Always Look on the Bright Side of Life!

(4-5 minute read)

On June 18th this year, it will be exactly one year since I released my first novel, Return to the Galaxy.

In some ways the year has flown by. In others it feels as though it has lasted a decade.

Since then, we have released eight novels in the Return to the Galaxy series, with a ninth hopefully arriving around the anniversary itself, soon to be followed by a collection of short stories set in the same universe.

Looking back, it is honestly difficult for me to fully process how much has changed in such a short period of time, both professionally and personally.

None of it would have happened without you.

So, to celebrate the anniversary, and to say thank you for all your support over the last year, I'm going to be giving away a few freebies over the next several newsletters.

For the first of these, I've included an exclusive chapter from the forthcoming Book Nine of Return to the Galaxy. You'll find it at the bottom of today's newsletter.

But before we get there, I wanted to talk about something that has been on my mind recently.

Optimism.

Despite everything happening in the world, I genuinely believe optimism is the healthier outlook for both individuals and civilizations.

In fact, I have honestly told my family that after my funeral, (Hopefully many years from now,) the last song played in church should be Monty Python's Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.

And I want people to belt it out.

That probably tells you something about me.

Life can be hard. Sometimes brutally so. Yet despite the setbacks, disappointments, and darker moments we all go through, I still find myself feeling strangely optimistic about humanity as a whole, even at times when it seems difficult to justify.

Because the media often make us feel as though we are living through a permanent crisis.

Open a news app or switch on the television and within minutes you are likely to see war, political division, climate fears, economic uncertainty, violence, collapsing systems, or predictions of catastrophe.

If aliens actually landed tomorrow, I suspect half the news channels would begin discussing whether they would accidentally bring a plague or if property prices might slump before the ships had even touched the ground.

A friend of mine worked for years as a television producer and once told me something that stayed in my head. He said modern television often feels less like a source of information and more like a system designed to keep people emotionally hooked in between selling them things through advertisements.

Fear works exceptionally well because frightened people keep watching. Outrage keeps people engaged. Doom keeps attention locked onto screens.

Quiet progress, on the other hand, rarely generates ratings.

A scientist slightly improving battery efficiency by six percent is not exciting television. A new cancer treatment quietly extending survival rates by another few years doesn't dominate headlines for weeks. Better desalination systems, smarter agricultural software, cleaner industrial processes, or AI helping researchers design more efficient materials rarely arrive with dramatic music and flashing banners across the bottom of the screen.

And yet those things may shape the future far more than most of the shouting.

That doesn't mean the problems are imaginary. Some of them are very real indeed. Climate change concerns a lot of people, and I think anybody looking honestly at the evidence would struggle to deny that the world is changing.

We are likely to see migration pressures, disruption to agriculture in some regions, water shortages in others, and increasing political tensions around resources and borders.

But I also think there is a difference between acknowledging danger and assuming humanity is doomed.

History suggests humans are remarkably bad at predicting their own future once technology begins shifting the equation.

A hundred years ago huge numbers of people genuinely feared mass starvation because populations were growing faster than food production. Yet agriculture transformed itself through fertilizers, mechanization, irrigation, genetics, and global trade.

In the 1960s and 70s, many "experts" warned of inevitable collapse through overpopulation and resource exhaustion, but birth rates later began falling sharply across much of the developed world and even in many developing countries. Today most nations are becoming more worried about shrinking populations than expanding ones.

Even pollution itself tells an interesting story.

When I was younger, many industrial rivers were effectively dead. Smog in some cities was horrific. Acid rain was a constant headline. Entire stretches of urban sky looked permanently grey. Every restaurant or pub was shrouded in clouds of cigarette smoke. Those issues were real, serious, and in some cases dangerous.

But over time technology improved. Cleaner fuels arrived. Regulations changed. Industries adapted. The damage didn't vanish overnight, and not every country improved at the same pace, but many younger people today barely realize how polluted parts of the developed world once were because the worst of it gradually faded into history.

That is one reason I sometimes wonder whether we are underestimating humanity again.

Not because humans are perfect. Far from it. We are tribal, emotional, self-interested, short-sighted creatures more often than not. We create many of our own problems.

But we are also astonishingly inventive under pressure.

Again and again civilization seems to stumble toward solutions later than we should have, more chaotically than we should have, but somehow still manages to move forward.

Maybe because I spend so much time imagining humanity's future, I am reluctant to give up on it.

And now we are entering an era where technological progress itself may begin accelerating.

Artificial intelligence worries many people, sometimes for very good reasons, but AI may also become one of the most powerful scientific tools humanity has ever created. Systems capable of assisting researchers with chemistry, biology, materials science, energy optimization, and medicine could dramatically increase the speed of discovery over the next twenty years.

