Galaxii – A Journey Into The Uncertain

The Origins Of Galaxii

Galaxii isn’t so much a journey of exploration into the unknown; rather it’s an adventure – a journey into the uncertain. For me it’s a journey I first began about 36 years ago, when I first set myself the goal of writing a novel. It’s all just snowballed from there!

I’ll waffle a bit about how I got into writing – since this was my first series, and “Blachart” my first novel – so if that’s not your thing, and you want to know more about the series and its books rather, scroll down past the waffle to “Blachart”!

In The Beginning

I was always very fortunate in that I received plenty of encouragement for my writing from my mother Yvonne. I have to honestly say that of everyone, she was the one who believed in me the most when it came to that – after all, she’d believed in my father and supported his talents as well.

My dad Theo had been a writer, although he was far less prolific than I, producing just 3 novels and 30 short stories in his entire lifetime. When he died in 1985 I was 12 years old, and he left behind a stack of typed manuscripts, handwritten notes, sketches, and several incomplete novels, plays and a sheaf of musical compositions for the piano. About half of his short stories had been published in special interest magazines during the 1950s, then dramatized for radio broadcast by Springbok Radio during the 1960’s and repeated several times during the 70s and early 80s. A lot of older folks still remember his name from Springbok Radio of those days.

One of the things I remember about my dad the writer, was that he always seemed to hold onto his optimism. He’d sent his novels in to various local and international publishing companies over the years, to no avail (I have all his submissions and the rejection letters on file). Still, even at the age of 55 and while unknowingly drawing close to his untimely death, he was still clinging to his dream of “writing a best seller”. He never had that during his lifetime, and in fact the only time his novels ever made it into print was after I’d edited them extensively and published them myself during the 2000s – culminating in two of them finally being published by Hally Park Publishers in KZN in January this year. Looking back at the struggles I’ve faced as a writer – thirty years of hard slogging and doing it all myself – I have no idea how he held onto that optimism. It seemed bullet proof – and he tried to pass it on to me.

Mom on the other hand had no real aspirations for herself left. An Afrikaans girl who didn’t really speak English well when she married my dad in 1955, she had writing skill and talent of her own, but hadn’t really pursued it very far. She’d written a few unfinished – but very good – stories, and a lot of poetry in both English and Afrikaans – often the same poem just translated into two languages – which takes some doing if you want it done right, believe me! Aside from all that, while dad was an unemployed dreamer dreaming of the day one of his novels would get picked up by a publisher from New York eager to make him wealthy and famous, mom worked two jobs to support the three of us. Dad turned out to be an alcoholic on top of everything, and in 1977, she had enough and got a divorce.

She had no time to spare for writing stories – she had a growing child to support.

When I was a child, I’d grown up in the glow of my dad’s aura of talent – with him being a writer, artist, pianist and composer. Mom encouraged me to write – from childhood, right through to adulthood. Often when I was in a creative slump, it was she who would prod and poke me to motivate me to get back on the horse again.

I find it strange, having also edited and published her poetry in two collections after her death in 2013, how she seemed to not think of herself as having had any linguistic talent or skill as a writer, when she in fact was well endowed with both – and in two languages as opposed to my father’s one.

In spite of everything that could be construed as negative or not-nurturing in all of the above, I was loved by both my parents. Both tried to encourage me to grow as a writer in their own way.

A Little Later

“Galaxii” was my first series, and here I’ll try to explain just how I got there from my first attempts at writing complete stories. This series didn’t just suddenly pop into existence, as is, all done and complete – or even recognizable as the thing it is today. It was a more than thirty year journey of constant change, evolution, growth and development. Let’s start at the beginning.

As I detailed in a previous article, as a child I was always busy writing something, usually short stories or essays for various school assignments. At primary school I would write imaginative pieces for various assignments, and they were basically what you would expect – childish scribblings from a 7 or 8 year old child. They would flow fairly well, be about 500 words long at most, and have appropriate content and endings. I remember I stood out above my peers, probably more because I used better grammar and spelling than most of them, even though I was a year younger, and that’s probably another reason why I stood out more.

