Hi Reader,

Before I get to this week's newsletter, I wanted to take a moment to say thank you.

On June 18th, it will be exactly one year since Return to the Galaxy was published.

When my nervously trembling finger pressed the publish button, I had absolutely no idea what would happen. I had never written a book before. I hadn't written anything longer than a few hundred words since leaving school.

I hoped a few people might enjoy the story.

What happened next exceeded every expectation I could possibly have.

Over the last year, many thousands of readers have joined Ewan, Rosie, Velal, Beryn, Shona and the rest of the crew on their adventures across the stars. The series has grown from a single book into eight novels so far, won several awards, reached number one in multiple Amazon categories, and gathered 1,350 ratings and reviews.

None of that happens without readers like you.

Every review, every email, every recommendation to a friend, every page read in Kindle Unlimited, and every book purchased has helped make this journey possible.

Many of you have written to me over the past year. Some have shared favourite characters. Others have pointed out typos I somehow managed to miss. A few have even suggested ideas that later found their way into the books.

I read every message.

The support, encouragement and enthusiasm you've shown have meant more than you can possibly realise.

Writing has become one of the most enjoyable adventures of my life, and the reason I get to continue doing it is because readers like you took a chance on a first-time author and stuck with him.

So, before we get into this week's newsletter, I simply wanted to say thank you.

Thank you for reading.

Thank you for your support.

Thank you for helping turn a dream into something real.

And the adventure is only just beginning.

Book 9 is coming soon, the Return to the Galaxy universe continues to expand, and I have plenty more stories still to tell.

I hope you'll continue the journey with me.

I said I would have some more free gifts for you. So, at the end of today's newsletter I have added another free short story.

(Rather than give you a link to Bookfunnel, I have added the whole story here. It is only seven pages long.)

Also, to celebrate my one-year anniversary as an author, on the 16th I will write to you again to give you a link to Return to the Galaxy, which will be free for everyone for three days. I will also give you a link to book two in the series, Reach for the Galaxy. It will be reduced to 99 cents from its normal price of $2.99.

Please feel free to send these links to any of your friends or family who you think might enjoy the stories. They can get the first two books in the series for a combined price of only 99 cents.

It is another way for me to say thank you all so much.

Thank you for everything.

Brian
BA Gillies

This Week’s Newsletter

The Beginning Of The End For Cancer?

(5 minute read)

What if future generations look back on the 2020s and conclude that this was the decade when cancer began to lose its death match with humanity?

It won’t disappear or vanish overnight. It won’t suddenly become a solved problem. History rarely works like that. Yet when I look at some of the breakthroughs emerging from laboratories, universities, and hospitals around the world, I find myself wondering whether we are witnessing the early stages of a profound change in medicine.

Cancer has always occupied a unique place in our fears. Almost everyone reading this newsletter will have been touched by it in some way. A family member. A friend. A colleague. A neighbor.

Unlike many diseases, cancer often feels deeply personal because it arrives inside people we know and love. It changes conversations. It changes plans. Often it changes entire families.

For most of human history, there was very little we could do. Doctors could observe. Occasionally they could operate. Sometimes they could slow the disease. More often, they could only watch its progress and hope for the best. Even within my own lifetime, many cancer diagnoses carried a level of fear that was entirely justified.

What feels different today is that several separate lines of research appear to be advancing simultaneously.

One of the most fascinating involves mRNA technology. Most people first encountered mRNA through the Covid vaccines, but many scientists always believed its potential extended far beyond infectious diseases.

Over the past few years, researchers at Moderna and Merck have been developing personalized cancer vaccines designed specifically for individual patients. Instead of creating a single treatment for everybody, they analyze the genetic mutations inside a patient's tumor and then design a vaccine intended to help the immune system recognize and attack those cancer cells.

Recent five-year data from melanoma trials have been remarkably encouraging, with patients receiving the personalized vaccine alongside Keytruda showing substantially lower recurrence rates than those receiving standard treatment alone. Larger Phase 3 trials are now underway across several cancers, including melanoma and lung cancer.

That idea still feels almost like science fiction to me. Imagine telling a doctor fifty years ago that a cancer treatment might one day be custom-built for a single individual. It would have sounded like something from Star Trek.

At the same time, immunotherapy continues to produce results that would have seemed astonishing not very long ago.

Instead of attacking cancer directly, these treatments help the body's own immune system identify and destroy malignant cells.

At the recent American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago, researchers presented a number of promising therapies, including experimental drugs designed to expose tumors that had effectively hidden themselves from the immune system.

One pancreatic cancer treatment even doubled survival times in certain advanced cases. Pancreatic cancer has long been one of the most difficult cancers to treat, which is why results like that attract so much attention.

Another development that caught my attention involved brain cancer surgery. Researchers reported strong results from GammaTile, a radiation-emitting implant placed directly into the surgical site after a tumor is removed.

