy had been transported onto the Millennium Falcon, ARIA
would be the result—a rollicking space opera,
both literary and musical, with a diverse cast and strong relationships.”
—Gregory A. Wilson, author of GRAYSHADE
“Annihilation Aria is
a classic 80s science-fiction novel with all those troublesome sexist bits stripped off. It’s got that simplified, pulp, curl-under-the-covers reading
that reminds me of being a kid, wolfing down exciting adventures.”
— Ferrett Steinmetz, Nebula Award nominee and author of
AUTOMATIC RELOAD and THE SOL MAJESTIC
Here’s a quick overview of some events/activities I’m doing to promote the book over the next few weeks!
August 5th Ask Me Anything at r/Books on Reddit (all day)
A note about the future of this setting: Annihilation Aria is listed as Book One of a series, but it will be a stand-alone unless there are enough sales to justify a sequel.
If you want more books in the series, please tell your friends and fellow readers that might enjoy it!
I’m very proud of it and can’t wait to see it find a readership and bring some respite to people during this uncannily trying year.
Cyberpunk is one of my very favorite genres. Movies like Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner were formative for me growing up, as well as The Matrix. I played the hell out of Netrunner card game growing up, as well as Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020. In school, I got to take a SF/F class from a professor whose specialty is cyberpunk.
I was a bit young to read Cyberpunk when it was first emerging in film and fiction. But as a Millennial/Gen Y/Oregon Trail generation kid, I grew up in an ever-more Cyberpunk world, with global communications technology, global mega-corps, consolidation, ever-more-impressive medical and technological breakthroughs, automation, rising corporate influence on government, and so on. It’d be pretty easy for me to argue that Cyberpunk is the genre most reflective of the world I’ve known growing up. It’s given me many of the tools I use to see and analyze the world, in terms of the social impact of technology, how labor, corporations, and politics intersect, and humanist questions about androids, robots, and so on.
Also, it’s got cool fight scenes.
So it’s little surprise that the majority of my non-novella short fiction is cyberpunk. “Kachikachi Yama” and “Can You Tell Me How To Get to Paprika Place” are both cyberpunk stories, though their focuses are very distinct. Cyberpunk aesthetics show up in the Ree Reyes series as well, especially in Hexomancy.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank John Appel, Devan Barlow, Beth Cato, and A.F. Grappin for their great beta reader feedback on this story. Richard Shealy’s copy edit helped me say what I want to say with clarity. Thanks also to Sean Glenn for keeping the visual style of Genrenauts going with his cover design, and to Meg White Underwood for being my first reader and final proofer, as well as a marvelous brainstorming buddy. And once again, thanks to everyone who backed, promoted, and otherwise supported the Genrenauts Season One Kickstarter.
So without further ado, here’s The Data Disruption! It’s free on all ebook platforms. Check below for more information about the story.
The Genrenauts are a group of story experts who travel to parallel worlds. Each is the home of a narrative genre—Science Fiction or Romance, Fantasy or Western—populated by archetypal characters and constantly playing out familiar stories.
The Genrenauts’ mission: find and fix broken stories. If they fail, the ripples from the story worlds will cause havoc and devastation on their home world.
In the world of Cyberpunk, D-Source, a noted hacker, has disappeared, leaving his team’s storyline to grind to a halt. Angstrom King leads the Genrenauts on a mission to find out what happened to D-Source and how to get the cyberpunks back in the action.
World-spanning megacorporations…suspicious mercenaries living on the edge…lethal computer programs designed to tear your mind to shreds…the Genrenauts will face all these and more to get the story back on track—before it’s too late.
A short story in the world of Genrenauts (afinalist for the r/Fantasy “Stabby” Award for Best Serialized Fiction.)
Today, Genrenauts continues with The Absconded Ambassador!
The reader response to Genrenauts has been fantastic so far, so I’m really excited to continue the series. If you haven’t read The Shootout Solution, you’ll definitely want to start there – the series is designed like a serial-episodic TV show – readers will have the best experience starting from the beginning and reading in order.
In The Absconded Ambassador, the team heads to SF world to help salvage an interstellar alliance on the verge of collapse. You’ll get diplomacy, dogfights in a spaceship graveyard, weird alien species, shout-outs to some of my favorite sci-fi TV shows, and more about the mysterious Roman de Jager.
You can get The Absconded Ambassador in three formats:
Buying in the first week (or pre-ordering), is one of the absolute best ways to support a series you love.
Other great things you can do are to write reviews (Amazon, Goodreads, B&N), and, as always, talking about the book to your friends who like books.
But, you don’t have to take my word that Episode 2 will be good! (You can, if you want. That’s fine, too.) Here are some early reviews to give you other perspectives:
“The second episode in Michael R. Underwood’s Genrenauts delivers on the promise of Episode 1, and demonstrates that his special alchemy of Leverage + The Librarians + Quantum Leap + Thursday Next (just my current guess at his secret recipe) has legs — and will hopefully go a long time.”
– Irresponsible Reader
“…it’s a heck of a lot of fun the way Galaxy Quest is: a little goofy, a little serious but not taking itself too seriously, and filled with a fondness for the source material that gives it weight without weighing down the story.”
-Samantha Holloway, New York Journal of Books
As with the previous installment, Mike uses his love of genre to spin a story that would feel right at home in a modern day episode of Star Trek, ramping up quickly, doing it’s thing, and then resolving. And just like later season DS9, we get a set of plot threads that we have to tune in next week to see the progression of.
-Alex von der Linden, Blackfish Reviews
“My Genre-loving friends, get ready… we’re out of the saddle and back in the Saddle, but this time we’ve got alien politics, burgeoning alliances, mystery, and enough fast-paced Pew-Pew action to make me think I was in a golden age rocket ship, and indeed, that’s the point.”
–Brad K. Horner
And coming on April 6th is “There Will Always Be a Max,” a Genrenauts short story. It will be available for free on Tor.com, and the ebook will be available for $.99.
