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What’s a Silicant?

In my Space Opera series of novels and short stories I write about androids quite a bit. If you enjoy that sort of Asimovian exploration of what would happen if androids became sentient, you will certainly like my stories.

I have many characters who are androids. Some of them are good and some of them are morally ambiguous. Not particularly evil, just not as morally absolute. Giving androids human-like emotions and watching how they deal with them is a staple of the genre. The best place to start reading my android stories is to pick up my Kindle short story: Slag.  The story is an origin one for Eighty-eight, a character who reappears throughout my entire series of novels and shorts.

Eighty-eight is a black android who awakens on a barren, dessert world and has no idea how he got there or what happened to him. As he soon discovers, he has undergone an upgrade or modification that removes the built-in barriers he’s always had on killing. This disturbs it enough that it kidnaps a programmer and forces him to find out what has been changed to allow a normal android to kill. Or of course, Eighty-eight will kill the programmer. Talk about some motivation.

If you read the short stories in the order I spell out here, you will get more insight into their actions in the novels. Eighty-eight becomes a mentor to another android character who is owned by a Stellar Ranger named Devon Ardel. The early short stories in the anthology, Tales From Ocherva, Volume One, are principally about Devon’s Rangers and her android, Thirty-seven.

When a normal android receives a special hardware upgrade that includes a new silicate chip made from the minerals from the desert moon, Ocherva, they become sentient. Thirty-seven receives this upgrade from Eighty-eight in the short story, Silicant’s Only. Subsequent stories are about how Thirty-seven handles the upgrade. Both Silicants are featured in Starforgers, the first book of the Star Trilogy.

The Silicants rebel against their human creators and how the humans handle this rebellion is the subject of future novels. Specifically, The Rising and XiniX are about the rebellion and what happens to the Silicants after their human masters send them away. If you are reading the books in the Star Trilogy you may wonder where all the android/Silicant characters are at in Starstrikers. Well, they were banished from Alliance space while the Alliance concentrated on fighting the Great War with the Votainion Empire.

Most all the Silicants characters from Starforgers return in the final book of the trilogy – Starveyors.  But after nearly a thousand years of being on their own, the Silicants have evolved. They are their own unique life form now and their technology has far eclipsed their creator’s abilities. Starveyors is about how the Great War ends and attempts to explain many questions that are raised in Starforgers.  I hope you will return with me to the Star Trilogy this fall when the final book is released. You won’t be disappointed.

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