What's Max Seventeen about?

Good question.

It's about sex, violence and swearing, of course. It's also about finding your identity and creating your own destiny. It's about finding where you came from and figuring out where you want to go. It's about realising you're the sort of person who gets to fall in love.

It's about pirates. Those of you who love Firefly will probably know that Joss Whedon's space jockeys have a strong Old West aesthetic. They wear guns at their hips and ride horses, which doesn't happen in SF nearly often enough. They're space cowboys, if you will.

But the crew of the Eurydice in Max Seventeen have more of a Golden Age of Piracy vibe. This may or may not be as a result of my obsession with Black Sails. The hero may or may not look a lot like Tom Hopper as Billy Bones.

My pirates fight with laser cannons and cutlasses. They wear leather weapons belts and big boots. They swear...a lot. They board merchant spaceships, tie up the crew and steal all the cargo. They're best friends with brothel keepers, drug dealers and thieves. Some of them might have done time in jail; my heroine certainly has.

It's also about space, about the vasty nothingness that exists when you blast out of a planet's atmosphere and the questions you might ask of yourself there. It's about new planets, where humanity has tried to start again and sometimes even succeeded. It's about double-layer helicon thrusters, lines of computer code and DNA riddles.

To borrow a line from Moulin Rouge: it's a story about a time, a story about a place, a story about the people. But most of all, it's about love.

It's out Nov 1st in ebook and paperback. To read an excerpt through Instafreebie, click here.