I’ve mentioned before that I’d always wanted to be a writer, to tell stories, and so I worked at my craft in my own way. School demanded more and more from the little compositions we had to deliver, and so I delivered. Privately I also started to write on my own, trying to build worlds and describe them in words. I read voraciously and improved my vocabulary to hone my craft. I started to write my first book at age 12, deliberately trying to create a novel instead of a short story, but it didn’t pan out. My struggle in those days, as a 12 or 15 year old teen, was to write anything longer than a very short short story. At the time, I was very good at that already, and received praise from various class teachers for my writing, and later on also for my skill at poetry. The challenge I had to overcome however, was to actually persevere beyond the first part of the story and make it into a novella, or even a novel! Consequently, at first, I gathered little heaps of abortive, attempted novels that ran into a number of A5 or A4 pages of handwritten beginnings that basically led nowhere.

Gradually however, things improved as I grew both as a person and as a writer. Finally, at the age of about 15, all the struggle started to pay off! In those days, writing was done by hand – I had no computer or printer, and even a typewriter of my own was a fantasy. Regardless, the stories that filled my imagination had to come out – and out they did via paper, pen and ink. Writer’s cramp was a reality, folks! I filled scores of A5 notebooks with stories, stapling them together when the story reached the end of the notebook, and continuing into the next empty page! Worse yet, I would continually revise the content, adding and removing bits here and there, improving the story as I myself improved, learned and grew as a writer and as a person. Naturally in those days any changes meant either adding extra loose pages into the manuscript, or crossing out sections, and inevitable, re-writing the whole thing over again by hand! This is why I still have several different manuscripts for the same story in different lengths and under different titles in my archive.

Blachart

From “Galaxy 1” To “Blachart”

My first completed novel-length story became “Blachart“, but it started off as something quite different. I first started working on it when I was about 12 or so, just as I started high school. It started off as “The Red Star”, and its plot was entirely unrecognizable compared to the story as it is now – everything was different, including the title. By the next year, 1987, I’d basically deleted everything except a few key elements and basic characters and started over. At some point during this era, the title also changed to “Galaxy”. I suppose it’s fair to say that from the outset I intended to write a series because the book that would later become “Blachart” was then tentatively titled “Galaxy 1”.

A year later, in 1988, the characters I think readers of “Blachart” would recognize first started to emerge, and the basic plot had evolved into the more familiar story of a starship Captain (then Mykl Nikolls, not the more familiar Mykl d’Angelo) being rescued from his broken down ship – and the introduction of the formidable Corsairs… and the villain, Blachart – then called Black Heart. Blachart the Corsair, his loderunner and it’s deck-layout and design moved from my imagination onto the pages of an A5 “Irish line” notebook, and the story of how the Antares confronted him – and the battle that takes place aboard the Corsair ship, with it.

The character of Ripley Jones, Exo aboard the Antares coalesced as the female lead opposite Mykl d’Angelo (then Nikolls), and basically for the next year or two all that happened in terms of the growth of the story and its plot was to fine-tune the detail. This, again, was done through numerous painstaking rewrites – often undertaken on weekends or during the long quiet of through-the-night writing marathons. I was young then, and filled with energy to write as I listened to the tween-hours music of Radio Orion. I also had the time to spare, and it was something I loved doing. Come daylight of course, I would sleep until mid-morning!

For a time, “Galaxy 1” became “Overkill”, and then “Black Heart”, and then finally “Blachart”. (I had subsequently learned that Blachart was an actual surname, and thought that was just perfect!) It was only natural that, having completed the basic outline and manuscript for the first book, that I would start to wonder what I would write next. Thus it was that at around 1989 I also had a second story in the works, called “Demonspawn“, which consisted of scenes and a sub-plot I felt didn’t really add anything to the existing story of “Blachart“, and so that was scooped out and put aside for “Galaxy 2”. However, for quite some time, that story got sidelined in favor of a prequel I’d decided to slot in in front of my already completed book!

Who Exactly Is This “Blachart” Fella?

