From 1980 to 1992, I considered myself as much a science fiction writer as a fantasy writer. In 1992, though, my agent sat me down and told me a few facts about the market, with reference to the royalty statements showing how much more money I made from fantasy than from SF, and I stopped writing science fiction novels under the name Lawrence Watt-Evans.

Well, after completing the three-book contract for the series now called "Worlds of Shadow," which crossed genre lines, I stopped. And there was one SF novel I'd written that hadn't sold yet, The Spartacus File (a collaboration with Carl Parlagreco), which did eventually see print.

But mostly I ostensibly quit.

During my time as a multi-genre novelist I wrote a total of ten novels I consider arguably science fiction. Half of them were series novels -- the "War Surplus" series (two volumes), and the "Worlds of Shadow" series (three volumes). Both series had fantasy elements mixed in with the SF.

One of the others, Nightside City, eventually became a series novel when I wrote a sequel, Realms of Light. Collectively, they're The Cases of Carlisle Hsing.

The other four are the first ones listed on the right. You can click on those links to read more about each of them. Two of them -- Shining Steel and Denner's Wreck -- share a background with the Cases of Carlisle Hsing, though there may be some minor contradictions, as I wasn't being especially careful about it.

So what happened since 1992? Where did those others come from?

Well, in an earlier version of this page I said there were two ways I might write more SF novels: I could write them under another name, or I could write them as reader-supported online serials, the way I did several Ethshar novels.

In fact, I did both. Realms of Light was written as an online serial. And I created another identity, Nathan Archer, to write science fiction. I set out to establish Nathan's career by writing tie-ins, and did half a dozen of those -- two Star Trek novels, two Predator novelizations, a Mars Attacks! spin-off, and in collaboration with Kurt Busiek, a Spider-Man novel.

The theory was that once Nathan was established I would write my own science fiction under that name, but alas, I never really found time to do that. Nathan wrote a couple of short stories, one of which ("That Doggone Vnorpt") was intended to connect with a novel I still haven't finished, but never any non-tie-in novels.

I did write a couple more novels that are more or less science fiction -- Vika's Avenger and the Tom Derringer stories -- but by then the market had changed so much that I went to Kickstarter to fund self-publishing them through my Misenchanted Press, and there really didn't seem to be any point in using the Archer name there.

So that's all my SF novels for now.

That's it; here's your list of handy exits:

The Misenchanted Page
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