Hidden Angels Series

The Hidden Angels Series is a set of alternate history science fiction books where history diverges from what we know with the arrival in 1700 of a man from a parallel world with special genes and knowledge.

The Books

Below I have listed the series as it stands today (06 JAN 2013). Initially, it was conceived as one volume that would cover from 1700 to approximately the present. Obviously, the work is expanding and each volume so far is creating the same number of pages for a lesser number of years. The likelihood of getting thirty years into any one future volume is low, and the splitting process will continue as it has already. While the general outline of the series exists out to the relative present, there are many random factors that determine exactly what happens on the way along the outline. In other words, this outline will change as the series is written.

Cover	Title	Years Covered	Publication	Synopsis
	What Angels These?	1700-1763	JAN 2012	In the year 1700 Molly Kirby looks on in horror as a meteor falls from the sky and wipes out the population of a Native American village in the western wilds of North Carolina, also killing her father, a trader who had built his trading post across a pond from the village. Molly races to the site of the disaster, to find that the only survivor was a man who was within the meteor. As the man helps her rebuild her life, Molly very quickly realizes that he has unusual abilities far beyond the strength to survive falling from the sky. The man takes the name Matthew West and builds a home, a family, a fortune, and a reputation. He also spreads an engineered complex of genes that makes him and his descendents special. What Angels These? is the first in the Hidden Angels series, an alternative history that follows Matthew West and his descendents through wars and revolutions. What Angels These? takes the family from 1700 to 1763 and the end of the Seven Years’ War.
	Angels Revolting	1763-1778	APR 2012	By 1763, Matthew West has become a major player in European and American history. He also has generations of descendants spread throughout Europe and North America, some of whom are exhibiting the same sort of psychic abilities that have allowed his rise in society. Angels Revolting, the second volume in the Hidden Angels series, follows Matthew West, his progeny, and those whose lives he has influenced from the year 1763 through 1778 as they twist the history of the world in new directions and the powers of those who become known as Angels are unleashed.
No Cover Yet	Angels in Motion	1778-1780	Not Yet Published	Continues the line of history with the aftermath of the War for American Independence and the wars between the European powers that it spawned, as well as following the main lines of the family and their separate stories.
No Cover Yet	Angels Out of Time	1778-1780	Not Yet Published	Takes place in the same time period as Angels in Motion, but follows a different line of the family that branched off through time.
No Cover Yet	Angels and Admirals	1778-1780	Not Yet Published	Takes place in the same time period as Angels in Motion and Angels Out of Time, but concentrates on the sea war and consequences of a decision by the British Admiralty.
No Cover Yet	Angels of War and Death	1781-1790?	Not Yet Published
No Cover Yet	Angels on Ice	1782-1783?	Not Yet Published	Thomas, Reichsgraf von Fairfax opens a doorway to a new dimension that allows space travel to other planets and encounters with alien species.
No Cover Yet	Angels in Apple Carts	1791-1798?	Not Yet Published
No Cover Yet	Angels and Empires	1798-1829?	Not Yet Published
No Cover Yet	Angels Fallen	1830-1859?	Not Yet Published
No Cover Yet	Angels at War	1880-1899?	Not Yet Published
No Cover Yet	Angels in Exile	1900-1929?	Not Yet Published
No Cover Yet	Angels...	?-?	Not Yet Published

The books are published through Amazon Kindle Direct Publiching and are available for Kindle and Kindle reading applications, such as Kindle for PC.

Novels, Short Stories, or Something Else?

Novels are wonderful things. But the volumes of the Hidden Angels series are not novels. They are groups of short stories hung on the framework of an alternate history family saga. Most of the chapters are independent short stories with separate characters, separate protagonists, and separate plots. Many characters only appear in one chapter/short story. Some characters or family branches may have whole threads of stories devoted to them. There are some chapters which are more part of creating the framework rather than separate and independent short stories. These framework stories especially occur in the beginning and first volume. Most of them have Matthew West as a significant character, even if the chapter is not from his perspective.

The closest that these volumes ever come to novels are in large, sweeping themes based on events in history, real or imagined. For instance, in the second volume three of the five text sections are covering the American Revolutionary War. In the first volume, there was a section on the Seven Years’ War. In what currently is planned to be the fifth volume, there is similarly a large portion mostly devoted to the French Revolutionary Wars and related revolutions. Still, the chapters in these sections are relatively distinct short stories. Events do overlap. Sometimes events happening in one chapter do effect events in another chapter. But they are still intended to be volumes of short stories.

It may be that in some ways the structure of these volumes are different from most writing that one encounters. Shakespeare’s Histories weren’t tragedies or comedies, per se. They were telling tales of history. That is what the chapters within the Hidden Angels series do. They are snippets of a historical family saga. Sometimes, the reason for a chapter is merely to tell how two people got together to marry and produce children. Is that truly a short story in the writer’s sense? Does it have all of the elements of a short story as one might learn them in a creative writing class? Maybe not. On the other hand, chapters of a (good) novel seldom resolve anything until the last chapter. The characters may solve a problem within the chapter, but it usually has little child problems to be resolved later. Thus is born a whole chain or multiple chains of issues to resolve each other in the last chapter. Does that sound anything like what the chapters within this series are? Some, perhaps. So, the chapters within the series may fall into three categories: chapters that move the frame along and may be novel-like chapters, chapters that are really independent short stories, and chapters that are just family history with no great problems to be overcome. That’s my theory for the moment. Perhaps some literature professor will look at it and have another theory? “Weatherford simply seems to suffer from an excresence of poor decisions on inclusions that mar the simplicity that could be the mastery of a blank page.” But perhaps I flatter myself.