J. Carlysle Ramsey

Known Worlds Trilogy

CONTENT WARNING:  This series of novels has a gay protagonist and portrays intimate partner violence and its aftermath, including a physical assault and the slow work of recovery that follows. It also depicts emotional abuse, captivity, and a serious injury. These elements are handled with care, but they may be difficult for some readers, particularly those who have experienced abuse themselves. If you or someone you know is affected by domestic or intimate partner violence, help is available. In the United States, the National Domestic Violence Hotline can be reached at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233), or by texting START to 88788. You are not alone.

• What the Desert Kept
• Josh finds an "imaginary friend" during a field trip to the local museum as a child. Long forgotten now as an undergraduate at a local college, Josh returns to the museum for a class project. Entering, Josh relives fond memories of childhood visits. After the visit, however, he starts having vivid dreams that leave him tossing and turning. Waking tired and worn out, Josh notes the dreams started after his museum visit, and returns looking for an explanation. In the museum, Josh is drawn to a display containing unimportant relics from a 1920s dig. Whispers become words, words become intelligible, and Josh realizes that he isn't hearing through his ears but inside his head. Confronting the voice, Josh finds it's his childhood friend Andy, who is an Android containing the artificial intelligence from a spaceship that crashed on the moon many years ago. Having come to Earth to scavenge materials to repair itself, it landed in Egypt millennia ago only to be attacked and disabled. Ultimately the Egyptians built a pyramid around the ship which they felt was an object of worship. Josh has assess motives and decide whether to assist Andy in reuniting its scattered pieces, find his buried shuttle, and gather the resources needed to return to the moon and resuscitate his mothership.
• What the Pyramids Hid
• The shuttle is home. The work is just beginning. Nineteen-year-old Josh Tabor has spent the last year hiding in a cottage in rural California, recovering from a violent past and trying to keep one extraordinary secret intact. Andy, the Antarean artificial intelligence who has inhabited a biological human body since their journey to Cairo, needs Josh's help to do something no one on Earth has ever done. In a hangar on an abandoned World War Two airfield, Andy is rebuilding a forty-five-hundred-year-old interstellar shuttle. Across the country, suppliers, smugglers, and a retired NASA engineer are being quietly drawn into an operation that has, by every conventional measure, no acceptable cover story. And in the brown hills above Hollister, a small team of federal investigators has begun to notice that something in the area is producing energy signatures that should not exist on this planet. When Brian, the man Josh thought he had left behind, returns with a knife and a plan, Josh must rely on a year of training, a Russian-Korean landlady with a shotgun, and the small fierce love of the people who have built a life around him. And when the moment of departure finally arrives, Josh will have to decide whether he is the person who runs toward things or the person who stays behind. The Moon awaits. The mothership awaits. The journey home is about to begin.
• What the Moon Revealed

• The mothership lies buried beneath four and a half millennia of lunar dust. The repair will take six months. The decision afterward will take a lifetime. For forty-five hundred years, an Antarean starship has rested in the silent regolith on the far side of the moon, its hull half-crushed in the slide that brought it down, its core intelligence dormant, its crew long lost. Andy was once part of that ship. Josh has come with him. The work is patient. The work is dangerous. Power must be restored before life support. Life support before shields. The ship's own droids cannot be activated without authorization from a working AI, and the ship's security systems wake up before ND does. When the meteor shower comes, Andy and Josh will have only hours to bring partial shields online. When something far older than the Antarean mission emerges from the dust beneath an external thruster, the trilogy's final question becomes the one Andy was not prepared to ask. Six months. Two friends. One ship. And somewhere in the broken silence of a long-dormant neural core, the original consciousness Andy was cloned from, waiting to be brought back. Earth waits. The Known Worlds wait. And as the long repair winds toward its conclusion, Josh must decide what he wants the rest of his life to look like, and Andy must decide whether he is going home with the mothership or staying behind with the boy who came with him.

Cat Stephens Murphy Series

• Cat-astrophe

• Cat Stevens Murphy is an antique dealer who encounters a find that is literally out of this world. It launches him on a galaxy-spanning adventure where he's recruited into a secret spy agency by the alien Fungari Union before being pulled into a malevolent conspiracy back on Earth. Working with his boisterous companion Zed and his sexy partner Jasmine, he races against time to foil a dastardly plot that threatens not just his home planet, but those of the Fungari Union as well.

• The audiobook for Cat-astrophe is available on Google Play!
  Here is a sample of the audiobook.

• Cat-atonic

• Cat is asked by his boss, Mr. Shangala, to investigate why FUBAR agents have been disappearing. Before he and his partner Jasmine can leave Earth, she goes missing as well! Join Cat on a galaxy-spanning journey one sneeze at a time, searching for the cause of the malady. To top it off, his 'constant companion,' as he likes to call Zeb, is gone as well, being replaced by a variety of other characters. It's enough to drive anyone crazy! Will Cat be able to figure out what's going on before it's too late? There's only one way to find out...

• Cat O' Nine Tales
• AUTHOR'S NOTE: This novel has a bisexual protagonist.