Blachart… aka Blachart the Bloody, is a Corsair, a space pirate… but also not just any old space pirate, he’s the commander of a pirate ship and crew who has a little more say and influence over the actions of his crew than an ordinary Corsair. He’s a man who’s risen to the rank of Captain – which given the callous, brutal nature of Corsair life, is no easy feat – and who probably did so by gaining enough support among the crew before either assassinating or challenging his predecessors, and defeating them in single combat.

In spite of the brutal environment he’s risen to prominence in, he isn’t a run-of-the-mill thug; he’s educated, savvy, and shrewd. He’s fond of history – particularly Earth history – which is strange considering he’s never actually been to Earth. Blachart grew up on a Corsair colony somewhere in the Omegan Quadrant, or at least, so the story goes. Wherever he really comes from, the name “Blachart the Bloody” was a name known to most Corsairs – and for the ordinary residents of Meradinis, their homeworld deep in the Omegan Quadrant, the Captains of their Black Fleet are like rock stars and celebrities. Even the colonists on the fringe worlds who experienced frequent Corsair attacks would threaten their kids to eat their broccoli or brussels sprouts else Blachart would come that night and get them!

The Terran Empire has a file on Blachart, under the unseemly name of “Walter Turlington”, but it’s unlikely that this is his actual name. Nor is it likely to be “Adam”, a moniker he uses in “Dead Beckoning” while he tries to reconnect with his true self. Given that, what his real name is remains Blachart’s own secret. Coming back to his affinity for history, he is particularly drawn to military history, and even has a collection of ancient Earth weapons in his study aboard his ship, the Undertaker. There’s a sword he either carries at his side or hides in a safe place which is something special; according to the many myths which had grown around the man, it was called “the Bata’ine” and was gifted to him by Death himself. Whether this myth has any truth to it or not, remains to be confirmed.

He’s also not limited to heterosexual fare, since in the first book he’s already noted for hitting on the male nurses while in care after his capture, aboard the Antares. In the third book in the series, “Dead Beckoning“, Blachart (“Adam”) is trying very hard to not become involved with Marsha, a transwoman who runs the spaceport bar on an underdeveloped new colony called Caries.

As the writer, for me the character of Blachart also evolved over the years. First he was just a stereotypical ‘bad guy’, a villain to be loathed and despised, and for whom I had to direct the reader to loathe and despise. But he’s not like the other villains I’ve written; he’s a character with depth and soul, and I relished transforming him from a mere ‘bad guy’ into that most tantalizing and realistic of roles: the anti-hero.

This is a theme I picked up again in “Dead Beckoning“, where he really comes into his own. Perhaps Blachart’s mindset can be explained further by examining his relationship with Marsha. His friendship with Mykl d’Angelo becomes important to Adam – in fact, it’s a lifeline.

Mykl & Ripley Explained

Mykl d’Angelo, the main character in ‘Blachart’ is a typical straight ‘good-guy’ hero type, who gets the girl and settles down and lives happily ever after… Although I spent a portion of my life wanting to be this, I never was, and so Mykl represents the pre-trans realization version of ‘me’ that was and I wanted to be, aspired to be – but which never materialized. Mykl d’Angelo was at his core a character based on the person I was when I was in high school – which is when I started writing this story.

I gave Mykl the cool name with the funny spelling, but it’s still just “Michael” wearing a funky hat. I wanted to give him a relatively traumatic history, and having to grow up and thrive in a violent war-torn environment on his home world did the job. d’Angelo has been a fighter pilot and air-ace before joining the Terran Space Fleet, where he and his romantic partner Ripley Jones, first met. At the Academy, Mykl was popular due to his reputation as already having been a soldier and being a decorated war hero on his home planet, Eden. Plus, he was a few years older than his classmates. Even after graduation, when serving in the ‘fleet, he’s endured hardship and trauma, and after a bad episode some two years before the start of “Blachart” he’d resigned and set out to reinvent himself as a loderunner skipper tramping freight around the Empire on his decrepit old ship, the Pegasus. This too was not a life of ease and it’s particularly that point which forces his path to again cross with Ripley’s.

