Visitation is the 10th and final instalment of the Dropzone series of military sci-fi books. It continues from directly where Into The Rift (Dropzone #9) 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.
It’s not every day that you can say you’ve finished a project that’s taken you three years, but that’s the case with the release of Visitation, the 10th and final book in my Dropzone military sci-fi series. That’s 10 books, 2,574 pages,772,137 words in total, all written, edited, self-published and marketed by me in between a mix of full-and part-time work… with excellent art as ever by Kat Bastow.
Here’s the blurb for the final instalment:
Lost crews. Last orders. Lock ’n’ load…
The Revenants are on the brink of freedom. They have just one mission left.
Elemental salvage ships are disappearing in the Forbidden Zone, only to reappear adrift in space with their crews horrifically mutilated.
Then an enormous alien vessel emerges from the darkness.
The crew nickname it the Vault.
The Agency doesn’t believe in coincidences.
No one wants to risk an intergalactic incident. Fortunately, the Agency has a squad of expendable misfits with one final drop left on their sentence – and they’re not about to let anything cost them their freedom.
But inside the Vault, the Revenants find something far stranger than a derelict ship.
Aboard are alien species that should never have been brought together, habitats that change without warning and a vessel whose purpose nobody understands.
Mission 10 is their last chance at freedom. First, they have to survive the Vault.
Join the Revenants for the explosive finale to Esa Ortega’s Dropzone series.
As is now traditional, I’ll run through a few of the inspirations behind this book. This is hopefully to persuade you that it fits into a distinguished lineage of sci-fi and isn’t just a bunch of humans and aliens running around with guns (it is that as well).
So here are some of the inspirations behind it:
1] Arena (1944)
My original idea for Visitation was something along the lines of ‘Hunger Games meets Rendezvous With Rama’. So it’s always a bonus to realise that someone has already done what you’re currently in the process of doing, just much better, 82 years ago.
Fredric Brown’s short story first appeared in the wartime June 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fictionmagazine and was also adapted into a Star Trek episode in 1967 and a Blake’s 7 episode called Duel in 1978. So it’s thatoft-told tale – a human and a red ball with tentacles wake up in a sandbox-like arena, separated by a telepathic wall they can’t seem to pass through and are then forced by a higher intelligence to fight to the death, with the fate of their entire species in the balance.
2] Rendevous With Rama (1973)
Arthur C . Clarke’s hard sci-fi masterpiece sees a mysterious, 20km-long cylindrical ark-ship environment visit our solar system, only to pose more questions than answers for those who board it. I first encountered the series in my teens and really enjoyed the later octo-spider-laden sequels. Visitation’s ‘galactic zoo’ concept nods to these later works, co-written by Gentry Lee. Apparently, a film version is in the works, with Denis Villeneuve (who else?) as director.
3] Alien: Earth (2025)
A fan-favourite aspect of Noah Hawley’s ambitious TV series interpretation of everyone’s favourite xenomorph cuddlebug was how the Maginot ship brought fresh aliens to the party. The mechanics of containing and maintaining the habitat of a set of dangerous, freaky space creatures is an area Visitation addresses throughout its action sequences.
4] Report On An Unidentified Space Station (1982)
JG Ballard may have been parodying what at the time was dismissed as the BDO (Big Dumb Object megastructure) subgenre of sci-fi typified by …Rama and dating all the way back to 1936 and Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. Yet in true Ballard style, it’s a knowingly bizarre take on the concept with its own manic internal logic, one well worth hunting down for a mind-expanding read.
5] Rogue Trooper (1981)
One of the utterly scrotnig 2000AD comic’s greatest stories, Rogue Trooper followed Genetic Infantryman Rogue, who embarked on a revenge mission with the intelligences of his dead comrades Gunnar, Helm and Bagman preseved as biochips in his rifle, helmet and backpack. Like Rogue, Virgil Lovell from Dropzone hopefully fits into the lineage of the soldier/officer who can’t come home, explored in The Forever War, Universal Soldier, Old Man’s War, RoboCop,Altered Carbon…
Here are some quick reads with more info about Fleet Rats (Dropzone #1), Parasite (Dropzone #2), Shadow Puppets (Dropzone #3, Derelict (Dropzone #4),Notorious (Dropzone #5),Infiltrator (Dropzone #6) and Winter Station (Dropzone #7), Ruinworld (Dropzone #8) and Into The Rift (Dropzone #9). 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.