Patients receiving the implant experienced significantly lower recurrence rates than those receiving conventional post-operative radiation treatment. It is exactly the kind of targeted approach that medicine increasingly seems to favor, delivering treatment precisely where it is needed while minimizing collateral damage elsewhere.

Then there is artificial intelligence.

Whenever people discuss AI, the conversation usually turns toward jobs, economics, or whether computers are becoming too clever for their own good. Yet one of the most important applications may turn out to be medicine.

At places like Google DeepMind and its sister company Isomorphic Labs, researchers are using AI systems such as AlphaFold to predict the structures of proteins, helping scientists understand biological processes that once took years or even decades to unravel. Drug companies including Takeda, Alnylam, and others are investing billions into AI-assisted drug discovery because they believe it can dramatically shorten the time required to identify promising treatments.

The significance of that may be difficult to appreciate because it happens behind the scenes. Most people never see the years of work involved in developing a new medicine. If AI can shorten those timelines from six years to two, or from two years to six months, the effects could ripple across medicine for decades.

What excites me most is not necessarily the prospect of eliminating cancer entirely. Biology is rarely that cooperative. Instead, I wonder whether many cancers may gradually move into a different category.

Throughout history, diseases that once terrified humanity often became manageable conditions rather than immediate death sentences. Tuberculosis, HIV, and numerous childhood illnesses followed that path. Medicine did not always eradicate them. Instead, it learned how to control them.

Perhaps cancer's future looks similar.

Perhaps a diagnosis that currently inspires fear becomes something closer to diabetes or high blood pressure. Patients continue living normal lives. They work, travel, party, annoy their grandchildren, and argue about football. Their condition is monitored, managed, and treated over many years rather than ending their lives prematurely.

That may not sound as dramatic as a cure, but for millions of families it would represent an extraordinary victory.

As I think about these developments, I often find myself reflecting on how quickly the world changes. I grew up in a world without the internet, without mobile phones, and without artificial intelligence. Many technologies that seemed fantastic when I was young are now so ordinary that we barely notice them.

Science fiction often asks us to imagine futures that feel impossible. One of the reasons I enjoy writing it is because every so often reality decides to catch up.

In Return to the Galaxy, humanity benefits from technologies that transform health, longevity, and quality of life. Those ideas were meant to be aspirational. Yet when I read about personalized cancer vaccines, AI-assisted drug discovery, and immune systems being trained to hunt tumors, I sometimes wonder whether reality is beginning to write its own science fiction story.

Of course, there will be setbacks. Some promising treatments will fail. Some breakthroughs will take longer than expected. Progress rarely moves in a straight line. Anyone who follows science closely learns patience very quickly.

Yet when I step back and look at the bigger picture, I cannot help noticing the direction of travel. Researchers at institutions such as Memorial Sloan Kettering, MD Anderson, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, and hundreds of laboratories around the world are attacking the problem from multiple directions simultaneously.

They are not relying on a single miracle cure. They are not searching for a single silver bullet. Instead, they are building an entire arsenal. Every year, that arsenal becomes more sophisticated. Every year, it becomes more personalized. Every year, it becomes more effective.

That gives me plenty of reasons for optimism.

In World War Two, by 1942, Britain had spent three long years absorbing defeat after defeat, standing largely alone against what appeared to be an unstoppable Nazi enemy.

Then came the battle of El Alamein. The British victory did not end the war, but it marked a major turning point, prompting Winston Churchill to declare, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

We may not be watching the end of cancer.

But I think there is a reasonable chance that we are watching the beginning of the end of cancer as we have known it for the last century.

And for millions of families around the world, that would be one of the greatest stories humanity has ever written.

What do you think? If you could choose one medical breakthrough to happen during the next twenty years, what would it be?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Until next time,

Brian

BA Gillies

*

Ranid Short Story**

Silent Progress

The war had lasted two hundred and twelve years, and Krrath-Vel had stopped thinking of time as something that moved forward. Time, to a Ranid, was pressure. It accumulated. It compressed choice into inevitability.

There had been a time when even the Ranid believed the conflict might end.

Krrath-Vel remembered the end of the first Ranid-Saret war more clearly than anything that followed.

The Saret had never fully understood the Ranid semi-hive mind. Memories could be passed forward, and determination and intent could be passed down the generations. It was not telepathy. Hive members still had to use clicks and pheromone scents to communicate with each other to pass information, but shared memories were very clear.

He remembered the sky filled with Saret ships, their formations so overwhelming and precise they looked ceremonial rather than martial. He remembered the broadcasts that came with them, layered in legality and moral superiority. Compliance offered as mercy. Ranid surrender framed as correction. Isolation promised as rehabilitation.

The Saret had never understood how those words sounded to an apex predator.

The Ranid had fought. They always fought. What they had not yet learned was restraint. This time it had been their undoing.

