Leigh Saunders

“…Covering vast areas of space with flashing spaceships and nifty alien races, space opera in the hands of great authors helped me time after time to get off this planet and live among the stars where life was a lot more fun than my real life. So for me, great, classic space opera is always my favorite kind of reading still to this day…”

– Dean Wesley Smith

I am delighted to announce that my novel, Memoirs of a Synth: Gold Record, is included in the 2019 Space Opera StoryBundle! It’s truly an honor to see my book on the shelf with this amazing collection.

If you don’t know how StoryBundle works, they assemble a themed collection of great novels, and then make the whole set available, DRM-free and in both .epub and .mobi formats (for your Kindle or other ereading apps/devices). Best of all, you not only get to set your own price, but you can choose to donate part of your purchase price to AbleGamers, to help them provide custom video gaming setups to people with disabilities so they can have fun with their friends and family.

UPDATE: The Space Opera Storybundle is over, but you can still find many of these great books at your favorite online retailers:

• Sticks and Stones: A Trek Novel by Robert Jeschonek
• Dreams of a Fool by Michael D. Britton
• Naero’s Run by Mason Elliott
• Gold Record – Memoirs of a Synth by Leigh Saunders
• The Runabout by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
• Fiction River Presents: Among the Stars by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
• Star Rain by Dean Wesley Smith
• The Drath Series: Books 1-3 by Meyari McFarland
• The Jani Kilian Chroncles: Books 1-3 by Kristine Smith
• Queen Anne’s Revenge by Blaze Ward

And thanks to all our readers for supporting us!

I was very happy a few days ago when I read the NASA report that the Voyager spacecraft are at the edge of the solar system, and about to enter interstellar space.

Why?

Because I remember when they took off – I was in high school, and wrote a report for my English class. My report would have been much better if I’d had access to resources like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Voyager mission page; I had to rely on newspaper reports and what I could glean from faithfully watching NOVA on telelvision, hosted by Carl Sagan.

Of course, now reports of the Voyager missions make me happy for another reason. I’m a science fiction writer. And what’s cooler than to incorporate something real into a science fiction story? Well, that’s exactly what I’ve done – and it’s been a blast. (And no, I’m not taunting you – the novel, Synth: Gold Record,  will be coming out soon, so check back for the announcement!)

In the meantime, I loved the closing passage from the NASA report so much that I wanted to repost it here (but really, click on the links above and read the whole report for yourself – it’s “way cool!” as we used to say in the seventies):

“A billion years from now, when everything on Earth we’ve ever made has crumbled into dust, when the continents have changed beyond recognition and our species is unimaginably altered or extinct, the Voyager record will speak for us,” wrote Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan in an introduction to a CD version of the record.

Some people note that the chance of aliens finding the Golden Record is fantastically remote. The Voyager probes won’t come within a few light years of another star for some 40,000 years. What are the odds of making contact under such circumstances?

On the other hand, what are the odds of a race of primates evolving to sentience, developing spaceflight, and sending the sound of barking dogs into the cosmos?

Expect the unexpected, indeed.