The Bantam

Edited by: Amanda Rutter
Publisher: Robot Dinosaur Fiction
Genre(s): science fiction
Wordcount: 18,756 (Novella)
Series: Phantom Traveler

When one of Ehli's bantam sisters turns up dead, she must figure out what happened before she's blamed for the murder, and before the real killer strikes again.

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Related Content

• The Bantam Goes Wide (27 Nov 2018, Blog post)
• Phantom Traveler (Series)

Ehli is an iscillian, designed in a lab to serve as a bantam, a ship custodian for a merchant crew. She imagines no future beyond the care of her starship and the quiet hours between ships spent painting in her quarters.

But when she discovers a vague clue that undermines the clear purpose of her existence, the satisfaction she once found in her simple routine dissolves into an unsettling, deadly obsession to learn the truth.

Her job is to put the needs of her ship and its crew before her own, but every step she takes to investigate her origins—the origins of all iscillian across the galaxy—drags her away from the life she knew and deeper into danger.

But Ehli can’t ignore what she’s learned. She must know what secrets have been kept from her, and she’s willing to risk everything to uncover them.

THE BANTAM transports you to a distant corner of space, introduces you to the most adorable invertebrate you’ve ever met, and sets up a mystery to propel Ehli forward into a new life of exploration and adventure.

Praise for The Bantam

“Colorful, delightful, technical, and strange…” — Amazon Reader

“This novella is beautifully written, with every detail intricately considered.” — Amazon Reader

RJT Tropes:

found families, friends helping friends, dangerous behaviors, aliens who paint, explorations of self amid crisis, low key whodunnit mystery, humanities, female protagonist, alien mc, hydrostats, cephalopod kinda mollusk-esque, squishy huggable aliens, asexual, ace, sentient spaceships, self-discovery, no humans in this, they’ve never even heard of humans, AI, droids that fly, specialized skills, no one reads the manual, under-appreciated talent, FTL travel, space mechanics, genetic engineering, loneliness, getting your boss back for four years of unpleasantness, color-shifting skin, secret language, chromatophores and iridiphores, invertebrate punks, identities tied to names, characters being creative for creativity’s sake, she can taste you with her skin, scaly four-armed grumpy aliens, clear your own name, shattered daily routines, you woke up and thought life was boring then murder happens, hugs as cure-all

Content Notes:

murder, blood, gore, racism, classism, bad interactions with law enforcement, fear, peril, isolation, surveillance