Having explored the time before the first game (Karen Traviss’ Aspho Fields and The Slab), the time between the second and third (Traviss’ Jacinto’s Remnant, Anvil Gate, and Coalition’s End), after the fourth game (Jason M. Hough’s Ascendance), and both during the fifth and before the first (Hough’s Bloodlines), the novels based on the Gears Of War games are now mining the previously untapped era between the third and fourth games with Michael A. Stackpole’s military science fiction novel Gears Of War: Ephyra Rising (paperback, Kindle, audiobook). In the following email interview, Stackpole discusses what inspired and influenced this story, as well as why you don’t need to have played all of the Gears games, or any of them, to understand it.
