It’s been almost exactly a year since the start of the Kickstarter campaign that included my story collection Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories, which we’d hoped would come out last July in time for that year’s Shore Leave Convention. But eSpec’s cover artist Mike McPhail wanted to take some extra time to create a suitable cover image of the Biauru characters from the title story. This proved more challenging than we expected, and Mike’s been dealing with illness and other things, so the cover ended up getting delayed quite a bit. Ultimately, we decided to settle for a simpler cover and just get the book out there in time for this year’s Shore Leave, though Mike hopes to revisit the cover art later. The book is now scheduled to release on July 1, 2025, and will debut at Shore Leave on July 11-13.

Cover by Mike McPhail of McP Digital Graphics

Since it’s been a year, I’ll repeat the info from my original introductory post:

Infinite Dimensions. Endless Possibilities. Universal Questions.

Across multiple realities and millennia of past and future history, heroes human and otherwise challenge their limits and brave the unknown in pursuit of the fundamental truths of the universe—and each other.

From bestselling author Christopher L. Bennett comes Aleyara’s Descent, eleven tales portraying the search for understanding, connection, and hope that unites seekers of all species, eras, and realities.

In an alien past, four impetuous youths brave a forbidden realm to discover their world’s true nature.A first contact between a UFO believer and a real alien doesn’t go the way either one expects.Scientists battling a kaiju invasion must overcome the mistrust of the insular enclave they strive to protect.A government agent’s drive to safeguard the future hits a speed bump when she questions a suspected time traveler.The inheritor of a fabled superhero name must prove herself by solving the one mystery her predecessor never could.

These and other diverse tales, many in print for the first time, bring a multiverse of aliens, monsters, time travelers, and heroes to life with plausibility and sensitivity.

Includes the brand-new tale “Nilly’s Choice,” a companion story to the Arachne novels.

Only four of the stories in this collection have been professionally published before, while all but one of the rest come from my Patreon’s Original Fiction tier (index here), which has so few subscribers that they’ll be completely new to most of my readers. They come in a mix of different continuities, breaking down thusly:

Arachne/Troubleshooter Universe:

“Conventional Powers” (Troubleshooters): Analog Sep/Oct 2019“Legacy Hero” (Troubleshooters): Patreon“Nilly’s Choice”: Patreon“Aleyara’s Descent”: Analog, May/June 2023

Braneworlds:

“What Slender Threads”: Patreon“Though Worlds Divide Us”: Amazing Stories (online), April 2023

Standalone stories:

“The Moving Finger Writes”: Patreon“Abductive Reasoning”: Analog Sep/Oct 2017“Early Warning Systems”: Never before published“The Monsters We Make”: Patreon“Growth Industry”: Patreon

I’ve revised most of the stories to offer a little something new. Mostly it’s just a few minor textual edits, but I did a substantial polish on “The Moving Finger Writes,” whose version on Patreon was a little rough. In “Conventional Powers” and “The Monsters We Make,” I restored some material I’d deleted for space, about 300 words’ worth for the former and a paragraph for the latter. In “Growth Industry,” I added a few bits that didn’t occur to me until after the story’s Patreon publication.

And here are links to our previous publicity for the collection:

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT – CHRISTOPHER L. BENNETT

eSPEC EXCERPTS – CHRISTOPHER L. BENNETT – ALEYARA’S DESCENT

It’s been a long road getting from there to here (no, wait, that’s from something else), but I’m relieved that the book is finally ready to come out, ending my long drought of published works.