They're not all pale, pasty nerds with chemistry degrees!
The Anti-Villain is the Anti-Hero's opposite: Where the Anti-Hero does good deeds for morally bankrupt reasons, the Anti-Villain has good intentions but deplorable methods.
First submitting to us back in Tevun-Krus #41: Alien Invasion, JeffreyVonHauger has been with the Ooorah Crew for a while now, writing kickass stories for various TK issues. But this year he decided to tackle a bigger project. For each of the year's main issues, he sought to write the next piece of an 8-part story. This is very interesting, since we all know TK changes the subgenre each and every issue!
How would he handle such a thing?
Let JeffreyVonHauger himself tell you about his process right here:
Tevun-Krus asked me if I'd be interested in writing short stories for the Ooorah! group's Sci-fi magazine and for the next two years, I didn't miss a month. I was in "Best of" issues and enjoyed interacting with the group and its readers. Honestly, I still don't know what the name means?
I was wanting a challenge when their 2019 sub-genre line up came out and upon reading what they planned to cover, I saw the potential to make a series out of it.
Drugs, Satanism, Virtual Reality, Sky worlds, Erotica, Genre mashups, Spies, and Anti-villains surely have a common thread? I'd covered altered states and VR before but satanism, spy novels, and sex would be uncharted territory. Anti-villain seemed to dare us to use a character eviler than the well-meaning Thanos.
At the time, I'd re-read Great Expectations after reading Purity by Jonathan Franzen. Dickens originally published as a series and I was thinking about committing to a year-long series. I knew my protagonist would be a variant on Pip and it didn't take TK's savvy readers long to call out her name similarities to a certain video artist. A good friend of mine just finished a PhD and was all about the short period of time before starting a new stage of post-doc life, it seemed like the perfect place to begin.
I was also in the middle of editing a fantasy. The novel starts with the death of an ancient wizard who traveled with a young paladin. I thought they'd be perfect characters for crashing high-fantasy into hard sci-fi.
I plotted a story arc across the planned genres, focused on Clarke's third law, and dove in.
She's a post-doc looking for experience and he's a fallen angel. She has a Joan of Arc complex and he's a millennia-old wizard. He's the best hacker in the galaxy and they're a bunch of middle-aged clones. And what the hell do they have to do with killer robots, lesbian lizards, virtual reality, sex, drugs, magic, and non-proliferation?
Find out in the made for TK series: Significantly Advanced Tech
Well, he's done it. His mission is complete. With this issue, Significantly Advanced Tech by JeffreyVonHauger can now be read from start to finish. And to make it easy for you, we'll throw down a list of links in the comment section below, as well as an external link to the first part of the story to get you started.
1. Girl, You're Tripping (Originally published in Tevun-Krus #65: AcidPunk)
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