Page Created: 11/13/22. Last Updated: 05/28/23.
BRIAN TRENT
ONLINE
Website: https://briantrent.com/
FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/brian.trent.370
BOOKS
Redspace Rising
Ten Thousand Thunders
SHORT FICTION ONLINE
The Last Library @ Nature.com
Across From Her Dead Father in an Airport Bar @ FlashFictionOnline
By the Moon Unblessed @ OnThePremises
Dayshift @ Intergalactic Medicine Show
Crater Meet @ FlashFictionOnline
Shadows & Shore Leave @ Intergalactic Medicine Show
A World of Bones @ PseudoPod
Interdimensional Trade Benefits @ Nature.com
Medusa's Revenge @ Daily Science Fiction
Chasing Comets @ Crossed Genres
The Archive Personality Protocol @ Nature.com
Wedding Day @ Daily Science Fiction
The Nightmare Lights of Mars @ Escape Pod
Checkmate @ Escape Pod
People of the Shell @ Escape Pod
Sparg @ Daily Science Fiction
A Matter of Shapespace @ Apex Magazine
Meeting Date: April 8, 2023.
Meeting Site: Bergen Highlands United Methodist Church. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.
Attendance: 23 + 8.
Meeting Program: Talk, Q & A with Science Fiction Author.
Notes:
Ice Nine discussion included movie subtitles, Bedazzled (original), Battlestar Galactica, Quantum Leap, Shazam, Lost Boys, D & D Honor Among Thieves, Fast & Furions, Purple Rain, and NASA's Artemis Project.
Newsletter Account:
The following account is reprinted with permission THE STARSHIP EXPRESS Copyright 2023 Philip J De Parto:
The month General Meeting of the Science Fiction Association of Bergen County was held at the Bergen Highlands United Methodist Church on Saturday, April 8, 2023. Science fiction writer Brian Trent was our speaker.
Mr Trent is the offspring of two science fiction fans and was a sf junkie from a young age. He accumulated an impressive collection of rejection slips before selling his first stories (to COSMOS and to APEX MAGAZINE) and winning the 2013 Writers of the Future Contest.
He is the author of two science fiction novels and numerous shorter works. The novels, REDSPACE RISING and TEN THOUSAND THUNDERS, and some of his shorter pieces are set 1000 years in the future with 60 billion people settled on a number of planets, moons, asteroids, and other habitats in the solar system. The books blend elements of military science fiction, cyberpunk, and space thriller.
Brian is currently shopping an alternate history in which the Roman Empire and Native American allies are at war in the New World with the Aztec Empire. Refugees from the fall of Carthage had traveled across the ocean and settled, bringing Old World diseases with them. The native populationo plummented, then rebounded, and was thriving when Rome crossed the waves centuries later. (Continued on club website.)
Meeting Talk Notes:
TEN THOUSAND THUNDERS
Set 1000 years in the future
60 billion people in solar system
Man has colonies on multiple worlds / moons / asteroids in solar system
Earth-dominated Planetary Federation runs things
Mars had a civil war in attempting to break away
Nanotec-Enhanced hero Gethin Bryce has been hypnotised and deep undercover
Has now been woken and original personality reactivated
Inspired by Grandfather's tales of WW2
Tributes to Mars of Bradbury, Burroughs, & others
Two classes of people, those in the Enclaves & those in the Wastelands
Classism is a theme in SF going back to The Time Machine's Eloi / Morlocks
Enclavers have virtual immortality through nanotech
Has some cyberpunk tropes
Major company in books is Prometheus Company
EARLY DAYS
Spawn of two science fiction fans
SF Junkie
Wanted to be a writer since he was a kid
MISCELLANEOUS
Forbidden Planet is favorite movie
Loved Illustrated Man growing up
Day jobs when starting out: Teacher, tutor, call center, martial arts instructor
Fan of Westerns
Reads lots of military science fiction
WORK
Reads lots of nonfiction
Wants books to seem real
Learned from Tolkien & Gibson
Fiction tends to dark, more Wells than Verne
Invisible man goes bad when he thinks he can get away with anything
Human nature does not change
Does creative imagination exercises
PROCESS
Starts with setting
Lots of world building
Panster once he has his world set up
Discovery writer
Writes disconnected scenes, not sequentially
5 - 6 drafts of novel, including Hemingway Draft to strip out metaphors
Has Murder Board on wall about Redspace universe
STARTING OUT
Lots of rejections
Then better, personalized rejections
Then sales to Apex and Cosmos
2013 Winner of Writers of the Future
Placed stories in theme anthologies by Flame Tree Press
Successfully submitted novel when they announced they would start publishing novels
MEETING
Read abridged Chapter 1 Red Space Rising
CURRENTLY SHOPPING
Alternate history where Rome never fell
Fleeing Carthegians made it to America
Infections laid waste to New World
Survivors had immunity and had rebuilt & were thriving when Romans finally arrived
Romans & native american allies vs Aztecs