Hero's Chains is an as-yet-unfinished, self-published sci fi / fantasy series by Robert Sier.
The first book, Chains of Loss, begins the tale of Derek, a naive cyborg of a 35th-century stellar colony who's yanked from his home by a manipulative precognitive who claims that she crashed his ship in hostile territory because he's the only one who can save the world. From Derek's perspective, though, the world's already badly broken; not only is Earth physically unrecognizable as the world his people left, there's orcs, vampires, and physics-defying magic.
The official heroschains.tumblr.com is now a porn spam page.
[Hero's Chains] contains examples of:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Subverted, as one AI goes into some detail when creating its offspring about methods of ensuring sanity and causing the new AI to imprint on humans. It's still not a good idea to take advice from a one-day-old AI with no real-world experience.
- Benevolent A.I.: The protagonist is a cyborg with an A.I. integrated into his own body in order to handle nanotech, data searches, and communication. He treats it like a sibling.
- The Chooser of the One: The precognitive Sheralys explicitly states that she chose Derek as the best option to break the status quo, but also openly admits that her foresight is hit-or-miss.
- Digital Piracy Is Okay: The author seeds a torrent of Chains of Loss, and encourages fan works. His stated opinion is that there's no difference between pirating his book and checking it out from a library.
