Talking In The Shadow Of The Dragon with Craig A. Reed Jr.

What’s great about the recent spat of BattleTech novels is many of them are pushing the boundaries of the universe’s fiction. That’s not to say there isn’t still plenty of big, stompy ‘Mech action, but a universe can’t run on giant robots. It’s the human stories that drive the narrative, and it doesn’t get more personal than a murder most foul!

In The Shadow of the Dragon, from author Craig A. Reed Jr., takes readers into a murder mystery set in the Draconis Combine. The strange murder of a nurse on Luthien sends a dedicated detective into the dangerous world of Combine politics, and it’s just as dangerous in 3150 as it was in 3039.

To get the lowdown on the story, I sat down with Craig to discuss In The Shadow of the Dragon and his many contributions to expanding the BattleTech universe.

Sean: We are live! Thanks again for agreeing to be interviewed for Sarna. We’ll be talking about your latest book, In the Shadow of the Dragon, a detective drama that covers some new territory for BattleTech. I don’t think we’ve had a detective drama before, which I found very interesting. 

But first, let’s have you introduce yourself in case nobody knows who you are. Although, with the amount of stuff you’ve written, I can’t imagine how that might be. 

Craig: Okay. My name is Craig A. Reed Jr., and I write for BattleTech. In the Shadow of the Dragon is my fifth novel in the BattleTech universe, and I’ve written almost 40 short stories between BattleCorps and Shrapnel.

Started way back in 1985. Walked into a hobby store in Laurel, Maryland, where I was living at the time, and I saw this box set, which was a Second Edition. Picked it up, and from there, through the 80s, through most of the 90s, was a regular player. In the late 90s, I kind of drifted away, and came back to it about 2005. When BattleCorps opened up, I started submitting stories, they liked them, they published them, and that’s how I got to 40 short stories.

Sean: That’s quite a lot. 

Craig: While there, BattleCorps was meeting a couple of other guys. Wrote short stories for, oh, about 10 years or so, and then John Helfers came to me and said, “Well, how would you like to write a full novel?” And that’s where Icons of War came from.

They decided that in one of the writer’s meetings they had Garner Kerensky, who was a saKhan at the time for Clan Wolf, had disappeared, and Anastasia had replaced him, but no one knew what happened to him. So someone suggested that the reason why Garner wasn’t there is he had gone to go get the McKenna’s Pride.

So the story I had to write was, how do I get the McKenna’s Pride from the Clan Homeworlds to the Inner Sphere? I told them I could do it in 20,000 words, but the actual novel ended up being about 45,000 words. I hadn’t done much research before I started writing, but I quickly learned that some things couldn’t be changed.

One of them was that McKenna’s Pride was still in the Clan Homeworlds in 3076. Because the Clans used it as the lead ship in their attack to destroy the Steel Vipers. I also realized that Vlad Ward was not going to send JumpShips a year out to a hostile homeworld where he didn’t know what the heck was going on.

So he decided that he was going to take all the Kerensky stuff in one swoop, including the body of Aleksandr Kerensky. They were going to steal Kerensky’s body and leave when the rest of the Wolves took Nicholas and Andery’s legacies with them. It was supposed to be all one shot, but of course, something went wrong, and they had to re-plan and live because they couldn’t steal the ship in the middle of the war.

What started out as a simple mission became probably the most outrageous heist/caper in BattleTech history. One does not go around stealing WarShips. 

Sean: No sir!

Craig: And from there, I got the three Elements of Treason novels based on the Tamar Rising sourcebook.

Elements of Treason: Duty was the Tamar Pact’s formation. Elements of Treason: Opportunity was Vedet Brewer forming the Vesper Marches. Elements of Treason: Honor was our first good look at Clan Hell’s Horses, and because of that, they gave me the go-ahead to double the size over the other two. So it’s a thick novel.

Sean: That it is, but it’s also an interesting book because Clan of Hell’s Horses up until that point had always been sort of the punching bag Clan. If you need a Clan to get the crap beaten out of it, you send in the Horses with their silly little tanks. Honor is the first story we get to see them in a different light.

Craig: Yeah. Just knew that I had to string some events together and hit a few plot points with certain characters. And it worked for the most part. 

The newest one, In the Shadow of the Dragon, is an anomaly. As I’ve said before, I wrote that blind. Just a story came to me, I wrote it out, sent the first draft to John, and asked, can you use this? And John said, “Yes, we can use this.” 

