Changelings

Liam Corley is an award-winning poet and scholar. Changelings Insurgence is his first work of fiction. He is a professor of American Literature at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. His work on literature and war has been published in War, Literature, & the Arts, College English, and the Journal of Veterans Studies and has been supported with a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Liam is the author of Bayard Taylor: Determined Dreamer of America's Rise, 1825-1878 (Bucknell University Press, 2014). A debut poetry collection, unwound, came out from Middle West Press in 2023. His poems can also be found in Strange Horizons, Chautauqua, First Things, Badlands, Inlandia, The Line Literary, O-Dark-Thirty, and Wrath-Bearing Tree. Since 2004, Liam has served in the U.S. Navy Reserve. He has completed multiple deployments, including ones to Afghanistan and Iraq, and throughout the Pacific area of operations. He lives in Riverside, California, with his wife and four children.

When Commander Tauran's young son, Lausus, is diagnosed as one of the despised changeling mutants, Tauran believes the government assurances that his boy will be treated well. His less trusting wife, Beatra, however, flees with Lausus to a changeling planet.After years of leading troops into battles against the mutants, while tirelessly searching for signs of Beatra and Lausus, Tauran seizes on an offer from a trusted, yet rogue, scientist with a time travel device that will enable Tauran to harvest fresh DNA from humans before Earth's nuclear wars.Teamed with three others-a scientist, a scholar, and a war criminal with nothing to prove-Tauran maxes out the time travel device, arriving to Earth's first century where he encounters a healer from an abandoned religious sect. Faced with more of a mystery than ever, Tauran determines to learn the healer's secrets or risk kidnapping him for his DNA to save Lausus, purge the mutation, and end the war between humans and their mutant offspring.But Tauran and his team have to move fast-before mutants from their own era overrun the team's time travel site on Terra, and before a government conspiracy to prolong the war destroys what's left of humanity's home world with a final nuclear blast.