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About Michael Orr Michael was born at the beginning of Gen X and hasn’t let anyone forget it for half a century. He graduated from the same high school as Kevin Costner (albeit a decade later) and attended UC Irvine back when they still hosted live Oingo Boingo concerts in the gym. Putting his English degree straight to work, he hired into one of those big ‘english’ corporations you always hear about, and was agonizingly digested by the cubicle beast over the next third of a century. But having ultimately escaped his own personal Sarlacc, Michael now spends his time jonesing for the beaches of his youth, reminiscing about NDEs on his dreadfully orange ZX-7R, and living vicariously through his tales of wide-ranging starships and alien shores. When not writing (which happens more often than one might expect), Michael descends into a voodoo trance of 3D modeling to tame his mania with the ships & people in his artwork. If you like that kinda thing, treat yourself to his newsletter! (Pairs well with spicy reds, black stouts and social isolation.)
The advent of a starpunk genre I was always a writer; but strangely, a writer without stories. It took a peculiarly long time to find my message, and once I did it wasn't the message I would've expected. When the pandemic hit I was working on a new space opera to wash away the bitter of a recent failure, and I suddenly realized it was so...well...operatic. Now, our current age can hardly be called a belle époque, so, an uncivilized era like ours isn't suited to an operatic tone. What we need now is something more 'metal'. Even punk. Maybe something sorta — dare I say it — 'starpunk'. So this new space opera evolved (or maybe devolved) into a swashbuckling punkish adventure complete with soundtrack. And when I say starpunk, I mean a personal experience of the cosmos, including a hearty brew of all the things we space junkies crave: ships galore, shiny tech, esoteric science, bizarre aliens, exotic worlds, freaky realms at the farthest reaches of the cosmos, rockin' tunes, attitude "up to eleven," and an abiding sense of cool. I also insist on expansive ideas that get us closer to universal truth, not just the empty calories of beach reading. And by serializing Starbarians into chapters, I aim to give people the kind of feelz we used to get with weekly TV episodes, spending quality time with a beloved cast of characters. Starbarians is found family, not just for the crew, but also for us. That's gone missing since the lockdown, and I've been around long enough to know if I'm needing something, so are most the people around me. I may be 'different', but I'm really not that different. This is boutique fiction handcrafted to taste rather than to market. It's my idea of adventure in space. Maybe it's yours, too.
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© 2017-2024 Michael Orr. All Rights Reserved. |