The Vulpecula Cycle was a novel I wrote around 2002 or 2003 in three parts, and it’s probably my only truly comedic piece. Light sci fi rather than hard science fiction, the main inspirations for the story came from the 2001 TV mini-series starting Thomas Gibson and Russell Wong, The Lost Kingdom, which I think has been retitled since as The Monkey King. The story was a remix of Chinese classical novel Journey to the West with Thomas Gibson playing a Western scholar of Chinese and Ling Bai playing Guan Yin.
The other inspiration was my readings on the Chinese fox characters in classical Chinese culture, which unlike the rest of East Asia also more prominently featured male fox spirits. They were more satirical or troublesome characters, often proficient in Taoist magic, and I wanted to explore that aspect by putting them into the very strange situation of an international space mission, which created its own unintended and interesting subtexts.
Here is one of my preliminary drawings of the male fox character De, whom I do eventually want to do a short manga about on my blogs:
The Vulpecula Cycle, is available in print and e-book editions at Amazon. The e-books were published in three separate books since I was still experimenting with self-publishing, so they also have very different covers. The volume titles there are The Heavenly Tranquility(Vol 1), The Regent and the Courtier (Vol 2), and The Star Lords (Vol 3) :
The Print Edition Book Cover
Here is the general description of the series:
Upon hearing rumors in the forests of China of a space mission to a lunar colony, foxes Hua and De use their magical powers to masquerade as humans to get on the shuttle, the Heavenly Tranquility. But the mission, headed by China and manned with an international crew, quickly goes awry when the magical imposters disrupt the flight, throwing the ship onto the inhabited planet of Ting-duo in the Vulpecula constellation. The new world they encounter is a feudal, Silk Road- style realm that forces the stranded crew to pick sides in battles between rival provinces and court magicians. As romance blossoms between the fox fairies and their crewmates, the arrival of a rescue mission from earth, the Scavenger, shatters the peace of everyone from both ships as the politics of earth and the revelation of Hua and De’s true nature threatens their future.
I chose a style for the three volume e-book covers that reflected my more innocent, silly, chaotic take on the fox myth (for a darker, more traditional take on kitsune, see my Lucky Cat series).
The Ice Pine Palace 