The Bright Black Sea: The Lost Star Stories Volume One
About this ebook
When Wil Litang, the first mate of the tramp freighter Lost Star, reluctantly accepted the job as acting captain, little did he realize that the Lost Star had a mysterious and dangerous past. A past that had caught up with it. And a future filled with danger and discoveries that would eventually lead him to the real Lost Star.
The Bright Black Sea is the first volume of the Lost Star Stories. The novel is set in the Nine Star Nebula – a compact nebula of nine stars and hundreds of planets, wrapped within vast fields of asteroids, gas, and dust. Drawing on the classic space opera motifs of space ships, space pirates, sentient robots, and uncharted worlds of wonder, C. Litka crafts an epic story full of mystery, danger, and romance. Join Captain Wil Litang and the crew of the Lost Star and escape to a wonder-filled future in the black and bright space of the Nine Star Nebula.
The adventures of Captain Wil Litang continue in concluding volume of the Lost Star Stories – The Lost Star’s Sea, an epic adventure novel written in the classic planetary romance motif made famous by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
C. Litka writes old-fashioned novels with modern sensibilities, humor, and romance. His lighthearted novels of adventure, mystery, and travel are set in richly imagined worlds and feature a colorful cast of well drawn characters. If you seek to escape, for a few hours, your everyday life, you will not find better company, nor more wonderful worlds to travel and explore, than in the novels of C. Litka..
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About the author
I read hundreds of science fiction books in my youth. Since then I've read many other types of novels; detective stories, mysteries, adventure stories, humor, and sea stories, most written in the first half of the 20th century. All these different types of stories have shaped the stories I now write.
My long space opera/planetary romance, “The Bright Black Sea” and “The Lost Star's Sea” borrow their themes from my fond memories of those early science fiction stories, and, as I've come to realize, from Edgar Rice Burroughs in particular. Their story style, however, reflects the adventure stories of the late Victorian and Edwardian age, by the likes of H Rider Haggard and the sea stories of C J Cutcliffe Hyne and Guy Gilpatric.
“A Summer In Amber” draws its inspiration from the Scottish stories of John Bucham and Compton Mackenzie, as well as Downton Abbey.
“Some Day Days,” it's a rather experimental romance whose perigee is far from clear, even to me.
My newest novel, "Beneath the Lanterns," was written as a fantasy adventure. However, its primary fantasy element is that it is set in an imaginary land, and so it can also be read as a straight adventure or even as science fiction, since it has a science fiction backstory.
What all these stories have it common is that they are stories written the way I enjoy my fiction – lighthearted, character-driven stories with danger, adventure, humor and a bit of romance told from the “ground level” of first person narratives.
As for me, well, I've lived a very ordinary life. One wife, two grown children, a couple of grandchildren, no dogs, no cats, one car and a house in a small Midwest town. Besides writing for a couple of hours each morning, I paint impressionist paintings,
( http://litka.deviantart.com/ ) put several thousand miles on my bike each year, putter around the yard in summer and the web in winter.
