aliens – The Chiles Files

…that you guys like my books.

Yes, I have a new release coming soon so this is the gratuitous marketing post.

I first pitched the Interstellar Medic series to Toni Weisskopf three years ago at LibertyCon. The idea of a paramedic who’d been swept up into an alien civilization and longs for home had taken root in my brain, and that generally means it’s time to start writing. Thankfully she agreed, but with one condition: this story needed to be two books. Before I could write the one I’d pitched, I’d first have to establish the character and do some serious worldbuilding.

She also said there had to be real aliens, not OG Star Trek types with people in blue body paint and colanders on their heads.

Okay, fair enough. Except I’d never really been into space-alien sci fi, so I had some work to do. Fortunately there was already a lot of existing material to work with, starting with standard abducted-from-my-trailer-park UFO stories. Grays, Nordics, Insectoids, and Reptilians all made for great character fodder, and that’s when I realized I could have a lot of fun riffing on those tropes. And since it was going to have a medical angle…well, we all know the Grays have a thing for rectal probes.

Side note: I promise I had never seen Resident Alien before writing these books.

I didn’t just rely on UFO legends; there has been plenty of speculation by real scientists as to what kinds of strange life forms might be waiting for us among the stars. In some cases, possibly within our own solar system. The idea of giant balloon-like creatures floating among the clouds of Jupiter and Saturn had stuck with me since reading about it in high school (back in the days of cutoff jean shorts and hot-rodded ’63 Impalas).

Those were aliens populating The Long Run. The upcoming book, The Long Way Home, features beings we can’t see without going through some complicated interdimensional jumps. Also space pirates. YARR!

This is all a roundabout way of saying The Long Way Home is the original book I pitched three years ago, and I’m excited to finally bring this story full circle. Will there be more to come? Oh, probably. Melanie Mooney’s adventures could easily become an open-ended series, and there’s already an idea in development (The Long Way Back? Maybe…). There will also be a short story featuring Melanie for a Baen anthology coming out next summer. Besides that, I’m currently outlining the final installment of the Eccentric Orbits series, Terminal Orbit.

Until then, The Long Way Home will be out in paperback and ebook on July 1st wherever fine books are sold!

As a kid, did you go through a phase of being obsessed with the paranormal? I did. My early years were spent buried in books about UFOs, Bigfoot, and ghost stories. No tale was too tall, no conclusion too far of a leap. Tabloids and low-budget TV shows reinforced my belief that the world was filled with supernatural shenanigans, and I was stunned that the adults around me could be so oblivious to the peril we were in. Surely the grownups had to be aware. How could they not be?

My parents eventually convinced me that my trusted sources like the National Enquirer were as fake as pro wrestling. That calmed me down a bit, though I was still coming to grips with the realization that the universe remained a big and mysterious place. Even if I was no longer living in fear of imminent demonic possession or alien abduction, that didn’t mean there wasn’t plenty left that eluded explanation.

In that vein, last year was a big one for UFO lore (the latest official term is “UAP” but I’m stubborn). Congressional hearings and mostly serious news articles have forced the notion of extraterrestrial visitors back into our cultural consciousness, dredging up some of those same feelings I’d wrestled with as a kid. The whistleblower stories are compelling, and it’s hard to say what’s more frightening: that we’re being visited by aliens, or the lengths our government is supposedly going to in order to conceal it.

Of course, there’s been zero physical evidence produced. Classified, you understand, for our own protection. Need to know and all that.

Riight.

So what’s more likely? That aliens are among us, or that it’s all an info op to cover up some technological breakthroughs the Pentagon would prefer to keep to themselves? I’ll point out that the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes had been flying operationally for years before DoD and CIA fessed up to them.

I’ll confess that I don’t know what to make of these stories, much less the cultural impact they’d have if true. They have the patina of truth, but without evidence I’m inclined to think it’s intentional misdirection. Either way, I’m left believing in a conspiracy theory.

All of this has been on my mind more than usual, because of course I was in the middle of writing about an unsuspecting human who gets swept up into an extraterrestrial civilization at the time:

Being a paramedic is a tough job; it’s tougher when you stumble onto a crashed alien spacecraft.

Melanie Mooney thought she was just doing her job when she came upon an unusual accident in the deep woods late one night. Acting alone, what she found was nothing like she’d expected. What followed was even more unexpected.

Recruited by emissaries of a galaxy-spanning civilization, Melanie is thrust into a world she thought only existed in supermarket tabloids. As the first human in the Galactic Union Medical Corps, she cares for extraterrestrials in desperate need of a medic who can ignore the fact that they’re nothing like any patient she’s ever seen, even on their best days. And in emergency medicine, it’s a given that every patient is having the worst day of their life.

Each run takes her deeper into the galaxy and farther from home, navigating alien cultures that only get weirder with each call. It will take all of Melanie’s experience, instinct, and grit to prove herself—and the rest of humanity—to be worthy of the Union. That’s a lot to put on a woman who’d just like to end the day with a cheeseburger and a cold beer.

Maybe it’s serendipitous that my first novel about space aliens and UFOs comes at a time when people are more aware of their possible existence than ever before. It’s a sharp turn from my usual technothriller/hard SF tales and was a ton of fun to write. If you like fish-out-of-water adventures with a plucky main character and poking fun at some well-worn alien abduction tropes along the way, then I think you’ll enjoy Interstellar Medic.

The first installment, The Long Run, will be out in paperback, ebook, and audio next Tuesday, March 5th.