BLITZKRIEG: What’s It All About?

The Warrior Trilogy. Wolves on the Border. The Clan Invasion. The FedCom Civil War. The Capellan Solution. MechWarrior: Dark Age. One of the things that makes BattleTech BattleTech is the long tradition of exciting novels that tell the story of the universe. Fiction at the cutting edge. Stories you can’t put down until you’ve blazed through them and then you can’t forget.

This is one of the things I love most about the BattleTech universe and I’m not alone. I don’t think there’s anyone at Catalyst Game Labs who doesn’t love the novels of yore and wouldn’t give their left, uh, non-specified body part to bring fans more of the same.

Late last year, Jason Schmetzer and I came up with an idea to do just that. We wanted to leverage the e-publishing revolution to bring more great BattleTech fiction to fans, an idea we pitched to our diabolical, but generally fair, overlords, Loren Coleman, Randall Bills and Herb Beas. Loren, Randall, and Herb were excited by the idea and improved on our pitch in a number of key ways.

The long and short of it is we are going to try an experiment.

Blitzkrieg.

LIGHTNING WAR

Here’s the idea: we’re going to e-publish short novels—about one-third the length of a full novel—roomy enough for plenty of twists and turns, but short enough that we can produce them monthly. These are real books with beautiful, original art for covers. Short novels that push fast and hard into new areas of the universe: Devlin Stone and the end of the Jihad. The Wars of Reaving. The brushfire conflicts that almost pulled down the Republic. The Dark Age.

And beyond.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR BATTLECORPS

Catalyst already publishes BattleTech fiction through BattleCorps. Blitzkrieg isn’t meant to replace BattleCorps—it’s meant to augment it. There are wonderful things that BattleCorps does that this new program just can’t: present works that are much shorter—or longer—than short novels. Plunge fans into unexplored corners of BattleTech history. Take an intimate look at how war affects the lone soldier. We don’t want to lose any of these great stories.

Our plan is to keep the great fiction that BattleCorps is already publishing, and add the Blitzkrieg short novels. As a reward to BC customers, we will publish the Blitzkrieg works on that website in PDF—at no additional cost to subscribers.

COME CHECK US OUT

So I hope you’ll give this new program a try. Go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble and peruse the sample text, see if we’ve hit the target. Drop by the forums and let us know what you think. And if you buy a short novel and like it, we would greatly appreciate a good review.

This is an experiment, one we really want to work.

So we can introduce a whole new generation of readers to the headlong action of BattleTech.

–Steven Mohan, Jr.