Hard Setdown by T.Q. Chant

Hard Setdown is the first novella of the Science Fiction Sam Cane series by T.Q. Chant.

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Sam Cane – ex-con artist (sort of), ex-soldier (definitely), and woman on the run.

In too deep with the wrong people, she’s bailed out of the nearest exit and gone corporate. Leaving a life of petty crime on Earth she’s heading for the furthest flung of humanity’s scattered worlds, looking for a place to hide. But sometimes, what you’re running from isn’t the thing that will kill you.

Out on the fringe, Sam finds that things can get a little strange, and a lot dangerous…

A Word from the Author

In many ways, this series is exactly as it appears – tense, fast-paced, hard-hitting science fiction stories that follow Sam Cane, a woman with a shady past trying to go straight, but getting caught up with dangerous events on the fringes of human settlement.

Through these novellas, though, I wanted to look at how much better we could be if we could do away with so many dangerous, negative things that still plague us. Things like everyday sexism, racism, homophobia, general intolerance and religious fundamentalism. Rather than the easy option of exploring these themes through dystopia, I chose to write about a world in which they have become a thing of the past. Not a perfect world, but I think a better one. One that’s being challenged by throwbacks to humanity’s darker past. The series started life as something a bit more military-SF, with a fairly typical square jawed hero. I found the setting really popped and the character came to life when I re-wrote it as a woman on the run from her own past. Not a hero, but not a villain either – someone in between who just wants to be left alone to get on with her life.

Hard Setdown finds Sam Cane landed on a bleak, hot planet and abandoned to her fate when it becomes apparent that the colonists she was supposed to join have disappeared. Follow her struggle to survive, find out what happened to the colonists, and try to get herself off the planet before it kills her.
(T.Q. Chant, May 2017)