Catch up with the cult ... the gay SF series which is reborn, growing, and thrilling readers worldwide!
So, what's all the buzz about?
It's about five novels which will change the way you look at science fiction ... and gay fiction.
It all began with DEATH'S HEAD, originally published in 1991, in abridged form by GMP in the UK. This book (a full-throttle, explicit gay novel)
was nominated for that year's Science Fiction Hall of Fame!
A year later came EQUINOX, the second of the Jarrat and Stone books ... and then a ten-year lull while GMP, as a business, wound down and merged itself into the much larger Millivres-Prowler Group.
Not until Mel Keegan entered into the current creative partnership with DreamCraft Multimedia did the NARC books stir back to life, and they took off in 2004/05 the way they should have fifteen long years ago!
The third novel, SCORPIO, was published in September 2004, and Mel has dusted off old notebooks: the story outlines for NARC books which were planned and of necessity shelved, so long ago.
Next came STOPOVER, which we whimsically called 'NARC #3.5," since it's a slim volume which falls between SCORPIO and APHELION. It's the same length as most of the SF novels of the 1960s — about 44,000 words ... and MK had actually intended it to be the prologue to APHELION.
Halfway through the writing, we all realized Keegan had 'done it again,' and the novel was going to run way too long. We cut STOPOVER out of APHELION and released it as a stand-alone early in 2007, while APHELION followed along later.
The NARC books became not merely a possibility, but a reality, with the DreamCraft reissue of EQUINOX, and a year later, the restoration of DEATH'S HEAD. The project was an immense task, but the book was shipped in March '04, and reception from readers has been overwhelming. Advance orders were several times more than we had expected, and the reader response has been better than we could have hoped for (and we'd already had high hopes to begin with).
Early in 2008, DreamCraft switched over to printing and binding in the USA/Can and UK/Eur, using the printing services of the POD 'giant,' Lulu.com.
To celebrate the move, we struck an entirely new set of covers.
Mel Keegan's readers frequently disagree on what might be their favorite book or genre, but on one issue they're solidly in agreement: gay-themed science fiction doesn't get any better than this!
It's a twenty-fourth century that would conceivably give conservative old Gene Roddenberry a complex. This future is an era when men could be real women if they wanted to, and women could be real men, and no one would even notice what was going on, becuse gender liberation has happened, past tense, and there are bigger issues to worry about. Gay science fiction, more than any other genre, has the potential to examine alternative futures which might easily become real. Mel Keegan's work has a strangely oracular 'feel' about it.
"Buckeroo Bonsai" in a 2008 feature article
on the NARC Website.