The New Face of Ceph

What do you do when you're more human than you want to be ... or not as human as you think you are?

An alien collective of radiation eating "space squid," the Ceph engineer mimics to intermingle with other races. While most maintain communication with their race through a subspace neural bond, a new class of unbonded, or severed, are growing up in the human empire. The series asks what it means to be human, and deals with otherness. How will a race of not-quite-humans find their place in our world?

This project started as a comic back in 2001. In 2003, I put the amatuer effort on haitus and didn't return to the idea until 2011. In the meantime, I wrote almost 100k words of backstory, and even came up scientific illustrations for my aliens. I'll post these as I refine them--and this website--once I've finished revising the first novel and put it up for publication.

Vava Calypso is a science fiction comedy of manners about sex, drugs, and music in a future where humans and aliens intermingle. Vava, a humanoid tree, is a media mogul who's about to add another husband to her harem: the young human pop star Michael Kinsey.

Meanwhile, her favorite husband Duran is falling back into old substance abuse patterns, with an unusual side effect: losing control over his alien teleportation ability. As he finds himself losing his grip on the universe, he discovers a monster stalks him deep in subspace.

As Duran faces his demons, Michael finds his own devil on his shoulder in a cynical alien musician named Dion. Dion wants nothing more than to see this squeaky-clean teen idol sullied, and seduces Michael down a hedonistic path filled with vindictive pranks.

Vava has her own problems dealing with family disapproval and cultural loss the more she becomes "humanized." She keeps her business running despite all opposition, but the mask cracks as she flails to keep her husbands from destroying themselves--and each other.

Sample: First Chapter