Sean: And here we are talking about it. 

Craig: I was lucky as John said he wanted something to look at the Draconis Combine. This just fell into his lap.

As of right now, I’m writing the first book of the Wars of Reaving Trilogy, with Jason Hansa writing the second book, and Philip Lee writing the third book. I’ve got most of the first draft done, and once we get all three, I daresay we’ll sit down and see what needs to be changed to smooth the story. Right now we’re writing independently, but we’re keeping everyone up to date on what we’re doing.

Sean: That ought to be very interesting since we still don’t have a lot of information on the Wars of Reaving or what’s been happening in the Clan Homeworlds.

Just another quick question before we dive into In the Shadow of the Dragon: what BattleTech games have you played? Have you gotten into any of the computer games or has it been just mostly tabletop? 

Craig: The last one I played was MechWarrior 3. My computer’s not up to MechWarrior 5 level.

Played tabletop regularly through the ‘80s and ‘90s. Now, I’ll catch an occasional game on here, but my time is kind of limited at the moment. I played off Alpha Strike a couple of times. Good game, but it doesn’t have the crunch that BattleTech does. Great for large battalion-against-battalion action. 

Sean: Yeah, it does lose some of the nuances when you don’t have to worry about specific limbs being blown off, and it just is 2d6 every single time. But I still appreciate Alpha Strike for speeding things up so you can finish a game in a few hours rather than all afternoon.

Craig: Yeah, that’s the one advantage it has,  it’s a quicker game. You can finish it up in a few hours as opposed to a weekend, using BattleTech on the same scale. 

Sean: Now we of course will get to the all-important question, what’s your favorite ‘Mech?

Craig: I like the Victor.

Soft spot for the SuburbanMech, and of course the Rattlesnake. To be fair, the Rattlesnake is not my design; that was a friend of mine who unfortunately passed away a few years back. But SuburbanMech was mostly mine. My real claim I have to the Rattlesnake is I named it.

Sean: Let’s talk about In the Shadow of the Dragon. This is a bit of a departure for you since I don’t think you’ve written a whole lot about Draconis Combine. Did you have any concerns about this being out of your comfort zone? Or was it exciting to get to take on a new aspect of BattleTech?

Craig: I’ve written for the Draconis Combine before. In fact, one of the characters in In the Shadow of the Dragon, I wrote about his great grandfather in A Matter of Honor, which is a short story that was in BattleCorps. I’ve written several Draconis Combine stories. Actually, I think I’ve written for all the major factions at least once. The great-grandfather was Jason Imaidegawa, while the great-grandson was Justin Imaidegawa. 

Sean: Ah, okay. Unfortunately, I didn’t read that particular short story, so I didn’t catch that reference. 

Craig: I know John wants to get the BattleCorps stories out in print. It’s just so many of them that it’s tough getting them all. 

Sean: But I’ve heard they’re going to reissue the BattleCorps Anthology fairly soon. 

Craig: That’s the first one they’re doing, the one with a new cover. I don’t know if there’ll be any new stories in it, but there are only about eight or nine anthologies out.

I believe there’s one that will be coming out soon called Honor Code, which is Draconis Combine focused. I have a story in that, so hopefully we’ll see that soon.

Sean: I think you mentioned earlier that In the Shadow of the Dragon didn’t really have a lot of source material to draw from. I skimmed through Shattered Fortress, which leads up to 3150, and it didn’t mention any of the events covered in your story. How much freedom did you have to create this story in terms of following the existing BattleTech canon? 

Craig: Particularly a lot. I mean, I had Yori and Toranaga, but those two characters have been dominating the Combine scene for several years. Everyone else I had to create.

I had a lot of room on that. I couldn’t go for a full rebellion of course, as I had to keep it to one planet, and the fact that the HPG system’s not working well would make it hard for that news to get out, especially if the ISF had anything to say about it, which they usually do.

I had the freedom to create the Civilian Guidance Corps Detective Bureau because I couldn’t see the ISF investigating simple murders or robberies or anything like that. They wouldn’t have the manpower, so let the civilian police handle the simple crimes while the ISF worries about interstellar crimes, espionage, and that type of stuff.

And I created the Office of Special Investigations, which the lead character ends up leading. That was simple to do because there’d been a long history of clandestine infighting in the Draconis Combine, and if the Coordinator needed to, they could activate this bureau if for some reason they couldn’t trust the ISF. 

