My dear readers. Before continuing with the story, I would like to say a few words to you, the community that made it possible for me to be doing this and achieve a dream I never thought I would see transformed into reality.
What you are about to read, has been a long time coming. I have spent probably around six years planning and working on this, building the Steel Song universe up from the foundation, expanding, refining the worldbuilding, making assets ranging from half a dozen different map versions, to graphical assets such as faction emblems and even a handful of 3D models, then iterating, iterating, iterating, on every aspect of the worldbuilding, the characters and story I aim to tell. It is very much a passion project, down to its DNA. What finally made it to a stage where I am confident enough to publish, is the fourth or fifth version, after having scrapped two almost-finished manuscripts of the entire book.
So, what is it? And why HFY? The answer is because in an age of doom-and-gloom, where so many other works of fiction try to be the next Dune or Game of Thrones, I have found a drought of good, old-fashioned escapism, of that old-school pulp ficion-esque energy that is sadly lacking from the shelves of far too many bookstores nowadays. Fortunately, we have that thing called the internet and on the internet, there are all these wonderful platforms where people post some of the wackiest things one can imagine and also, some of the most touching stories I have ever read.
What are my objectives with Steel Song? Not to subvert expectations, but to give the readers exactly what they expect, a good old fashioned helping of escapism, a space opera with a dose of political intrigue and a smattering of more profound ideas. I do not aim to write the next Game of Thrones. I aim to write a story that I fell in love with, from the moment I first stumbled upon the idea. And I hope it is a story which you, my dear readers, will enjoy reading as much as I enjoy writing it.
As of the time of writing this, the first three chapters of House of Wolves, the first book in the Steel Song trilogy, will already be available to read for free. It is, as every other work of fiction in the HFY subgenre, a story about humanity, in a somewhat-distant-future where it has to come to terms with the fact that many of the creatures from its mythology, might not be so mythical afterall.
Please keep in mind that while I do use AI to structure and format my private worldbuilding notes (there is not a single word of AI-generated lore, though), no LLM has touched, or will ever touch, any chapter, paragraph, or sentence in the Steel Song series, itself. Not even to check for punctuation or grammatical errors, because I would rather give you a raw, flawed book that is true to its vision, than a grammatically-perfect, sanitized chunk of text that had its soul scrubbed out of it by an AI.
Anyway... Its here! Its finally happening!
With the ramblings out of the way, let's get on with the thing we're all here for. My dear readers, I give you House of Wolves.