The irony is almost amusing. People fear AI because of the energy it consumes while AI itself may help humanity discover radically better ways to generate clean energy.

Solar power is already vastly cheaper than it was twenty years ago. Battery technology continues improving. New nuclear reactor designs are emerging. Desalination systems are becoming more efficient. Carbon capture technologies are improving. AI is beginning to help optimize electrical grids and industrial systems in ways humans simply could not coordinate manually.

None of this guarantees a perfect future. Some regions of the world may struggle badly during the coming decades. Politics will become unstable in places. Certain coastlines may eventually become difficult or extremely expensive to defend.

There will almost certainly be mistakes, overreactions, underreactions, and unintended consequences because that's how our messy human civilizations behave.

But I think there is another side to the story that often gets drowned out by the constant noise of catastrophe.

The average human alive today possesses access to knowledge, medicine, communication, entertainment, and technology beyond what kings possessed only a few generations ago.

A nurse on her lunch break in Sydney can watch a live rock concert in London in real time. A poor but bright student in a remote Indian village can watch a lecture transmitted by MIT in Boston.

Medical discoveries spread globally in days. A scientist in London can collaborate instantly with another in Tokyo, Toronto, or Singapore.

Knowledge itself has become networked in a way no civilization in history has previously experienced.

That matters.

Because civilization's greatest resource has never really been oil, gold, or land.

It has been the accumulated knowledge of humanity.

One genuinely good idea can improve the lives of millions of people. Sometimes billions.

I think science fiction appeals to me partly because it reminds us that humanity still feels unfinished.

We are not living at the end of the story.

We are living somewhere near the beginning.

We have not cured aging. We have not built cities beyond Earth. We have not explored more than a tiny fraction of our own solar system, never mind the galaxy itself.

And perhaps most importantly, we still don't fully understand what human civilization might become once intelligence itself begins accelerating through AI and advanced computation.

That future could certainly contain dangers.

But it may also contain possibilities far beyond what most of us can currently imagine.

Perhaps the greatest mistake humans repeatedly make is assuming tomorrow's problems will only be solved using today's tools.

History suggests otherwise.

Are we underestimating humanity again?

Or should we always look on the bright side of life?

Feel free to sing along.

*******

As promised, here is your exclusive preview chapter from the forthcoming Strike for the Galaxy, Book Nine of the Return to the Galaxy series.

To set the scene:

After a desperate running battle in the outer Solar System, several Ranid assault shuttles manage to break through the outnumbered Orion Federation fleet and land on Earth. Vice President Henning ignores much of the Orion Federation's warning, believing humanity can contain the threat easily without outside help.

He is catastrophically wrong.

The Ranid are not simply soldiers. They are highly evolved killing machines, fast, intelligent, heavily armored, and terrifyingly aggressive. A single Ranid warrior can overpower multiple elite human troops in close combat, and everywhere they land the results are horrific. Villages disappear overnight. Families vanish. Entire military units are wiped out in minutes.

As panic spreads across Europe and the United States, Earth's armies begin learning painful lessons about how the creatures hunt and fight. In the Kentucky hills, a US Special Forces team believes they may finally have found a way to lure the Ranid into a carefully prepared ambush.

What follows is one of the first real attempts by humanity to fight back.

Conversation Piece Captain Mallory Kentucky

Captain Eric Mallory lay motionless beneath the camouflage netting stretched across the hillside, the damp Kentucky earth cold against his chest as he watched the narrow mountain road through his night optics. Below him, the valley twisted between steep wooded ridges thick with pine and oak, the darkness broken only by the faint glow of chem lights marking hidden American firing positions.

A creek cut through the center of the pass, silver under the moonlight, while mist drifted low across the water like smoke from a dying fire. It would have been peaceful if not for the tension hanging over every man on the ridge. Sweat, gun oil, damp leaves, and diesel fumes mixed together in the night air while somewhere farther downhill the distorted recording of Saret voices echoed from the loudspeakers bolted to the back of the Humvee.

The idea had originally come from Walker. Mallory had refined it once the intelligence analysts working with data taken from the Orion Federation confirmed that the alien language in the intercepted broadcasts was called Saret.

The recordings themselves had been taken from Orion Federation transmissions intercepted during earlier encounters around Earth. Nobody in the Special Forces camp understood what the words actually meant, but that hardly mattered.

The Ranid hated the Saret with such instinctive fury that merely hearing fragments of the language had already drawn them out of hiding twice before. Tonight the Americans intended to turn that hatred against them again.

Sergeant Nate Walker crouched beside Mallory behind the fallen log, adjusting the feed belt running into the M240 machine gun resting on its bipod. Even in the darkness Mallory could see the tension in the younger man’s face.

Nobody on the hillside believed this was a fair fight anymore. Across Europe and America, too many soldiers had already died proving that the Ranid possessed every physical advantage that mattered once the shooting stopped and the killing became personal.

