Bøger af Weyand Richard F. Weyand

Computer engineer and science fiction author Rich Weyand tells sixty-two of his favorite stories in this engaging memoir. Funny and insightful, he demonstrates just how ridiculous life can be, and how to roll with the punches.

Ruling over the vast bureaucracy of the Sintaran Empire is the Imperial Council. It's only check: The Empress, whose every decree is binding law. The corruption of the bureaucracy has reached staggering proportions when a true reformer ascends to the Throne. She has a long-term plan to reform the Empire. But can the new Empress and her young allies succeed? And at what cost? AN INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND Is EMPIRE part of the Childers Universe, or a completely new series? EMPIRE is a completely new series. I wrote myself out of a job in Childers. Jan Childers solves the interstellar war problem, so life gets much less interesting from a novelist's point of view. The Childers books start a few hundred years in the future, and span about three hundred years. EMPIRE is likely a thousand years or so in the future, and spans only about thirty years across all five planned books. What are the core technologies underlying the science in EMPIRE? Fully immersive virtual reality is here. I think direct neural VR is virtually a certainty. Hyperspace is here as well, although it works differently than in the Childers Universe. I need hyperspace to have interstellar travel while not violating normal-space physics, but it's only a one-layer hyperspace, not the multi-layered hyperspace of Childers. Finally, EMPIRE has quantum-entanglement radios, which allows something like the Web across the entire EMPIRE. Real-time connectivity. So you can stream video across light years in real time. Are you doing something new here with plotting? Yes. Childers grew organically. I didn't have five books in mind at the start. I didn't even know if Childers was going to be novel-length. I just started writing. Each book in the series was planned after the last book was done. For EMPIRE, I had a five-book story arc laid out before I started this first book. So what's the grand scheme? Well, without getting into spoilers, the five-book arc is the story of Robert Allan Dunham. I can't say any more without major spoilers. This first book is the story of how Bobby Dunham, his sister Dee, and their friends grow up and ally with the Empress to reform a hugely corrupt Imperial bureaucracy. The cover blurb says the Empire is 150,000 planets and 300 trillion human beings. That's a huge scale. Yes, but it's still a human story. If you had told someone in 1000 AD that in 2000 AD there would be cities with twenty million people in them, countries with over a billion people, and seven billion people on Earth, they would have thought you were crazy. Even Rome at the height of its power had a population of barely a million. So there are lots of planets, and lots of people, but the human story is still about what does this person do, how does this person's life unfold, against this bigger backdrop. How did EMPIRE write? Was it fast? EMPIRE: Reformer is 88000 words and took 44 days to write, so about 2000 words a day. That includes non-writing days. I take off one day a week even in mid-novel, and sometimes I have to take a day off to rake leaves or something. I usually write about 2500 words per writing day, and that maintained through this book. What about the cover? That's a departure for you. For the Childers books, I used photography of real people. I have seen a lot of book covers that were artwork, and the characters often just weren't real to me. They weren't human, but more like a detailed cartoon. Lifeless. But I found a wonderful artist on-line, Aaron Griffin in England. Even very raw sketches from him catch the humanity of his subject, like a pencil drawing could just start talking to you. They're alive. He's a terrific young talent, and I contracted with him for the five-book series.