The defeat had not been swift. It had been careful. Saret admirals dismantled Ranid expansion nodes one by one, severing supply lines, incinerating brood-worlds, and enforcing isolation that strangled growth without granting extinction. It was a punishment designed by a species that believed survival and morality were the same thing.

Two hundred and fifty years of servile containment followed. Movement caps. Population ceilings. Surveillance so dense it felt like compressed gravity.

The Saret called it rehabilitation.

The Ranid called it endurance.

Krrath-Vel felt that memory recede as he settled into the living harness fused to the brood-ship’s spine. Ships that were a fusion of the original Ranid models and captured Saret dreadnoughts.

The resin flowed around his thorax, warm and faintly slick, responding to his weight and neural pattern. The ship answered with a low vibration that travelled through chitin and bone alike. Not affection: that was meaningless to a Ranid. This was alignment, shared purpose.

The command chamber smelled faintly of burned resin and recycled air that never quite forgot anger. It was an old smell now, layered into the walls themselves.

Once, early in the renewed conflict, the Saret had called the uprising a revolt. That word comforted them. Revolts were temporary. Revolts implied restoration. Order broken, order restored, lesson learned.

Krrath-Vel remembered the intercepted broadcasts from those early decades, thick with legal phrasing and certainty, promising reconciliation once the Ranid were brought back into compliance. Even then, the Saret misunderstood.

This was neither reconciliation nor revolt.

For the Ranid, this was a war of extermination. Every life form that was a potential threat to their domination had to be erased.

Navigator Jex-Thaal interrupted his thoughts.

“Contacts emerging as predicted,”

The tactical display bloomed into existence, filling the chamber with ghostly light. A Saret fleet translated into the system in staggered waves, heavy cruisers first, escorts following in disciplined formation. Their arrival was confident. Almost beautiful.

Too confident.

Krrath-Vel watched the kill lattice activate around them. Gravity anchors slid into position, invisible but absolute. Plasma banks warmed along the inner ring, their energy signatures rising in patient synchrony.

“Saret navigation vectors are holding,” Jex-Thaal added. “They think they’re heading into open space.”

“They always do,” Krrath-Vel replied.

The Kuskoi had done their work well.

They had embedded their tricks and traps in Saret navigational architecture decades earlier, when the Federation still believed in shared responsibility. Kuskoi code worms slept quietly inside trusted systems, wrapped in compliance routines and diagnostic sublayers. They woke only when a precise code word was received.

Then the right admirals trusted the wrong data.

For a last time.

Entire fleets trusted their charts. Trusted their instruments. Trusted space itself.

The first Saret cruiser emerged exactly where the Ranid wanted it.

Gravity folded.

The ship’s hull screamed as internal mass shifted violently. Decks collapsed inward. Power spiked, then vanished. The cruiser imploded without ever firing a shot, its destruction so complete it barely left debris.

The rest of the fleet followed.

The raging storms of a gas giant pressed close in front of the Saret, and rings of Ranid dreadnoughts and battleships enveloped them on every other side.

Some Saret ships emerged too close to the gas giant’s gravity well, engines flaring uselessly as mass and mathematics disagreed. Others translated directly into overlapping Ranid firing arcs, shields still cycling from jump stress.

Plasma beams and gravity lances tore through the void.

Krrath-Vel watched calmly as Saret escorts scattered, colliding outright as corrupted command data fed contradictory maneuver orders into their helm systems. A destroyer attempted a hard burn and sheared itself apart against its own inertial dampeners, its crew crushed before they understood what had gone wrong.

Dozens of frigates scrambled for space to jump again. Only two made it.

“Broadcasts are spiking,” Jex-Thaal said. “They’re requesting clarification.”

Krrath-Vel did not answer. He watched the moment discipline fractured into confusion, the instant certainty gave way to panic.

The Saret relied on systems.

Systems relied on trust.

Trust was revocable.

The last surviving cruiser attempted to retreat, its captain choosing withdrawal over annihilation. The ship jumped again on corrupted coordinates, emerging into a second kill zone already primed for its arrival. It died streaming plasma across the stars. The Kuskoi had done their work well.

“Educational,” Jex-Thaal said.

“Efficient,” Krrath-Vel agreed.

The few Saret survivors would tell of the disaster. That engagement would be dissected in Saret academies for decades, studied as an anomaly, debated as a failure of doctrine. None of those debates would matter.

***

Weeks later, another battle unfolded under very different conditions.

This time, the Saret arrived ready.

Formation tight. Shields layered. Weapons hot. They had learned enough to suspect ambush, known enough to distrust space itself. Their admirals had adjusted doctrine, shortened reaction chains, drilled crews for system failure.

It still wouldn’t save them.

Embedded aboard the Saret command ships were Kuskoi operatives, officially present as Federation technical liaisons. Known to be helpful. Trusted implicitly.

