Galactic Survey

Synopsis

THEY FOUND HYPERSPACE. NOW WHAT? Chen JieMin hypothesized the existence of hyperspace. The government of Arcadia put a project together to build a hyperspace probe. Chen ChaoLi managed the project to build a successful probe and transition it there and back. But hyperspace is still just a curiosity, no more. Unless they can figure out a means of propulsion in hyperspace, it is a purely academic exercise. Even with a means of propulsion, Where will they go? The locations of the colonies were kept secret from each other and from Earth. Where are the other colonies, the best potential destinations for a hyperspace ship? And if they space to a colony, how will they be received? AN INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND GALACTIC SURVEY is the third COLONY book. What's the setup? In ARCADIA, they managed to successfully send a probe into hyperspace and have it return at the same place intact. That's not a hyperspace drive. So the first problem to solve is propulsion. How do you manage to move in hyperspace? That's the first problem? What's the next problem? Where do you go? They are reticent, as a colony of twenty million people, to make contact with Earth, which was stable at four billion people the last they knew. But where are the other colony planets? Janice Quant kept their locations a secret. How do you find them? Hence the title. Exactly correct. They're going to have to figure out the most likely locations for the other colonies and go out and look for them. It's a big galaxy, so the job isn't easy. I assume they find some colonies. Yes, but now you have another issue. If you send people to another colony, after over a century of separation, how will those people be received? Will they be welcomed? Will the other colony be compatible as a trading partner? What have they got to trade? So there's a lot going on. Yes, and it's all going on in parallel, along multiple threads. That's why GALACTIC SURVEY took 45 writing days. A bit faster than QUANT, though it felt longer because I had twenty-one days of not writing in there. An SF convention and summer vacation interrupted my writing. So it was sixty-six calendar days start to finish. It's a complicated story. Who's in this one? All the characters from the last novella of Arcadia are here. JieMin and ChaoLi. Karl Huenemann and Rob Milbank. Chen Zufu and Chen Zumu, who are still MinChao and Jessica. And there's a lot of new characters, not just on Arcadia, but on other colony planets as well. Does Janice Quant make an appearance? Yes, and that's all I'll say about it. Spoilers are possible. What about the cover? That's JieMin explaining to ChaoLi how he's trying to find the other colony planets. He's visualized a way to figure out where they are, based on what he already knows. Once again, the artists are Luca Oleastri and Paola Giari, working to my specification. This is twenty novels in four years for you. How do you do that? It takes maybe five hundred hours to write a novel. So the question is, How many hours a day are you willing to work? I think about the book or write in it all day, seven days a week. Then I take a couple weeks off between. You still write seat-of-the-pants? Absolutely. I have only the vaguest idea what's going to happen when I start a book. I don't think I could come up with a plot as convoluted as the ones in the Colony or Empire series by thinking them out ahead of time. I have two months of thinking about the plot as I write, and I keep having "Oh, what if this happened?" thoughts as I write. So what's next for the COLONY series? I haven't decided yet. I could continue with them finding and opening up a dialog with other colony planets, or I could skip thirty years or so, to when that is all done, and carry on from there. Both have their appeal.