Winter Station is the seventh instalment of the Dropzone series of military sci-fi books. It continues from directly where Infiltrator (Dropzone #6), Notorious (Dropzone #5), Derelict (Dropzone #4), Shadow Puppets (Dropzone #3), Parasite (Dropzone #2) and Fleet Rats (Dropzone #1) left off, with the same characters.
The Dropzone series is set in the same universe as my previous sci-fi books – Conversations With Droids, The Kassini Division and Rise Of The Exiles – but it takes place in 2841, a half-century before the events of the other books.
Here’s the blurb for the latest instalment:
It’s easy to stay loyal. It’s hard to choose a side.
Winter Station was an old, dilapidated and patched-up space station held together by neon billboards, dodgy promises and broken dreams. Now, it’s the hub of a powerful narcotics cartel.
With the Great Expansion war raging, the Agency must send in its agents to infiltrate the syndicate and gather intel. But the only way in is by posing as ruthless pirates, and the consequences of being caught are dire.
As Lovell and his strung-out squad navigate the treacherous world of the narcos, their loyalties and resolve are severely tested. Can they resist the temptations of power and greed in one of the galaxy’s most dangerous hives of scum and villainy?
Join the adrenaline-fuelled journey through the Kassini universe in this action-packed instalment of the Dropzone series.
At this point in the series, I wanted to zoom out and focus a little more on the territorial rivalries of the Great Expansion war. After all, this conflict is the reason for the Sleeper Agency’s existence in the first place and is also the reason underpinning most of the squad’s missions so far.
The Estrellas Rojas cartel that the squad is sent to infiltrate is an unexpected byproduct of the war: an opportunistic criminal gang allowed to organise and flourish in the shadows of the underworld, until it’s well on the way to becoming a small but powerful faction in its own right.
Later in the book, we encounter another unseen consequence of the wider conflict: a rogue commander hell bent on proving herself follows her orders over-zealously, creating a nightmare situation that many of the powers in the sector could’ve done without.
As ever, I like to add a bit of background info on what I had in mind when conceptualising and writing each part of the overall story arc of the Dropzone series. Here are some of the indirect inspirations behind the book this time round…
1] Babylon 5 (1993-1998)
This flawed, dated but also legendary sci-fi series is mostly overlooked nowadays, a victim of its inadequate budget and the dated TV conventions of the time it was made. It was sadly also something of an evolutionary dead end, thanks to its ambition as a long-running TV epic in an era that wasn’t quite able to sustain it.
And yet, for those who do remember it with fondness, it introduced many a 90s sci-fi kid to a nuanced vision of a future where there was realism and complications in interspecies relations, there were consequences to actions and humanity wasn’t reduced to wearing the uniform of a shiny, one-dimensional neo-fascist Federation.
2] Narcos (2015-2017)
This expertly crafted three-season dramatisation of Pablo Escobar’s real-life rise to notoriety shows how quickly corruption becomes a runaway train in the brutal world of the narcotics trade. I’m presuming that even in as far-flung an era as the 2800s, galactic citizens of all kinds will still be getting high and a nefarious underworld will still exist to supply the demand.
3] Alleykat (1986)
In Winter Station, Vilnius Baba Yaru is a young hotshot Red Shift racer, reluctantly earning money with the cartel in order to finance his next meet. This later C64 game from cult designer Andrew Braybrook of Paradroid and Uridium fame was a vertically scrolling arcade shooter with a spaceship-racing premise. The idea was to navigate your speeder through progressively trickier courses which were fiendishly dangerous in themselves, earning enough money to enter ever-more challenging races.
I like to think this very minor C64 oddity had some distant bearing on the podracing sequences in a certain later Star Wars film, but… we don’t talk about THAT FILM, do we?
4] Marvin (from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy, 1978)
Douglas Adams’ Genuine People Personalities prototype android will always be the archetypal pessimistic, depressed machine. In Dropzone 7, I couldn’t resist including a robotic character, Arp-0, who was aware he was reaching the end of his useful lifespan and shared the same existential angst as Adams’ terminally droll comic creation.
5] Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
The Imperial attack on Echo Base led by Darth Vader near the beginning of Empire… aka the Battle Of Hoth, is a masterful sequence that’s still yet to be bettered by the rest of the Star Wars franchise. It’s a breathless, desperate and heroic battle that’s full of jeopardy and its grittily realised setting on the inhospitable ice world of Hoth is a masterstroke.
It stands to reason that after this movie, a desperate, high-stakes battle sequence at a rebel base – riddled with tactical oversights and desperate stratagems – should surely be a prerequisite of any and every space opera… and mine is no different.
Here are some quick reads with more info about Fleet Rats (Dropzone #1), Parasite (Dropzone #2), Shadow Puppets (Dropzone #3, Derelict (Dropzone #4) and Derelict (Dropzone #5) and Infiltrator (Dropzone #6), I hope you enjoy them… and if you’ve read and enjoyed my Kassini books, I strongly suggest you give the Dropzone series a whirl, as there are many shared aspects you’ll instantly recognise.
If you enjoy these or indeed any of my books, tell your sci-fi-loving friends and please leave a positive review on Amazon.
