Category: The Committee

Our Biggest and Best Launch Yet!

Posted on by Shane Lochlann Black

Please review our new editorial policy

The Build a Starship Campaign Funded in One Day!

Our Top Contributor is WOLVERINE
Future Owner of NINE Spacecraft!

We’ve Hit FOUR! TWO Stretch Goals Left!

Concept art only. Actual models may be different designs and sizes

We’re making custom manufactured, hand painted models of FIVE of the ships from the Starships Universe: We’re building the Citadel-class battleship DSS Argent, the Pershing-class advanced strike cruiser DSS Fury, the G-85 First Generation Tarantula Hawk Gunship, the Proximan battlecruiser HMAV Jaal, commanded by Lord-Captain Gael Oakshotte, and the entire formation of 2G Yellowjacket fighters from Squadron Nine. You might know them better as the Bandit Jacks! Each fighter will have custom warpaint to match its pilot’s callsign!

Cold Beverage Studios is designing each ship using specialized 3D software. We have a local manufacturer ready to build and paint the models and their display stands. We’re making collectible quality numbered first builds available to readers as campaign rewards. You can have an authentic officially licensed Starships Universe collectible spacecraft on your bookshelf!

Concept art only. Actual models may be different designs and sizes

I launched Build a Starship to raise funds to adapt all of my books to paperback formats. Like all authors I know readers appreciate choices, especially when it comes to formats. Some folks like the convenience and portability of digital, but others like to hold books, put them on a shelf and not have to worry about battery life when they’re reading! I want you to know Shane is right there with you. When the campaign is funded, we can bring the Starships Universe to the printed page in an affordable format that maintains the quality level you’ve come to expect from my store. We’ve already made tremendous progress:


Strike Battleship Argent has already been released! The story that launched the Starships Universe is now available as a signature edition hardcover, a signature edition paperback, a full length remastered audiobook (over nine hours) and in the original digital edition that took the science fiction world by storm ten years ago in October!

Let None Return Alive was also released as a signature edition paperback in January! This is the title that kicked off Destroy All Starships with a thunderous battle in the Core Seven system and the introduction of three new alien factions! That’s two of my most popular titles so far, and we’re just getting started! Battle Force is slated to be released in February 2026!

Build a Starship funded in one day. We hit two stretch goals in a couple of weeks We hit FOUR in a month! My original plan was to adapt Starship Expeditionary Fleet for a paperback collection. Now I’m in a position where releasing the entire catalog in both paperback and hardcover is within reach. So I’ve added two new stretch goals and added extra clock, but time is limited! Here’s how you can join us today and make what we’ve started even better:

Join the Engineering Tier – Contribute $7.40 or more: I’ve set aside the electronic edition of the upcoming DSS Argent Starship Technical Manual as a reward for your fine efforts. Help us continue our expansion into paperbacks and enjoy a premium bonus!

Join the Challenge Tier – Contribute $100.00 or more: We’re designing unique custom-manufactured Challenge Coins with emblems from Skywatch Command, the Skywatch Marine Corps, the Ironjammer Pirates and even Cold Beverage Studios! You will receive the Challenge Coin of your choice for contributing in this tier!

The Build a Starship Campaign is our fourth crowdfunding project, and it is the fourth that has funded successfully! You purchased 25 Ultimate Arsenals from Getabook.today to make The Infamous 24 Series a reality, now we’re going to create a monster library of premium quality paperbacks worthy of our readers! Hit the link to follow the campaign and be sure to bookmark this site for the latest news! All ahead! Battle speed!

Welcome Back to Home Base

Posted on by Shane Lochlann Black


There will be a larger than normal volume of email over the next two to three weeks in order to properly update subscribers about the work we’ve done since the beginning of 2025. We have reason to believe email platforms have been interfering in the delivery of our newsletters for at least 2-3 months, possibly as long as a year, so bear with us as we bring everyone up to speed. Consider this site your headquarters for upcoming campaigns.

Please review our new editorial policy to familiarize yourself with the philosophy behind our new approach to email newsletters.

If you have not already done so, sound off in our Communications Check post to confirm you are receiving our newsletters.

I will be organizing these posts as individual topics and then posting “digest” versions every few days for people to catch up. As I’m sure you can imagine between books, merchandise, videos, audiobooks, crowdfunding, spaceship models, commemorative art and many other things, there’s a lot to cover. We’ll start with the new published material from last year. I published three new books in 2025:

Dreadnought Ascendant
Starships at War Book Six
The Bandit Jacks go into action against a fleet of planet raiders in the Core Six system!
Operation Justicar
Destroy All Starships Book Seven
Captain Jason Hunter and Proximan Lord-Captain Gael Oakshotte are stranded on a barbaric world!
The Infamous 24
Bitbook Only Title
The Battleship Argent discovers a Mystery in the contested Mycenae Ceti system!