The thing about the Office is it’s a very powerful position. You’re only reporting to one person: the Coordinator. The coordinator provides the Office with anything they need. If you have to go somewhere, transportation is provided. If you have to talk to someone, you can do so no matter who or where they are. And they have the power to bring in other agencies to help them. The ISF doesn’t like it too much, but they will cooperate if they’re forced to.

I also created a lot of the other characters, most of the ones around Yori. And well, can’t say I really created the bad guys, I just kind of gave them a new life.

Sean: I also don’t think we’ve ever had a detective drama. What made you want to write a detective drama set in the BattleTech universe?  

Craig: It just felt right, how simple crime just suddenly snowballs, goes from a murder to political intrigue involving both the ISF and Order of the Five Pillars.

Then it just became a matter of drawing out the investigation, unraveling the mystery while the main character, Russell Blaylock, tries to stay out of politics. He believes in the law, his guide is the law. Politics are foreign to him.

He’s trying to solve this crime, trying to stay out of the political situation, but it gets to the point where he has to get involved in politics to solve this murder. He doesn’t like that. He’s a cop. He’s not a political bureaucrat. But I had to write enough of the crime novel to show that he was making progress despite the politics. 

The Five Pillars also get some screen time, which is unusual because they’ve always been in the background. And that also allowed me to create a new Keeper of the Family Honor. Now, Makoto Kurita is the great-granddaughter of Mies Kurita. He was the last governor of the Rasalhague District before it declared independence.

Mies’ thing was he got along with people who otherwise wouldn’t get along with anyone. And Makoto kind of inherited some of that ability. She also wields a mean naginata. She has to. I’m talking about the polearm and not the ‘Mech.

Sean: It’s important to distinguish between those two because they both exist.

Craig: What’s interesting is in Medieval Japan the naginata was usually taught to young women to defend their homes, so you attack a village and run into a wall of naginata. Even today, young women in Japan are taught how to use the naginata. 

That would also allow me to bring in the concept of the  Kensei, which is what they call sword saints. In the Combine, these are men and women who are so good with the sword you would have to be crazy to challenge them. They also have a strong moral code that holds the standards of the Combine. To be declared a Kensei by the Coordinator basically means you can write your own ticket.

Sean: How much research went into the Japanese language and culture for In the Shadow of the Dragon? You mentioned that you had to look up the ranking system for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. What other things did you have to look up for In the Shadow of the Dragon?

Craig: Well, originally when I said I wrote this blind, so I did not realize I did not know about the other novels that were going on at this time like Damocles Sanction and it ended up being moved back from 3151 to 3150.

Research. Well, Luthien at this time is kind of a blank slate because it was rebuilt after the Jihad. I created an open area around the palace—you know, the plaza where most of the climactic fight happens. But beyond that, just making sure I’ve got the right equipment at the right time. That’s why you see one character piloting a Shiro, for example.

It’s mostly imagination mixed in with a little research. If I can make things viable, such as the ranking system then I’ll do so. I like to use as much reality as I can, instead of trying to figure out my own system for the police department—the Civilian Guidance Corps—just borrow one.

Sean: That does lead to another question I had. What’s with the pink-and-white suits for the ‘Friendly Persuaders’? That just seems like an out-there uniform choice. 

Craig: Because that’s what they’re dressed in. 

Sean: Really? 

Craig: All the way back in 3025. Yeah, they were wearing these outfits.

Sean: Oh yeah, you’re right. Man, that’s a look.

Craig: Yeah. Blaylock doesn’t because he is a detective so he can wear civilian clothes, but that’s the way they dressed. I don’t know why. I mean, it looks a little bit like a clown suit. Only in this case, the clowns are heavily armed and don’t take too kindly being made fun of. 

Sean: I’ll keep my opinions to myself I guess.

There are a lot of spy tropes in the story. In addition to being a detective drama, the story eventually gets into spycraft and intelligence work. There are a lot of spy tropes, like hollow teeth with cyanide pills, secret finger codes, and lots of silenced weapons, including at one point a silenced anti-materiel rifle. What spy trope did you wish you could include in Shadow of the Dragon but just couldn’t? 

Craig: Well, I couldn’t include all the neat gadgets that the James Bond types have. Probably be about the only thing. But there are different tropes for different things. For example, the hand signals are with the Order of the Five Pillars. Cyanide and the anti-materiel rifle are the bad guys. Blaylock isn’t a spy, so couldn’t give him any neat spy stuff.

