Posted by Joey Peters on Oct 27, 2025
Greetings pals, I just wanted to give an update on what I’ve been working on.
In a typical year June tends to be very busy for me, but for whatever reason work hasn’t slowed down since then. It’s fine. I’ve been neck deep in community organizing stuff and the end in sight is maybe the middle of November, pending any further disasters (a bad bet to make right now, I suppose). The down side is that I haven’t had as much time for my personal creative pursuits as I would like.
The other effect is I’m less interested in writing about topics related to the community organizing I’ve been involved in. Like I have been working on a guide to protest marshaling, but when I’m out doing that two or three times a week for months on end it’s hard to get the motivation to sit down and actually write that out, so it remains a halfway done draft. I think for this month I’m going to write a movie review about one of my favorite weird bad horror movies. Expect that later this week.
But the other thing I’ve had bubbling in the background is Refugees from Utopia. It’s the followup to my last science fiction novel, Dissidents of Utopia. The events very much follow up on the events of that one, continuing the adventures of starship Gagarin, now impressed into service to hunt down Venture, now a rogue vessel after the events of the first book. Meanwhile an old forgotten threat from the history of the galaxy has reawakened and threatens the Union of Sovereign Planets’ Utopian society.
I finished the first draft earlier in the year and have been plugging away on the first editing pass. I want to do one more editing pass to beat the structure into shape, but I’m making progress. These things are basically fully self-indulgent for me, because what publisher is going to publish a brutal socialist critique of Star Trek? Indeed, that essay I wrote last month came out of the ideas that inspired the DOU series. I’m hoping to be done with RFU by the end of the year. Donors will get first dibs once I’m more or less happy with it, then I’ll release it on all platforms where fine ebooks are sold and make the first book free.
Prewriting has begun for Radio Free Mars, the next sequel. From the beginning the first three books have been somewhat solid ideas and I haven’t let myself think about what future books in the series will look like.