Being for being, the creatures were faster, stronger, tougher, and far deadlier. Humans were receiving brutal lessons about exactly where they stood in the new food chain.

Europe had already shown what happened when helicopters slowed long enough to engage them properly. Plasma rifles turned aircraft into fireballs in seconds. Entire French special operations teams had vanished in villages near the German border. The official briefings still talked about “containing isolated hostile entities,” but every soldier here knew the truth now.

These things were monsters.

Staff Sergeant Cole Mercer shifted position farther up the slope behind one of the hidden minigun nests. “Movement,” he whispered over the comms. “Top of the ridgeline.”

Mallory raised the optics slightly.

At first, he saw nothing except trees moving gently in the wind. Then a dark shape burst across the road nearly half a mile away, too fast and too large to mistake for anything human. Another followed it. Then three more. The thermal overlays in his visor lit up instantly as more signatures flooded into view among the trees.

“Oh shit,” Walker muttered softly.

The Ranid came downhill like predators scenting blood. Massive, black-armored bodies bounded over rocks and fallen timber with horrifying speed, eight legs driving them forward while plasma rifles swept constantly from side to side. Their combat harnesses shimmered faintly in the moonlight as targeting systems scanned ahead toward the false Saret broadcasts. Some clicked to each other in harsh bursts of sound while others simply charged in silence.

Mallory felt his stomach tighten as more and more shapes emerged from the forest.

The satellite cover they had overhead confirmed the numbers. It wasn't the four or five they had expected. It was thirty-two.

The entire valley suddenly felt far too small.

“Captain,” Mercer said quietly over the net, “that’s a whole goddamn platoon.”

Mallory kept his voice calm with effort. “Everybody hold positions. Don’t engage till they’re fully inside the kill zone.”

Below them the Humvee rolled slowly away down the road, loudspeakers still broadcasting distorted Saret voices into the darkness. The bait vehicle looked absurdly fragile compared to what was hunting it. The Ranid accelerated as they heard the sounds more clearly, crowding together along the narrow road as they charged downhill toward the source of the transmissions.

Mallory watched them enter the trap piece by piece.

The lead aliens crossed the first concealed ambush positions. Then the second line. Then the third.

Walker glanced toward him nervously. “Now?”

Mallory waited another heartbeat until almost half the Ranid formation had entered the narrowest part of the pass.

“Do it!”

The world exploded.

Two hundred Claymore mines detonated simultaneously from both sides of the valley, the overlapping blasts merging into one colossal concussion that slammed through the forest like the fist of God. Over a hundred thousand steel ball bearings tore across the road in intersecting waves, shredding trees, rock, armor, and flesh with such violence that the first ranks of Ranid simply disintegrated beneath the impact.

Black combat harnesses burst apart. Limbs flew spinning through the air trailing dark fluid. One Ranid vanished entirely except for fragments of burning armor scattered across the asphalt.

The sound rolled back and forth through the mountains hard enough to shake dirt loose from the hillsides.

Eleven Ranid died in the first second.

The survivors screamed in fury rather than fear.

Then the flamethrowers ignited.

Jets of burning fuel erupted upward from hidden trenches cut into the roadside, engulfing the surviving Ranid in towering sheets of orange fire. Heat washed across the valley while smoke billowed upward through the trees, but the effect was far less devastating than the Americans had hoped. The alien combat suits absorbed most of the flames, black surfaces glowing briefly red before cooling again. Only the already-damaged Ranid suffered badly. One creature whose rear legs had been torn apart by Claymore fragments collapsed into the burning fuel and thrashed helplessly while flames poured into ruptured armor seals.

“Open fire!” Mallory shouted.

The hillsides erupted.

Mercer’s minigun roared first, its rotating barrels vomiting streams of tracer fire into the packed Ranid formation below. Other machine guns joined instantly while Barrett M107 rifles cracked from concealed sniper nests higher up the slopes. Thousands of rounds hammered into the trapped aliens at once, sparks and fragments bursting from armor plating as the Americans poured overwhelming firepower into the narrow road.

For a few glorious seconds it worked.

Three more Ranid fell beneath the concentrated fire. One lost half its head when a Barrett round punched through its optic cluster. Another pitched sideways into the creek after Mercer’s minigun tore away four of its legs.

But almost unbelievably, the survivors kept coming.

“They’re pushing through!” Walker yelled.

Plasma fire answered from below with terrifying precision. Blue-white bolts screamed upward into the hillsides, vaporizing trees and detonating fighting positions in violent flashes of light.

One of the minigun bunkers vanished instantly in a blossom of plasma fire that hurled burning debris across the slope. Men screamed over the comm net. Another plasma blast struck near Mercer’s position, throwing him backward in pieces.