Writers use the world around them as inspiration and it would be a lie to claim that the character of Ripley wasn’t inspired by someone in real life. Although I won’t name any names, Ripley is based on a girl I had a crush on at high school – and although it was nearly 40 years ago now, I remember all the drama that ensued in my personal life when things didn’t pan out the way I hoped they would! There the resemblance pretty much ends, and further as time went by, I had to modify the character as circumstances demanded. Here’s another tit-bit for you though: the name for the character was also inspired by the movie Alien: Ripley was the name of Sigourney Weaver’s character, and Jones was her cat!

Whereas Mykl is a tough survivor used to making it with less, Ripley Jones is the polar opposite. She comes from a comfortable background, and had a tendency to “settle” – she chose her career and stuck to it, she entered the Academy directly after finishing high school and once assigned to a starship, very much stuck it out from there, gradually climbing the ladder and just doing her job. Ripley’s cushy past shouldn’t be taken for granted however; she’s a skilled flight officer who’s risen to the rank of Commander while Mykl’s been trying to make a life pushing cargo through the Outblack, and by the time the Antares is sent to rescue him, she’s the Exo to Captain Falcone. When the two meet again, I went to some effort to make it obvious that both were still carrying torches for each other, and it was quite enjoyable to gradually bring them together – even while under fire aboard the Pegasus and through the death of Captain Falcone.

Afterwards, when Mykl exchanges his consultant status to be reinstated as a Space Fleet officer and is assigned as the new Captain of the Antares, it was rather a complex process to not let resentment from Ripley show. I think I managed to pull it off quite well. Working together as a team – both formally and informally, Mykl and Ripley become something of a power-couple in the social structure of the I.S.S. Antares. Mykl has his dream job, and so does Ripley. Each of them has the added bonus of also working together with their most significant other. This dynamic was carried through all the later redrafts and revisions of “Blachart“, and also continued and evolved into the third story that included characters from both the Antares and the Mordrake.

From “Galaxy” To “Galaxii”

The series was then called “Galaxy”, and so I felt that whatever titles the other books had, the first one ought to be called “Galaxy”. Even so, there was something missing from the title as far as I was concerned. It lacked something – and so after mulling over the conundrum, “Galaxy” became “Galaxii” in 1990, and “Blachart” would follow onto “Galaxii” in the series… except that the newer prequel presented me with considerable difficulties of its own at the time. In spite of anything, I finished the handwritten drafts for both “Blachart” and “Galaxii” during 1990.

Mom, always eager to support my writing in any way she could, typed both manuscripts for me on her electronic typewriter which she worked on at home for her second job. Both were entered into local writing contests, but nothing ever came of them. I’m not bitter about that, since that was more than 30 years ago now, and both I and those same stories are now very different animals.

“Blachart” was completely redrafted in 1998 when I rewrote the entire story over on A4 paper – it was the last time I would ever do it that way. In 2003 I first began to use a PC to type on, and the first book I digitized was “Blachart“. That alone opened a whole new realm of possibilities for me as a writer! Over time, I began to digitize all my other stories, editing and correcting and modifying them as I did so – made so much easier, simpler and seamless by this amazing tool of the digital age! The pet-name for the Antares became “the Ant-arse”. This was the result of something that didn’t happen when handwriting manuscripts: typos – and that’s the anagrammatic truth of it!

When I finally entered the self-publishing ring in 2005, “Blachart” was the very first book I published. It was right here that “Blachart” finally became the story 100% recognizable as it is today – although it has been revised a number of times since then with each subsequent new edition, the changes were minor and cosmetic ones. In the meantime, the prequel “Galaxii” remained in limbo. I wasn’t quite happy with it, and wouldn’t be for quite some time to come – in fact, it was only eventually published in 2020 – and as a standalone novel entitled “Best Served Cold” which alluded to the Galaxii Series without forming an integral part of it. “Blachart” then, remained the first book in the series. So as far as the actual series as it was originally conceived is concerned, the layout is still very much as I originally intended! It’s quite astounding to realize that, considering it’s been almost 40 years since I embarked on this journey!