IMPERIAL ASSASSINATION! Mere hours after the coronation, Gail Anne Burke - the Empress Arsinoe - is struck down and lay dying. The attack was by the unlikeliest and most unexpected of methods. Tracking down the method is the first order of business. But who is responsible? The enemies of the Throne, now bent on reform, are almost too numerous to count. The sector governors, estranged from the Throne and unwilling to give up their power. The old nobilities of the Alliance nations, yearning for royal status once more. And the hidden enemy, the subtle enemy, the enemy behind the scenes: the plutocratic families of the old Democracy of Planets. Wealthy, powerful, and bent on bringing down the Empire that defeated them three centuries before. INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND What's EMPIRE: Resistance about? In EMPIRE: Renewal, Emperor Augustus VI initiated massive reforms with the help of historian James Ardmore and Imperial Marine Gail Burke. The things that needed to be reformed were primarily preferences for bureaucrats and special interests. Those reforms generated resistance among those groups, which boils over on the coronation of Ardmore and Burke as the Emperor Ptolemy and Empress Arsinoe. And they assassinate Burke? Major spoilers are possible. I'll just say that the cover scene is right out of the book. So what does Ardmore do? The Emperor's first knee-jerk response is to kill everyone and anyone who might have been responsible. He's a historian, and he takes the long view. Of course, in the long term, everyone's dead, the rest is a matter of timing. Historians can be among the most ruthless of rulers. Gordon R. Dickson said it best in Tactics Of Mistake: "Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than the sage among his books. For to you kingdoms and their armies are things mighty and enduring, but to him they are but toys of the moment, to be overturned with the flick of a finger." Wow. So the Emperor goes after the bad guys in a big way. Yes, but in an unexpected way as well. EMPIRE: Resistance takes many twists and turns along the way. Things are not as the Emperor - and the reader - expect. Since I don't know what happens until I write it, it surprised me, too. The cover blurb lays out the bad guys. Who are the good guys? Assisting the Throne we have the Imperial Investigations Office, the Zoo, the Co-Consul and his wife, Franz Becker, and the Department, which is the reconstituted Section Six. So Tom Pitney is back, as is Troy Donahue. So after they take out the bad guys, what's left for the next Empire book? EMPIRE is written as a series of trilogies, and EMPIRE: Resistance is the middle book of the Renewal Trilogy. There will be work left to be done in EMPIRE: Resurgence to complete the trilogy. What's next for EMPIRE after EMPIRE: Resurgence?Next up is the Section Six Trilogy from Stephanie Osborn. That's getting under way as I write this.

Robert Allen Dunham IV, the Emperor Trajan, is dead. Daniel Whittier Parnell, the Heir to the Throne, is three weeks' spacing away. In the interregnum, renegade sector governors advance their own candidate for the Throne, Provence Sector Governor Jerome Goulet. The Galactic Empire hovers on the brink of civil war. Amanda Peters comes up with a daring plan to save the Empire, while putting the proper Heir on the Throne. Ann Turley, Paul Gulliver, Marie Louise Bouchard and Dieter Stauss conspire with Peters to carry out her plan, under the very nose of the would-be Emperor. Once more, the fate of the Empire hangs on Amanda's insight and cunning in her most high-stakes move of all! INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND So this is the conclusion of another trilogy? Yes. The EMPIRE series is constructed as a series of trilogies. While each individual book has an ending, in that the conflict that is the major feature of that book is resolved, the big story arcs are completed in the third volume of each trilogy. Each trilogy includes enough background that it can be read on its own, independent of the other trilogies in the series, though I think the best experience is to read them all through. And what is the big story arc of this trilogy? The aging Emperor. It's not much of a spoiler, given the cover illustration and the title, that Emperor Trajan dies at the opening of this third book. The big problem is that the Heir to the Throne is over a thousand light-years away, on Garland. It will take him three weeks to get back, which is more than enough time for people to cause trouble. Who are the movers and shakers in this book? The good guys are all people we've met before. Amanda Peters, the Emperor's widow; Daniel Parnell, the Heir to the Throne; Marie Louise Bouchard and her mother, Marena Prieto; and Ann Turley and Paul Gulliver, the Section Six agents. The bad guys are new to this book. Amanda Peters is how old in this book? How big of a role does she play? She's 88 years old at the beginning of EMPIRE: Succession. I hadn't expected Amanda to play that large a role when I started the book, but she was right there in the Imperial Palace, had the loyalty of the staff, and felt a personal responsibility to see Bobby's preferred Heir on the Throne. Between that and her understanding of people and power, she was the obvious character to be the ringleader of the plan to install the rightful Heir without causing a civil war. With this trilogy concluded, what's next for EMPIRE? The next trilogy is another one from me, the Renewal Trilogy. A couple hundred years after EMPIRE: Succession, the Empire is deteriorating. Spiraling into decline. Why is that, and can the sitting Emperor save the situation? After that, it's at least one trilogy from Stephanie Osborn. Empire 10, 11, and 12 is the Section Six trilogy. It continues the story of Nick Ashton as he sets up and runs the Emperor's private intelligence operation. That will fill in the gap we left in the numbering scheme. And these will continue coming out on a monthly basis? That's the plan. We'll see if we can pull it off.