About

An age of peaceful exploration has ended.

The centuries old dream of meeting an intelligent, nonhuman species has finally come true, in the form of the people known as the Leyra'an. But the dream soon becomes something darker when the Leyra'an prove to be more than just humanoid. They are like us to a degree that cannot be explained by chance alone. The search for the answer to this mystery will reveal a universe stranger and more dangerous than the crew of the probeship William Bartram could have imagined, and expose both Humanity and the Leyra'an to the threat of extinction.

For better or worse, that search has begun. 

About

Thomas Watson
Thomas Watson

I've always been a storyteller, and very early in my life found the written word to be my preferred method for telling tales. I grew up enjoying words for their own sake, with some of my earliest memories being of family members reading to me and teaching me to both read and write. Most of my childhood was spent in houses full of books, and reading inspired writing. The experience of reading stories, of having feelings and images conjured from my imagination merely by reading carefully arranged words, fascinated me. Somewhere, in a time lost to memory, reading inspired me to try writing my own stories - and that truly was a long time ago. Then as now, I wanted to see if my words could evoke emotions and images in the minds of other people. Have I succeeded in doing so? I have a certain amount of confidence in what I do but, really, success or failure in this regard is a call only readers can make. 

Books

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The Luck of Han'anga

War of the Second Iteration, Book One
Book #1 from the series: War of the Second Iteration

An age of peaceful exploration has ended.

The centuries old dream of meeting an intelligent, nonhuman species has finally come true, in the form of the people known as the Leyra'an. But the dream soon becomes something darker when the Leyra'an prove to be more than just humanoid. They are like us to a degree that cannot be explained by chance...

All That Bedevils Us

If not for the intervention of the insectoid beings called the T’lack, the Faceless War would have ended with the extinction of Humanity and its Sibling Species. That intervention came at a great cost for the T’lack. No one knows or understands Humanity’s debt to the T’lack better than Jan Costa, who paid his own terrible price at the end of...

Toby

Paul Ford is a man on the road, seeking to put distance and time between himself and events that turned his life inside out – and not for the better. Toby is a big dog, lost and far from home. A chance encounter brings them together and sends them on a journey to reunite the dog with his family, a trip that just might help Paul find his own way...

Latest Updates

Now available from Amazon and through Kindle Unlimited!

In the aftermath of the disastrous Godsend expedition, Paul Rost'aht-MacGregor leaves behind the life he’s always known....

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Contact

It's often said that a writer's life can be a solitary existence. There's some truth to this. You do spend a lot of time inside your own head, and at the keyboard doing the actual work of writing the tale you want to tell. Hearing from readers provides a welcome break from that writerly solitude. So feel free to drop me a note, and tell me how you feel about what you've read.

And you can read even more here: https://underdesertstars.com/