There are quite a few reviews and reader’s comments for “Blachart“, below are a few that mean most to me:

• “This is another great adventure from a little known writer who definitely deserves more recognition!“
• “If this is your first experience of Christina Engela my best advice would be to sit back and enjoy!“
• “I wasn’t a fan of the genre, this book changed that. Sci-fi gained a fan because of you!
• “There’s so much in this story that I could talk about but I don’t want to spoil anything but do strongly suggest that, if you like Buck Rogers, Firefly or Pirate stories you give this book a go as I thoroughly enjoyed everything it had to offer.“
• “Sheesh, where to start with this book? Simply put, it has everything! There’s adventure, space battles, fistfights, pirates and, of course. romance.“
• “The classic tale of a hero who doesn’t intend to be one. Engaging and fast paced… the speed of light is not a challenge to these space faring pirates and the people out to chase them.“
• “I haven’t given a book review, although I have read more than a hundred, maybe two hundred. But this is the first sci fi action book that made me feel like I was there with these characters. It was AWESOME and unbelievably real to me.“
• “At times tense, at other times funny, Christina manages to maintain a healthy balance between humour and excitement – producing a first novel that is as easy to read as it is a joy to experience. Truly this is one of the very best sci-fi novels that I have read all year!”
• “From shootouts to car chases this book has everything fans of sci fi action could want. It’s imaginative, highly readable and fun much like many of Christina Engela’s works which I highly recommend!“

Demonspawn

After I’d finished the first digital draft of “Blachart” in 2003, I continued working on digitizing my other books as well. Right at the top of my list of stuff to do was “Demonspawn“.

I wrote this story because I was enamored with the idea of a space ship crew exploring a sinister, ruined alien ship in deep space, gradually being killed off by what seemed like accidents, until it became obvious that they were being hunted by something the last crew of the ancient vessel had left behind. “Demonspawn” was an exercise in learning the ropes of writing suspense, knowing where and when to apply tension, and how to get characters into a jam… and out again, if they are so lucky. After years of working on “Blachart” and focusing so intensely on the Corsair aspects of that story, I wanted to do something different. Yes, “Demonspawn” is part of “Galaxii”, and in that timeline the Corsairs still posed a threat and took up the most of the Space Fleet’s time and attention, so what else could I write about that wasn’t Corsair oriented? A catastrophe in deep space? An accident? Or perhaps the crew might encounter something enticing – a relic of some sort, that offered the opportunity to gain either knowledge or advanced technology?

The first drafts of “Demonspawn” operated on the third suggestion – the Antares simply ran across a derelict alien spacecraft and stopped to investigate. Later drafts showed all these elements – the Antares suffered a breakdown and needed to stop, decided the alien ship might have some spare parts they could use – and then, as the saying goes, along came a spider.

Originally, this story started out with the same characters as the previous book, but over time I felt I needed to explore new characters. So it was that around 2003, Commander Joe Lofflin, accompanied by the entire cast of characters from another short story I’d written in the meantime called “Horner’s World” moved over to “Demonspawn“, leaving only the plot intact, although merged with that of the short story as well. Similar to the crew in “Demonspawn“, the crew of the Mordrake have survived an intense battle with a Corsair raider in deep space and suffered catastrophic damage to their ship. In fact, they have just days left to live before the air runs out. They also must deal with the discovery that in the chaos and breakdown of the aftermath, someone has murdered their Captain.

I felt these elements could add immeasurable value to the whole that would become the new “Demonspawn“. The biggest reason I can think of for this drastic merger and all the work it entailed, was to tell a bigger, more dramatic and suspenseful story, but this option also created a few clashes and conflicts of its own, for example: The acting-Captain or lead character in “Horner’s World” (Lofflin) was gay, while the Captain of Antares (“Mykl d’Angelo) was not – and I really wanted to write “Demonspawn” with a gay action hero, so Mykl had to go! Because he had to go, everything else did too! Of course I didn’t want to just kill off one of my favorite characters, so instead I would revise the story to have other characters. This would be a separate story featuring a separate ship and a separate crew of characters. I happened to think of the characters from “Horner’s World”, which was a favorite among my short stories – it was action-packed and exciting, and I could hear it begging to be longer and more… So I obliged.