Walker stared in horror. “Cole’s down!”

The surviving Ranid charged directly through the flames and bodies of their own dead, bunching tighter together as the narrow road forced them into a killing funnel. Their hatred for the Saret voices overrode almost everything else. Even while under catastrophic fire they kept driving forward toward the sound.

Mallory fired controlled bursts from his SCAR-H while trying desperately to count surviving targets through the smoke and chaos.

Fourteen left.

Then thirteen.

Then twelve.

Walker’s machine gun hammered continuously beside him until plasma fire struck the rocks directly below their position and showered both men with burning fragments. Walker cursed as molten stone tore across his sleeve.

“They’re too close!”

One Ranid bounded over the burning wreckage of another and fired uphill. The plasma bolt hit Sergeant Ortega’s firing nest dead center. For a brief instant Ortega remained standing inside the blue-white glare before collapsing backward without a sound, the front of his body burned almost completely away.

Mallory knew the trap was finished.

“Fall back!” he shouted into the comms. “All surviving teams disengage now!”

The remaining Special Forces troops began breaking contact immediately, abandoning ruined firing positions and scrambling uphill through secondary escape routes cut into the forest.

Barrett rifles continued firing from farther back, heavy rounds slamming into pursuing Ranid heads and joints whenever opportunities appeared. One alien lost two legs beneath a sniper round and crashed sideways into the ditch. Another dropped after repeated hits shattered part of its facial armor.

Most kept coming.

Below them the Humvee accelerated hard down the valley road, the loudspeakers still blasting distorted Saret voices into the night. Staff Sergeant Ben Holloway fought the steering wheel while Specialist Danny Pike clung desperately to the radio rig mounted in the back.

The surviving Ranid burst out of the kill zone behind them.

And started gaining.

“Oh shit, they’re fast!” Holloway shouted as plasma bolts ripped into the road around the fleeing vehicle.

One shot grazed the rear corner of the Humvee hard enough to send it fishtailing sideways across the dirt track. Pike looked back through the shattered rear glass and saw the Ranid closing rapidly through the smoke and darkness, huge, armored bodies devouring the distance between them.

“Turn the radio off!” Holloway screamed. “Turn the damn thing off!”

Pike grabbed frantically at the controls, but before he could manage it the edge effect of another plasma blast punched through the rear compartment and vaporized the radio operator sitting beside him. Blood and burning fragments sprayed across the seats while the distorted Saret recording continued playing through the loudspeakers.

The Ranid were almost on top of them now. The Humvee screamed around a tight corner.

Pike tore the entire radio assembly free from its mounting bracket, and hurled it out the rear hatch, smashing onto the road behind them. He grabbed his rifle and emptied half a magazine into the shattered equipment as it bounced across the dirt.

The effect was immediate.

The Ranid raced around the corner and stopped.

Instantly.

Several clustered around the ruined radio while the damaged speakers crackled and squawked weakly in the darkness. One alien bent low over the smashed equipment while another scanned the surrounding hills. Even from the speeding Humvee, Pike could almost feel the moment they realized they had been tricked.

“Go! Go!” Mallory shouted into the radio from farther back up the ridge as surviving American troops disappeared into the forests. “Move!”

A Ranid lifted its plasma rifle in the direction of the fleeing vehicle.

Holloway buried the accelerator and careered around a corner on two wheels.

The Humvee roared deeper into the Kentucky hills while behind them the surviving Ranid stood motionless among burning wreckage, dead comrades, and shattered trees.

Inside the vehicle nobody spoke for several seconds.

Holloway finally looked back through the shattered rear window toward the distant flames fading behind them. “How many of our men do you think made it out?”

Pike wiped blood from his cheek and stared into the darkness ahead.

“Not enough,” he said quietly. “Nowhere near enough.”

Behind them, somewhere back in the ruined valley, the Ranid began moving again, spreading out to hunt their hunters.

***

Until next time,

BA Gillies
Author, Return to the Galaxy Series

***

Book 8 is Live. The War Has Truly Begun

It's here. Battle for the Galaxy, Book 8 of the Return to the Galaxy series, is live right now.

For the first time, Earth forces face the Ranid directly. Admiral Ewan Scott is pushing beyond known space chasing an alliance that could decide the war, while back home, power is shifting fast and humanity is dividing before the enemy has even arrived.

The war has truly begun. And humanity may not survive its opening moves.

Read Battle for the Galaxy on Amazon UK

Read Battle for the Galaxy on Amazon US

Free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

Thank you for all the support, reviews, and encouragement. It genuinely means everything.

Brian

*******

If you haven’t started the series yet, Book 1 is still available to buy for 99 cents or read for free on Kindle Unlimited:

Read Return to the Galaxy on Amazon UK

Read Return to the Galaxy on Amazon US

*******

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