I'm proud to share the official Blood Dawn map!

After more than 15 months working carefully on the draft for Blood Dawn, I enjoyed a much-deserved break during the holidays. One thing I got around to doing that I've been looking forward to the most is drawing the map for the world.

Some of you have seen the sketch of the world (it's in the third sample chapter on my project page). This map is much more detailed and put together with care. It came together like magic, in fact. I'm very pleased!

p.s. think this is cool? If you haven't bought Blood Dawn, then now is the time! This map will appear in the book, and is but a foretaste of the rich adventure waiting for you.

Hey guys. Thought you might get a kick out of this...

Many of the ships from our story are available as 3D printed collectables. Here's one i've hand painted.

...

Check out our online store and grab yourself one. :)

https://www.shapeways.com/shops/byteshop

The Trekonomics New Year's Update

Dear readers, followers and friends of Trekonomics,

I am very happy to report that after two months of furious rewriting and editing, the final manuscript has been sent for copy-editing. We are on track for our late-spring 2016 release.

A lot of coordination is involved in producing a book. I am discovering the age-old process of designing a cover and gathering all the elements for the book's jacket as well the so-called "front matter" (that is, all the text and pages that are not part of the manuscript itself).  

Speaking of the book's front matter, we are planning a neat little surprise. It will be revealed in time (and I will not say anything more lest I jinx it). 

The cover is being designed by the incredibly talented Jennifer Bostic (http://www.paperplanestudio.com/) and John Powers (http://johnpowers.us/, as well his essential blog http://starwarsmodern.blogspot.com/). It is an awesome privilege to work with artists of their caliber. We will share the cover design and artwork with all of you as soon as it is blocked and finalized, within the next few weeks. 

2016 will mark the 50th anniversary of Star Trek's first airing on NBC. The exact date is September 8 at 8:30PM Eastern Time.  For that occasion, the US Postal Service will release a series of four commemorative stamps. Here they are in all their glory:

"Forever" means that they will be forever good for first-class letters, regardless of future price increases. Hopefully, we will be able to ship some of your pre-orders with these stamps on the envelopes.

As a final note, I am happy to announce that I am contributing to Fusion.net's Real Future on a regular basis. You can set your RSS readers to: http://fusion.net/author/manu-saadia/ or follow me on twitter (@trekonomics).  My latest piece was on Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

We will be in touch very soon. In the meantime, a happy and felicitous New Year.

Live Long, and Prosper

Manu