The Dawn of Starcraft
For the Swarm!
Since then, I've been wondering what else I could do that could let me combine my passions. I've written a couple of science fiction books, and I always wondered what it would be like to write a science fiction story with the Starcraft pro scene as the main setting. So I wrote one, and it's free to download and read!
The setting is a parallel universe very similar to our own, where Starcraft and eSports in general have evolved exactly the way they did here. The only real differences are the names of the professional gamers and their teams. I did this so that I could write about fictional characters without having to write a story about real people like Idra, Huk, Stephano, or Naniwa. (I did include mentions of Artosis and Tasteless, but that's because I figured they are so powerful that they would exist in every universe) The main character is John "Heart" Wolanski, who is kind of an amalgamation of a bunch of different pro players but also his own person.
The timeframe is set in late 2012, before the release of Heart of the Swarm. I did this because I understood some of the matchups better in Wings of Liberty, mostly due to watching more matches overall and the metagame being slightly more figured out. Also it lets me set future stories after the release of the expansion.
Some of the metagame is changed for dramatic reasons, or because it's a parallel universe, or due to my lack of intimate understanding of the matchups. Or maybe all three. But the metagame is important to the story, so I tried not to stray too far from what could be believable.
To make the cover image, I made a landscape using Teragen and drew a Stalker (slightly differently shaped from a real Stalker because, well, it's a parallel universe) in a layer on top using Photoshop and a Bamboo tablet, then applied some filters and effects to make the Stalker seem more otherworldly.
The story is free to download in multiple formats (epub, mobi, PDF, etc), all DRM-free, at this link:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/316284
However, if you have a Kindle, and you want to support my work and support me, you can buy a copy at Amazon for 99 cents here. If you like it enough to want to read some of my longer works, you can check them out here.
I had a lot of fun writing this story and I hope that people enjoy it. If there is enough interest I might do a full-length novel using this setting.