My hopepunky space-opera novelette Bearly Believable is now available at Hexfiled. When the Volpex Picnic Park ranger and his owl companion need a biological android to offer a fire-safety program, it’s gotta be a bear, right? Enjoy!
I wrote a bit about it when it was accepted for publication. I’m really excited that it’s finally coming out! But I wanted to share a few more details of how it fits into the other stories I’ve written about the setting. And some of the other characters that appear in the story.
Bearly Believable is set on Volpex, a planet that was first introduced in The Better Angels and the Very Scary Halloween. That story was originally released in 2022 as a Halloween promotion for the Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy and subsequently included in Better Angels: Tour de Force. It’s a terraformed world that has a single developed continent with the rest of the world left fallow to provide ecological services and replicator feedstock harvesting.
I’ve written more about the ecology of terraformed worlds in You Can’t Change Just One Thing that features my characters Totemo Isogashii and the NeoBoxer Lambda. They first appeared in The Better Angels and Lambda and Tau, in Better Angels: Tour de Force, but they also appear in Bearly Believable also where they play a small, but crucial role.
In 2023, I wrote a story about a group of girls who run a cooking show on Volpex called The Butter Angels. The humor of them getting mixed up with The Better Angels is played for laughs a time or two, but it was the beginning of several ideas I’ve explored over several stories. The Butter Angels also appear briefly at the beginning of Bearly Believable, so this is their public debut.
The Mayor was just arriving in a SkyStretch with a large police escort. The SkyStretch landed while the police vehicles orbited the site.
When the door opened, a bodyguard exited first, carrying a compact railgun, then the Mayor, and then they were followed by a crowd of young women wearing some kind of costume.
The young women were all matching: cute red tops with long, open sleeves; short, checked skirts; and patterned bandanas to tie back their hair. Plus each had a pink ribbon tied crosswise to hold back their sleeves. They chattered cheerfully among themselves, self-evidently excited to have gotten a ride in the Mayor’s luxurious SkyStretch.
The Mayor led them forward to the ribbon where attendants handed each a pair of scissors. The crowd caught sight of the women and someone yelled, “It’s the Butter Angels!” A huge chorus of shrieks and cheers erupted from the crowd. The Angels offered broad smiles and waved to their fans.
I wrote the original story about the Butter Angels that I had hoped would be published as part of a Truck Stop anthology and, when the publisher proposed doing another Halloween promotion, I wrote a little piece of flash fiction to go along with it. It was around that time that the publisher stopped developing the Truck Stop series and so the stories were never published. I set them aside and turned my attention to other things.
Since it doesn’t appear the Truck Stop is coming back, I’ve started shopping some of these stories around to other outlets. But the Halloween promotion story doesn’t seem like it would ever fit anywhere else, so — since it’s almost Halloween anyway, I’ve posted it separately on my blog: An Anomalous Aggregation of Angels.
I hope you enjoy the stories. I look forward to sharing more stories from Volpex in the coming months and years.