Visit again later today to see my works in progress, some of which you can preview here, on Bitbook and on my video site. Then we will cover releases of new editions of my books.

Greetings to Our New Readers

Posted on by Shane Lochlann Black

Special Offer: If this is your first time here, leave a comment and say hello. You might find something fun and surprising in your email! 🙂

Welcome to the Committee! This is my flagship site, where useful information is published for the convenience of my readers and guests. Above you will find a menu to some of the cardinal attractions on our network. Chief among them is the Gateway Link which will provide you a menu of roughly ten sites you can explore.

Here you will find over 32 years of creative work, all of which is owned or licensed by my studio or production company.

Exploration and curiosity are rewarded here. There are no ads, pop-ups, distractions or tracking. You will not be forced into obsessive scrolling. I have many hours of videos and over a quarter-million words of free science fiction, fantasy, gamelit, romance, non-fiction and comics for you. I have an enormous collection of hand-drawn art made by my studio team and even a few games here and there. Take your time and enjoy all we have to offer.

I maintain an oft-updated Blogroll and links list, which I plan to expand considerably in 2026. This site is the primary canonical source of official news regarding my various book series, outbound links, merchandise, crowdfunding and most other projects I publish for readers, subscribers, customers, clients and supporters. If you are looking for official information it will be found here. Feel free to bookmark Lochlann.black. I also invite you to follow my RSS Feed.

Blogroll Update

Posted on by Shane Lochlann Black

I’ve added a “Tech” section to the Blogroll, and included the inestimable Emacs Org Mode. The Tech sites are a little more permanent than the Sites of the Day.

There’s a new recommended book and I’ve instituted a policy of no longer linking to Amazon for book recommendations. Authors: Build your own web sites. Put your book on your own site where you can protect it.

In case you are wondering, I maintain a blogroll. It’s where I link to other interesting sites on the web. Not social media posts. Not big tech’s gigantic piles of debris. The web. Where we all have our own sites and we link to each other because that’s how you make “the web” and not an endless river of diseased #(%&*@%.

The Home Space Station

Posted on by Shane Lochlann Black

It was a lot of work, but it was both worth it and necessary. I’ve consolidated all our most vital operations to our own land, as it were, so we can have a little more control over the quality of the product we’re putting out there.

The Internet has changed quite a bit since I got started. Keeping in touch with readers is challenging, but at the same time it is easier than it was all those years ago. The good news is we are no longer dependent on outside services for our vital communications. I like to think of it as one less point of potential failure. In order for us to grow our audience and invite more subscribers, we have to be consistent. This is one of the steps we had to take to make that happen.

I have five primary commercial web sites now: One for the Starships series, one for the Ironjammers, one for the bookstore, one for the studio and the fifth one for Bitbook. There are other ancillary pages, but those are the main points of entry. The Committee is equally associated with each, which is why I’ve added all of the sites to their own section on my links page.

I have several other publishing projects I’ve completed over the years which are no longer being actively updated. These include the First Kiss Romances, the Incredible Untold Story of Sailor Moon, my Kings and Conquests LitRPG series, the Million Dollar Artist™ series and so on. The books will still be available in the store, but they aren’t going to have their own “sites” per se because we’re not actively pursuing any ongoing new titles currently. This may change, of course, but for now the two major initiatives are the Starships Universe military science fiction series and the Ironjammers fantasy adventure series.

It wasn’t all that long ago I had separate pen names for all these books. The logistics involved in keeping them all organized were overwhelming. Don’t ever do that to yourself if you’re an author.

The thing I’m most excited about is Bitbook, because it is where I can fulfill all the plans I had for the Library-Tron and still make entire novel-length titles available for purchase. I will publish my first experimental title there soon. I think it will be a lot of fun.

I will also be launching an Ironjammers newsletter soon, so I can keep readers up to date on what’s happening with my fantasy series. Believe it or not, my fantasy characters have been around a lot longer than my sci-fi crews. Those books will come together quick, so don’t miss out.

Head over to my links section (it’s in the menu above) and take a look at what’s new. I’ll be updating much more frequently now that I’ve got everything semi-organized in one place. Black out.