Each Kuskoi was a neuter-drone who could never breed. Only their deeds would grant them immortality in species memory. They sat quietly at consoles, mandibles clicking softly as they monitored encryption flow and system load.

One of them spoke to a Saret captain moments before activation.

“Your fleet is optimally positioned,” the translator hummed. “All systems report nominal. You may proceed with confidence.”

The Saret admiral nodded, jaw tight. “Transmit readiness across the line.”

The Kuskoi complied.

Immediately after the successful jump into the new system, the Kuskoi killed everything.

Navigation collapsed first. Helm controls went dark, then flickered with false positional data that contradicted inertial sensors. Weapon systems followed, power routing itself into recursive dead loops. Shield harmonics destabilized and shut down entirely.

Communications dissolved into static.

The Saret fleet did not explode.

It simply stopped.

Ships drifted helplessly, engines locked, weapons inert, crews shouting into unresponsive consoles. Officers screamed orders that could not be executed. Engineers tore panels free, fingers bleeding as they tried to force systems awake by hand.

Nothing worked.

Ranid strike groups translated into the system moments later and held position.

“They can’t fight,” Jex-Thaal said in distaste. “They can’t even die properly.”

Krrath-Vel felt a flicker of satisfaction, almost enjoyment

“We wait,” he said.

He could clearly imagine the dread and panic aboard the Saret ships, almost smell the heady scents of fear and panic.

For nearly an hour, the Ranid did nothing, predators toying with their helpless prey.

They waited while Saret crews attempted manual overrides, as engineers rerouted power through emergency trunks that had already been silently severed. Watched captains realize, one by one, that their ships had become coffins drifting in open space.

When Krrath-Vel finally gave the order, it was almost merciful.

“End it.”

The Ranid dismantled the fleet methodically, ship by ship. No urgency. No spectacle. Just erasure.

The Kuskoi had been instrumental.

They were small. Insectoid. Centipede-like. Brilliant in ways that made most species uncomfortable. Where the Ranid thought in population curves and extinction horizons, the Kuskoi lived inside networks. They did not fight. They rewrote.

They were also proud.

Too proud.

***

That successful campaign resulted in another breeding session with his Hive-Queen. It was the fifth time that Krrath-Vel had been so honored; his offspring would live long in his hive-tribe.

The resulting promotion meant he rose high in the Queen's council and now helped shape species strategy.

When the Kuskoi envoy stood before Krrath-Vel’s dais weeks later, the centipede-like creature’s excitement was poorly concealed.

“We have fulfilled our obligation,” the envoy said. “We were promised expansion.”

Krrath-Vel inclined his head.

The Kuskoi had begun the war with two marginal systems. They now possessed six more, all fertile, all thriving. Their growth curves were aggressive. Their confidence unchecked.

Too aggressive.

“Two additional systems,” the envoy continued. “We have identified them. Suitable for colonization.”

Krrath-Vel reviewed the future projections in silence. Ten thousand years. A hundred thousand. Cultural memory. Technological drift. Probability curves converged without exception.

The Kuskoi were not enemies.

That didn’t matter.

Any species that expanded unchecked eventually became one.

“The request is approved,” Krrath-Vel said.

The envoy vibrated with joy.

Ranid fleets escorted the Kuskoi colonization armada personally. A courtesy. The ships were heavy with life, larvae, Kuskoi matriarchs, genetic archives, history in transit.

When the fleet entered the target system, Krrath-Vel waited until the last ship crossed the hyperlimit.

“Fire.”

The first volley erased the lead transports. The second annihilated the fleet’s core. There were no evasive maneuvers. No counterfire. Only confusion, then silence.

Orders propagated outward. Ranid strike groups translated into all eight Kuskoi systems, one by one. Orbital bombardment followed; atmospheres burned; nests vitrified; oceans boiled.

The Kuskoi ceased to exist.

That was satisfactory.

***

Later, back on the hive-planet, a junior officer asked the question protocol required.

“They were loyal,” the officer said. “Useful.”

“Yes,” Krrath-Vel replied.

“Then why exterminate them?”

Krrath-Vel turned slowly.

“Because in a hundred years,” he said, “they might have asked again. In ten thousand years, they might have become a threat.”

The war against the Saret continued.

The galaxy grew quieter.

And that, Krrath-Vel believed, was the sound of progress.

THE END

***

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

*******

Discover More Sci-Fi Adventures

Each week, I’ll team up with a group of talented sci-fi authors to bring you an incredible selection of books. Whether you’re looking for thrilling space battles, deep space mysteries, or first-contact encounters, these books are packed with stories to fuel your imagination.

I wanted to draw your attention to this promotion. There are some fabulous authors on here. I've enjoyed a lot of their books in the past and I would suggest you'll find something good to read here, and they're all free!