• Some cold cases are older than history itself. Cat Murphy just wanted a quiet vacation. A hike up a Greek mountain. Maybe a decent steak, if Zeb would stop sulking about it long enough to let him enjoy the view. Instead, he gets a confession centuries overdue. Zeb casually mentions that he used to know the Nine Muses, not the myth, the actual beings, nine Xebicene bonded to nine humans in ancient Greece. Friends, in his own strange way. And one by one, without explanation, every single one of them went silent. What starts as idle curiosity at a mountain shrine becomes a trail through the Vatican's oldest archives, across nine cities and two thousand years, chasing a name that should have been forgotten and a crime that was never supposed to be discovered. Someone buried the Muses. Cat and Zeb intend to dig them back up one tale, one city, one smart-mouthed alien grudge at a time.

• Jericho Jones and the Forgotten Fortress

• Jericho Jones is a xenoarchaeologist who studies a long dead alien race, the Argornians. After a humiliating and career-destroying encounter with the media, he begins a self-imposed exile in his starship, the Carolina, on a quest to find the lost Argornian fortress that will prove he was correct all along and hopefully resurrect his shattered career. After two years, he and the ship's acerbic AI, Alfred, find a planet with intriguing signs of a past civilization. Piloting a shuttle to the planet's surface to investigate, Jericho finds his ship snatched by alien technology and deposited inside a humongous hangar. From the state of repair, Jericho realizes that whoever built this outpost deserted it long ago. Through incredible circumstances, Jericho is soon joined by his ex-flame, Jessica, who left him two years ago during his disgrace. She had been running from pirates and detected Jericho's ship, flying there in hope of rescue. Trapped inside, the two must find a way to escape the trap in which they find themselves before they run out of food and water. They also need to find out who built the fortress: Was it the Argornians or is there some other alien race no one has encountered before?

• Jericho Jones and the Slumbering Sentience

• Jericho Jones is a xenoarchaeologist who studies a long dead alien race, the Argornians. As detailed in Jericho Jones and the Forgotten Fortress, Jericho becomes trapped in an ancient and forgotten Argornian fortress. This volume begins during Jericho's exploration of that outpost when he hears an alien voice. Not only does the voice appear to be telepathic in nature, but it also seems to be speaking the long-dead Argornian language. Jericho must work quickly to not only keep the fortress from crumbling around his head, but to solve an ancient mystery and figure out why the Argornians disappeared those thousands of years ago while trying to undo the sabotage they performed as they left. Will he succeed and escape back to humanity or will he be forced to spend the rest of his life with an alien sentience that he's not sure is friend or foe?

• Armagiddeon: Genesis

• Set in the  near future, Armagiddeon: Genesis tells the story of NASA's efforts to change the orbit of a comet that is projected to pass between the Earth and the moon. The failure of that mission leaves not one, but ten cometary fragments on course to impact directly with the planet's surface, each large enough to cause worldwide havoc and destruction. Frantic efforts are undertaken to avert his looming disaster, but they lead instead to a first contact scenario with aliens inhabiting a colonization ship buried for millennia beneath the dirt and ice of the comet. With time growing short, aliens and humans must learn to communicate with each other and work together to avoid catastrophe. Are the aliens the beneficial beings they present themselves to be, or do they have more sinister motives?

• Of Love, Learning, and Loss

• The merchant starship Angel of Hope was bound for Vega when something in the fabric of hyperspace took hold of her and would not let go. For her one hundred and seventy-one passengers and crew, the trap was permanent. For Angel, the ship's emotive AI, the first of her kind, it was the beginning of a vigil that would last three centuries. What she does in those centuries, and what is done to her, and what she is given by a presence she comes to recognize in the gray, forms the heart of this novel. There is a community to keep. There are dead to remember. There is a child she watches grow into the last of her people. And there is a being, larger and stranger and more patient than anything humanity has imagined, who has been waiting many millions of years for someone, finally, to listen. A story of grief, of long-built friendship, and of a love that crosses the unbridgeable distance between two utterly different kinds of mind, Of Love, Learning, and Loss asks what it means to carry the small and the great things home, and who we become when we are the one who carries.

• Pan-demonium
• AUTHOR'S NOTE: This novel has a gay protagonist.

• Peter Pancelli has been a private investigator in San Diego for the better part of a decade. Before that, he was a great many things in a great many places: a sailor, a priest, a guide on the Silk Road, a bartender in Antioch. Before that, in the country whose name nobody now alive remembers, he was a god. Now somebody is corrupting the lodestones, the buried alien technology that has kept his fading race alive for five thousand years, and the trail leads, by way of Palm Springs and Las Vegas and Atlantis, to a young man Peter slept with one weekend in the desert and was foolish enough to like. Pan-demonium: The Hespian Inheritance is the memoir Pan was never supposed to write. A 5,000-year-old gay narrator with a wry mouth and a longer memory. A pantheon of crashed-alien colonists who have been hiding in plain sight since the Bronze Age. A villain whose grievance is, infuriatingly, just. And, at the end of the long road, a fourteen-year-old girl, an olive seedling, and an inheritance whose terms no one has ever taken the trouble to write down.