This merger necessitated a lengthy string of changes, including the setting for the story, which became the Mordrake instead of the Antares. Originally Joe Lofflin’s name was Mike, and it went to print as such the first time round – but I realized while I was writing the later sequel “Dead Beckoning” (2007) which placed both characters together in the same story, that having two Michaels in the same scenes didn’t really help things flow all that well – so I went back and changed it. Thus Lofflin became Joe. If you happen to find one of the first editions floating around where Lofflin is still “Mike”, hold on to it, it could be worth something one day!

Looking back, this merger was definitely not a bad thing. I loved the chemistry of the Mordrake’s crew and I felt that could really carry the weight of the sort of story “Demonspawn” really wanted to be. Plus, I really enjoyed exploring Lofflin’s personality and his character, and it made a nice change to think of a gay lead character who led from the front without anyone thinking of it as anything out of the ordinary.

“Demonspawn” also gave me the opportunity to create perhaps my most memorable villain. When I first started writing “Demonspawn” – which was back in the early 1990’s – I wanted to create a villain, a nemesis, a kind of monstrous adversary that could survive almost forever – a kind of undying evil that could lie in wait for its next prey to come sauntering up to it, obliviously. Readers are introduced to the curiously named, ominous and sinister Akx, an entity that butchered the original alien crew of the derelict ship on which Lofflin and his away teams must hunt for spare parts to repair the Mordrake, and which lurks in the shadows, venturing closer and closer until it finally claims its first victim in thousands of years. The Akx is a creature of nightmares – it’s a predator. It preys on it’s target’s weaknesses, and in inspiring terror, it fulfills some need which drives it to want more. Being armored and powerful, it is also pretty much impervious to unprepared attacks. Because it is also a master of camouflage, it’s also difficult to track or detect. However, the Akx isn’t the only villain which the valiant surviving members of the starship Mordrake have to face in the story – but it is definitely the more terrifying!

The finished version of “Demonspawn” went out in 2005, after which I took it down again in 2014 because I signed a contract with a traditional small press publisher. They edited it, before republishing it in 2015 with a new cover of their own design, and it was taken down again in 2016 when they had a meltdown and full-blown identity crisis about being a “pure horror publisher” stuck with far more sci-fi than they intended! It wasn’t long before I had “Demonspawn” and the others back up again on my own terms. “Demonspawn” has been revised several times through various editions since, and is presently on its 6th edition.

There have been some great reviews of “Demonspawn” over the years, here are a few that stand out to me:

• “Christina seems to have a knack for writing villains. With the Akx she really raised the bar. I felt suspense filling my whole body while reading. It kept me reading up till late to find out what happens.”
• “The best part about the story was the quality writing. Excellent description. Good pacing. Recommend.“
• “Really enjoyed reading this one. I had a hard time putting it down. Every page leaves you with a burning desire to find out what happens next. The way she writes this book makes it so easy to picture the entire story in your head. Its more like watching a movie than reading a book!!“
• “A riveting blend of horror and science fiction.“
• “With excellent writing, brilliant narration and more than a few dry laughs, this is an absolute must for all fans of sci-fi horror adventures.“
• “This Sci-fi thriller brings everything to the table, murder, suspense, action, love. A real page turner by Christina Engela.”

but this one really encompasses what they all have to say:

Galaxii has meant more to me than just four books – it’s been a lifetime journey that started roughly 36 years ago, into which I’ve invested time, effort, blood, sweat and tears – and it still isn’t over! In achieving my first goal of writing my first novel, this achievement led to more books – my first series – and then two more series containing nine more novels. I’ve also written a number of standalone novels, novellas and others so far. Better yet, as I approach 50, my writing career is really only getting off the ground!

I hope you’ve enjoyed my recollection of why I created this series, how it came about, and my reminiscences of the stories and what each of them mean to me!

“Galaxii” is on sale at Smashwords in eBook format, and via Amazon in eBook, paperback and hardcover.