Science fiction author. Professional troublemaker. Nominally responsible for all of this.
Hi, I’m AJ Pryor, a science-fiction author and the person ultimately responsible for The Inbetween Archives.
Although Shade disputes the word responsible.
I write character-driven space opera about found family, morally complicated people, impossible choices, deeply questionable coping mechanisms, and the things waiting in the spaces between stars.
There are spaceships.
There are conspiracies.
There are ancient cosmic entities.
But mostly, there are people trying to work out who they are when everything they thought defined them has been stripped away.
Preferably while somebody is shooting at them.
About the books
I’ve always loved science fiction most when the impossible stuff makes the human stuff more complicated. I want the spaceships and strange worlds and technology that probably needs considerably more safety testing.
- But I also want to know:
- What happens after the mission?
- Who sits beside you when the adrenaline wears off?
- What does loyalty look like when the institution demanding it no longer deserves it?
- What happens when the person everyone thinks is dangerous is also the person who makes you feel safest?
- And how many catastrophic decisions can one found family make before somebody confiscates their access to military hardware?
Apparently quite a few.
That became The Inbetween Archives.
The Inbetween Archives
The series began with one image:
A woman sitting alone in a cell.
She had been there for years.
I knew she had ended a war.
I knew everyone thought she’d betrayed them.
And I knew someone was about to open the door.
That image lived rent free in my head for years.
Then one day, I sat down and started writing.
That woman became Wraith.
The man on the other side became Kael Veyne.
And what was originally a story about a disgraced soldier being dragged back into service became something much bigger.
Ghost Command arrived.
Then the Inbetween.
Then the Void.
Then apparently somebody started a cult.
At this point I’ve accepted that I am mostly here to document the consequences.
What I write
If you like your science fiction focused on the people inside the spaceship, we’ll probably get along.
My books tend to contain:
Found family
Usually armed.
Frequently emotionally constipated.
Extremely difficult to kill.
Morally gray characters
Nobody gets a halo simply because they’re standing on the protagonist’s side.
Sometimes the right choice is obvious.
Sometimes every available choice is terrible.
Those are usually the interesting ones.
Complicated relationships
Romantic, platonic, familial and occasionally difficult to categorise without diagrams.
Love matters enormously in these books.
It just doesn’t magically solve trauma, erase history or make people stop being idiots.
Gallows humour
If the universe is ending, somebody is going to make a joke.
It’s probably Shade.
Big science-fiction weirdness
The Inbetween starts as a dangerous way to cross enormous distances through space.
That explanation becomes increasingly inadequate.
Choice
More than anything else, these stories keep coming back to agency.
Who gets to decide what you are?
Your government?
Your history?
Your trauma?
Your family?
Your gods?
Or you?
About me, outside the Archives
I’m South African, which means I write space opera from a part of the world that doesn’t appear nearly often enough in conversations about science fiction.
I’m also a speaker, trainer and habitual collector of interesting ideas, so my brain spends a lot of time bouncing between technology, people, systems, stories and the various ways humans make all of them unnecessarily complicated.
Writing fiction is where a great many of those interests collide.
Fortunately, fictional governments are much easier to overthrow.
Legally speaking.
Why space opera?
Because it’s enormous.
You can build civilizations, cross galaxies, invent technologies, break physics and put humanity face-to-face with things it cannot possibly understand.
And then you can take two people, lock them in a tiny ship together and make them talk about their feelings.
That’s range.
Space opera lets me tell intimate stories on ridiculous scales.
A friendship can matter as much as a war.
A single choice can matter more than a prophecy.
A family can be six people who met because a government thought turning them into weapons was an excellent idea.
And the end of reality can still be inconvenient because somebody hasn’t had coffee yet.
That’s my kind of science fiction.
A note on the people in these books
I love them.
This does not mean I treat them well.
There appears to be some confusion about this.
Characters are regularly subjected to:
- government conspiracies,
- bad planets,
- worse memories,
- injuries of questionable medical survivability,
- cosmic interference,
- romantic complications,
- family reunions,
- and Geist.
Sometimes readers ask whether I knew where all of this was going from the beginning.
Some of it, yes.
Some characters arrived, kicked down a door and substantially altered the furniture.
Shade is looking pointedly away.
Where should you start?
Not with my biography.
Excellent procrastination attempt, though.
If you haven’t read The Inbetween Archives yet, start with:
Hard Parole
A woman too dangerous to kill.
A man too principled to leave her behind.
Wraith has spent almost five years alone in a black-site prison when Major Kael Veyne opens her cell and tells her she’s a patriot again.
Humanity needs her.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t trust her.
So Kael has been made her Tether.
If he dies, she dies.
Things become considerably less straightforward from there.
Book One is free.
Already one of us?
Ah.
Then you probably don’t need the sales pitch.
You need classified material.
Character dossiers, bonus stories, SID files, Cult transmissions and various pieces of evidence that should arguably have been destroyed are available elsewhere in the Archives.
Spoiler clearance applies.
Mostly.
Want to keep in touch?
I send out news from the Archives: new releases, bonus material, behind-the-scenes notes, character nonsense and occasional evidence that I have lost control of my own fictional universe.
You’ll also be the first to hear when new books, stories and classified files become available.
No daily spam.
No inspirational productivity emails.
Probably some Shade.
[JOIN THE ARCHIVES]
Events, interviews & other official business
I’m available for selected:
- author interviews,
- podcasts,
- festival and convention appearances,
- panels,
- book discussions,
- and conversations about science fiction, storytelling and writing.
For media, event or professional enquiries:
[OPEN COMMS]
Official author biography
AJ Pryor is a science-fiction author and creator of The Inbetween Archives, a character-driven space-opera series about found family, morally gray survivors and the increasingly inconvenient consequences of humanity discovering that the spaces between stars are not empty.
Her fiction combines military and political intrigue, dark humour, complicated relationships and cosmic science-fiction weirdness, with stories centred on identity, agency and the people we choose to call family.
She is not responsible for Shade.
Her lawyers have advised her to make that clear.
SHORT BIO
AJ Pryor is a science-fiction author and creator of The Inbetween Archives, a character-driven space-opera series filled with found family, morally gray characters, dark humor and cosmic trouble.
VERY SHORT BIO
AJ Pryor writes character-driven space opera about dangerous people finding family at the worst possible time.
One final disclaimer
Everything in The Inbetween Archives is fictional.
The Confederation is fictional.
SID is fictional.
The Void Cult is fictional.
Ghost Command is fictional.
Shade is—
Look, the lawyers say that’s enough.
Love, always
AJ Pryor
Author of The Inbetween Archives