Sean: That’s all I had for In The Shadow of the Dragon. So what’s next for you and BattleTech? You mentioned that you’re working on a book set during the Wars of Reaving, and that’ll take us to around 3080?

Craig: Maybe a little bit past, but I’m writing the first book, which covers the opening of The Wars of Reaving. My book is The Wars of Reaving: Poisoned Honor. You get a good look at the Wars of Reaving from the beginning of 3071. Jason covers the middle with Corrupted Honor, and Phil ends with Shattered Honor. I haven’t really read through theirs yet, because I’m working on getting mine done.

I think what will happen is, once we get all three done, we’ll sit down and see what needs to be moved out. Because right now we’re kind of writing independently of each other. Giving each other a date on how far we’ve gone to get them all matched up. The Wars of Reaving is a great book, but it’s densely packed. Sometimes it’s as simple as a date. Other times… one of the saKhans for one of the Clans Is mentioned twice in the book, but it never mentions their first name. But I’m fairly certain that there will be some overlap in the timeline between three books. 

In some ways, I think I’ve got the easiest because I’ve got one set of events that I can work with. Jason may have a few scenes that happen during the time of my book, and there’s no doubt some of Phil’s scenes will be.

Hopefully we’ll have these first drafts done before the end of summer. I don’t want to put a timeline on when they will be published because we have to sit down and analyze the novel’s timeline. If a character appears in my book, does he go through Jason’s book and then Phil’s book? Or is there another character that goes from Jason to Phil’s? Does a character that appears in my book end up being killed in Phil’s book? Like that. 

Sean: Make sure it all lines up.

Craig: Yeah. And John is keeping an eye on us so we don’t get up to too many shenanigans. 

Sean: I trust in John to keep three stories straight.

Craig: The thing is, there are so many stories there that haven’t been told yet, and it’s partly been because we haven’t had that many authors. 

That’s one of the reasons why Shrapnel is such a great vehicle. It shows if you can write short stories—consistently write short stories—then John will offer you a novella. If you’ve shown that you can write a good novella, you’ll work your way up to novels.

For the last 10 years, the biggest holdup has been the number of authors we’ve had has been such a small number. We lost authors like Victor Milan, who’s passed on, and others have left for one reason or another. I mean, you can get a novel or two out of Stackpole, but can’t rely on him to be the main man. In fact, it’s better that you don’t have a main man. You have a core of five or six authors do the heavy lifting, and bring in new authors as they work their way up the ladder. 

My personal opinion, I think those young guys coming up who want to write a novel, give them something from the past. We got the Amaris Civil War, you got the Reunification War. There are so many blank spots that you could easily write a novel in.

Catalyst is really heavy with the ilClan because it’s a brand-new era. It’s brand new territory. There’s nothing to worry about as far as having hit certain points that have been mentioned in the past. So if A wants to invade B, they can, provided they’ve been approved by the story committee. And it’s great because no one knows what’s coming. I mean, I’m told of the basic timeline, but a lot of stuff that I don’t know about I’ll find out the same time as everybody else.

At the same time, we’ll talk about some problems that were set up in the past. Like in the Jihad, like in the Succession Wars, the Amaris Civil War. There are whole sections of history that haven’t been really looked at yet. That’s the great thing about BattleTech; you don’t have to rely on a small core character group.

You look at Star Trek, for the most part, you’re looking at the crews from TV series. You’re thinking of Captain Kirk, Captain Picard, or Captain Archer. In BattleTech, you don’t have to worry about including more characters. If you want to write a story about a mercenary unit that gets involved in a certain battle, you got carte blanche. You don’t have to worry about accidentally crossing over to someone else’s territory.

BattleTech is basically the background. What you need to do is add characters and plot, and then you mix in the details from the universe into that. That’s where you get the stories from. Get these interesting characters into interesting situations, and see if they can get out of it. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.

Sean: Speaking of those characters you’ve written quite a few of them. Which characters do you have a particular soft spot for and would love to revisit at some point? Either from your novels or from your short stories. 

Craig: I like revisiting characters.

Ansgar Shurasky was originally in the short story Thirteen, also in a sequel called Laws are Silent. The first one was in BattleCorps, the second in Shrapnel. One character is Precentor Gazael, he appeared in a couple of BattleCorps stories. He was challenged to write because everyone sees Manei Domini one way. And I had to make him at least sympathetic enough so you didn’t hate his guts all the time. Ulysses Steiner, I did a couple of stories on. He is an infantry officer and relative to the Archon. 

