R.R. Corvi Newsletter#1 July 6, 2026

This is Issue #1 of what I hope to be a series of more-or-less monthly newsletters about my forays into the writing biz, after many decades spent following my first love, astronomy.

My friends ask, “Why?”

Briefly, it’s a matter of worldview. Mine holds that evolution has molded us, as a species, to deal with war, famine, and disease. But nothing in our genes or our culture has prepared us to cope with success. Over the last century or so, given our apparent victory over nature, we’ve acted as if “can” means “should”. As a result, we are stumbling into several crises, notably (but not only) climate change. To manage these diseases of plenty, we will have to change the way we think about a lot of things. Since our biases are among our dearest possessions, there will be hard choices to make. Fiction might help clarify these choices, before we must decide for real.

Where, then, are the authors representing my worldview? By rights, SciFi writers should be leading the charge in this domain. But it seems to me that not many are stepping up to the task.

So here am I, trying to help fill the gap.

My first novel, The Brangus Rebellion, published three years ago, is of course a book like the ones I’m looking for. By the standards of a big-five-publisher breakout novel, its reader numbers are trifling. By those of a first-book indie author (that’s me), it has done a bit better than okay. So I’m pressing on. And just at this moment, there is a lot of news.

Recently, I’ve sold a novelette to Analog Science Fiction and Fact, which at nearly 100 years of age is the oldest monthly SciFi magazine in the business. I remember my father reading Analog, when he was a young English professor in Texas and I was knee-high to a duck. The story is called Septo’s Taj, and unlike the Union Township Series, it is straight-up spaceflight and alien-culture SciFi. It sounds a faintly subversive note, however, with its main character debating the pros and cons of owning a vast fortune. Elon would never waste time that way. I don’t yet know when it will appear, but when there is news about that, I will post it here.

I’ve now also written a sequel to Brangus and split it in half to make two books of reasonable size: Sibs Underground and The Sibs Revolution. In the first of these, the illicit gene manipulation from Brangus is revealed as merely one branch of an outright revolutionary conspiracy, planning a coup against the central government. Of course, my main characters try to stop them. Both Sibs books are written, and I am in the middle of the publishing process. I expect to launch all three (starting with a re-launch of Brangus) in a staggered fashion, beginning the first of September and ending mid-October. They will then be a trilogy, The Union Township Series. You can learn everything that is now public about them (covers and blurbs, plus the first couple of chapters of Sibs Underground) from my web page rrcorvi.com.

Right now, I need Advance Readers for Sibs Underground. Volunteers who agree to read it and post timely reviews on Goodreads and Amazon will get a free Advance Reader Copy (ARC) of the book, in eBook format. (For ARC readers who have not yet read Brangus, I can gift an eBook of that, too.) Early reviews turn out to be very important. So I’m asking ARC readers to post their reviews on Goodreads as soon as they can, and ideally on Amazon on launch day, when the book’s Amazon page goes live. Also, readers should send reviews directly to me at [email protected] by the end of August, so I can include juicy bits in the published book’s front pages. For Sibs Underground, launch is now scheduled for 22 September.

Distribution of the ARCs will begin soon. If you think you might like to be an Advance Reader, please use the contact form below. Don’t delay: tempus fugit. Some rules apply.

If you want to continue receiving this newsletter, or may wish to become an Advance Reader, please fill out the google form.