I think if there’s room for it to go back and use a character, then reuse a character. Ansgar Shurasky, I’ve got two or three other half written about him and his time on Tharkad. Gazael, I’ve got two more stories for him. I’ve got an idea for Ulysses Steiner. 

Vengeance Games, which was serialized in Shrapnel magazine. I picked up a character that I’d used in a story that Rob and I submitted to BattleTechnology. It was issue 21, the last issue. That was where you first saw the Rattlesnake. It was a story called Snake Dance. In a scenario called Snake, Rattle, and Roll, which I did not come up with the scenario name, neither one of us did. I took the character from that story and put him in Vengeance Games and made the main character the son of another character from that BattleTechnology story.

I also like running multiple generations of a family. House Imaidegawa, for example, is one such. I have a great-grandfather in one story. I have a great-grandson as a character in In The Shadow of the Dragon. Three White Roses, a character related to one from Vengeance Games, from the same family, but just different branches.

In Elements of Treason: Duty, Sarah Regis’s aide is Ansgar Shurasky’s grandson, and he is piling the same Zeus Ansgar did during the time on Tharkad during the Word of Blake occupation. That’s where those stories are based on. I love showing multiple generations of the same family.

Cause that’s what BattleTech is: It’s a generational thing. Could do a story about every single generation and family down through the years, through different events.

Sean: Here’s a question from a Sarna staffer. As you mentioned earlier, you were involved in the creation of the Rattlesnake and the SuburbanMech. What was it like being able to canonize these mechs in Shrapnel? 

Craig: Well, the SuburbanMech was mostly mine, that was just me. What happens when you replace the Autocannon with a PPC and make it a bit faster. My friend Rob made the Rattlesnake. It was originally part of a series of three or four ‘Mechs we would use to set up a hammer-and-tong type of tactic. Rob took a Jenner, replaced the engine with an XL, gunned it up, and gave it enough heat sinks where it could fire everything without building up a lot of heat.

He came up with the design. I came up with the name because it’s a nasty little ‘Mech. Moves 7/11 and has seven Medium Lasers. Now, if you’re part of a C3 unit, You can put a C3 Slave on that and you’ve got automatic targeting, basically.

I’ve made sure that Rob gets the credit for it. I’ve canonized him a couple of times as the designer and creator of Phoenix Industries in Vengeance Games. And I also tuckerized him as a leader of the SDLF division in the Star League sourcebook. It’s good to have them finally what’s the word? Finally legitimized, I guess you’d call it. 

And I’ve had a few people mark on how nasty that Rattlesnake can be. I used it in a tournament once at a convention. I got behind a Crusader, and after three turns that Crusader was down because seven Medium Lasers in the back is not something a lot of ‘Mechs would come back from.

Sean: Not many at all. 

Craig: It’s not a stand-up fighter, it just gets in, cuts, and leaves. And the scenario we had for that was three of those Rattlesnakes going up against a Masakari. All the Masakari had to do was get out of a box canyon, and both times I played with Rob, it didn’t make it. Because those ‘Snakes were fast enough they could get into the back arc and really wreak havoc on the Maskari’s rear armor. 

I’m glad to see both of them canonized. 

Also, I should mention, there was a Thunder Stallion variant. It just happened that on one of the BattleTech Facebook groups, a guy had just lost his wife. He designed a Thunder Stallion variant for her, and he really wanted it to be canonized. We talked it over, and we agreed that we could do that. So I wrote up the background on it, used his wife as the pilot and he was happy because his wife’s ‘Mech is now official. 

The second proudest thing I’ve ever done. The proudest thing I’ve ever done was, I was writing for the Total Chaos sourcebook. I wrote everything for Gannon’s Cannons, which is one of the three mercenary names to follow throughout the book.

Gannon Deer at the time, well, had leukemia at like six years old, and his father was a Catalyst agent. He asked the community if they would help keep his son’s spirits up by sending him ‘Mechs. They created a paint scheme for the unit to use, and I think Ganon named himself Ganon’s Ganons. 

So when it came time to write the sourcebook, it was given basically two characters: Ganon Deer and Amanda Wolfe. I wrote the introductory text for each of the scenarios that the Cannons were involved in and also wrote the aftermath. I switched between Ganon Deer’s view and the view of a Wolfnet spy in the Cannons. Only at the end do you find out who the spy is. 

It was nice just being able to canonize the Cannons. Last I heard, Gannon had joined the Marines I think. I think he joined the Marines. So he’s made a full recovery.

Sean: That’s good to hear. And good that he’s going on to do some big things. 

Alright, that’s most of the questions I had. I did have one other quick question for you. I did do a quick Amazon search for your other works and you apparently have a new book coming out about the Ukraine-Russia war. 

Craig: That’s been out for a while.

Sean: Oh, it has? 

Craig: That is a story that sticks in my craw. I was contacted by a friend I knew through the message boards. He’s a good guy and proposed what would have been the first of a number of books about the Russian-Ukraine war. The idea was we would write one about ever six months, and bring people up to date, and, basically show what was going on from a somewhat objective point of view.

So, we wrote it. Remember the old Game Designer Workshop books on the Gulf War? The idea was this would do the same thing. It was only for people who wanted to know what was going on, but it was also for war gamers. 

Sean: Right. 

Craig: As I wrote it, I realized that we had to explain what the situation was because this was not something that happened overnight. This had been brewing for centuries. It boils down to Ukrainians don’t think of themselves as Russians. The Russians think Ukrainians are Russian, but the Ukrainians don’t. So I had to include a chapter on history. 

What’s interesting about World War II is, yeah, you had Ukrainians that were fighting for the Nazis. You also had sizable contingents in the American Army, Canadian Army, and Russian Army. They were probably the biggest group that didn’t have a country that was presented among the ranks of all the other armies.

Then I detailed what led up to this and the opening month or so that the Russians attacked and ended after they retreated back north.

Anyway, the friend and his wife owned the company, and they were going to use social media to advertise the book. Only last minute, Facebook and Twitter deep-sixed the ad campaigns because they thought it was propaganda. I tried very hard to not make it propaganda, but it killed sales. 

They tried to pre-order on Amazon, but evidently, Kindle couldn’t handle a book that was so dense with pictures. I was paid, but I feel bad because I think it’s a good book. It’s a perfect primer if you want to know what the hell is going on politically and what happened in the opening moves of the war. We had hoped to do another book every six months, with the next one starting with the sinking of the Moskva and maybe the Ukrainian counterattack. 

It’s a very unusual war. It’s the biggest one in Europe since World War II. Combines World War I trenches and ultra-modern drones. Ukrainians have absolutely exploded when it comes to drones, even to spot for artillery. They’ll fly them over Russian defenses and drop bombs on them, small grenades or mortar shells. They use suicide drones—drop them right into armored vehicles. And of course, the Russians are using Iranian drones to attack Ukrainian targets. It’s been this mix of ancient and ultra-modern. 

It’s such a bloody war. I mean that as bloody. The same friend who made me write the Ukraine book and I put together an article that appeared in the U. S. Naval Institute magazine Proceedings back in January of 2022. We did it on drones—this was before the war started—and we have been looking at what we’ve seen with drones and just shook our heads. We knew that there would be drone warfare, we just didn’t realize how big it would be.

In addition to that book, I also co-authored four thriller novels in the Outcast Ops series with Rick Chesler, and they’re on Amazon. They’re about a team of specialists: one’s ATF, one’s FBI, one’s Navy SEAL, one’s Secret Service, one’s NSA, and one’s CIA. They’re all very good at their jobs but have all been released from their agencies for one reason or another. They banded together and became a team like Phoenix Force or Able Team if you know about them.

Sean: I think I’ve heard of Able Team. 

Craig: Military thrillers with a lot of technology involved. Watchlist is a little unique because it’s about using DNA to carry data that outlines an attack against the United States. Shadow Gov and Red Ice are straight political thrillers, while African Firestorm involves nuclear weapons and an aircraft carrier. They’ve done pretty good reviews. It’s just been a while since I co-authored them. One day, I’ll go back and see if I’ll do my own.

Oh, and I had a short story in the Giant Freakin Robots Anthology.

Sean: Well, that wraps it up for me. Thanks so much for your time and discussing your works, as well as In the Shadow of the Dragon.

Craig: You too, glad to do it. 

Thanks again to Craig for being interviewed. You can download In The Shadow of the Dragon from Catalyst’s website or wherever good books are sold.

And as always, MechWarriors: Stay Syrupy.