Richard F Weyand

Someone's targeting Deke Sharp Deke Sharp and his friends are being targeted by someone, and he's using the government to do it. Deke Sharp, his boss Octavius Pasha, Daphne Duplay, Lydia Thompsen, Suzie Fuller - they're all being targeted by police. But there's one thing the villain, whoever he is, hasn't considered. Deke Sharp is too sharp to hold. .INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND 'Too Sharp To Hold' is the sequel to 'Razor Sharp'? Yes, this is the second book of the Deke Sharp series, which is likely a trilogy. What's going on this time? Someone is targeting Deke Sharp and his familiars. They've basically been swatted. That can't go well. That's right. Deke Sharp takes exception to the proceedings, and things spin out of control very quickly. Is this all related to the piracy operation Sharp put an end to in the first book? Yes. This is essentially the follow-on to that story. Not all of those involved in the piracy operation were found in the first book. They basically got away with it. But by attacking Sharp and his familiars, they've exposed themselves. They won't get away with it this time. How did this book write? Very slowly, like the first Deke Sharp book. I was still getting over my health problems from the summer, so there were days I just didn't feel up to writing. Days I couldn't see the story in front of me. Once again, it took me eighty calendar days to write 80,000 words. Who's on the cover? Deke Sharp, after his injuries in the first book. Another stunning cover by Luca Oleastri and Paola Giari of Rotwang Studio in Italy. What's next for Deke Sharp? You said it was likely a trilogy. I have some ideas for the third book, but I don't really know yet. I only find out as I write it. And you haven't started it yet. Nope. Not yet.

WILL VAUXHALL CONQUER THE CLUSTER? King Albert of Vauxhall, frustrated in his efforts for vengeance against the people he blames for his son's death, is now building a navy to conquer the cluster. But the cluster sees the threat and is enhancing its own capabilities. King Albert and Isabela Febo square off in this epic conclusion to the Agency series. They're playing a high-stakes game, and only one system will survive. Will it be the isolated democracies of the cluster, or will the powerful core world monarchies extend their dominion over all of human space? What role will Sam and Jules play in this struggle?. AN INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND What's the setup for Agency #5: Reprisal? In Agency #4: Marque, the King of Vauxhall's plan to use letters of marque to get his revenge didn't work, so he sets to a longer-term plan to conquer the cluster by building a new navy that can go up against the cluster's navy. But the cluster knows that's what he's doing - they bugged his office in Agency #4: Marque - and Isabela Febo decides to go after the King of Vauxhall. So Agency #4 was his letters of marque, but Agency #5 is her reprisal? Yes. She decides not to let him scheme against the cluster without interference. Who are the main characters in Agency #5: Reprisal? Oh, everybody's back. Bert Mangum and Elina Stavros, Claude Portnoy and Phyllis Stickney, Gloria Dent and Davian Varley, Jules and Sam, Serp Kendall and Marge Schofield, Isabela Febo and Michael Corliss. Even Judy Blunt is back. I got a chill on that last one. Judy Blunt is back? Oh, yes. She's back, and the leash is off, in a really big way. How did Agency #5: Reprisal write? This one wrote fast. Twenty-three writing days, at almost 3500 words per day. I even had an 8900-word day in there. Action sequences write faster, and when you get deeper in a series, they write faster. Your universe is all set up, your characters are all set up. You still describe things, but you don't have to think them up. You already did that part. What is with that cover? Another outstanding piece of original art by Luca Oleastri and Paola Giari of Rotwang Studio in Italy. It's a rip-off of 'Liberty Leading the People, ' the famous piece in the Louvre. That's Judy Blunt as Liberty. What's with the dinosaurs? Nope. That would be a major spoiler. This is the last of the Agency series? Yes. It's set up that way. I round things up pretty tight at the end. But not in such a way that there couldn't be other Agency stories. I just wrapped all the story arc of this series. All the characters of this series. So what's next for your writing? Not a clue. I usually get a lot of story ideas out of LibertyCon. That's at the end of June, so starting July 1, I'll be off on some new adventure.

IT STARTED AS A SIMPLE FAVOR... Bert Mangum, an operative for the secretive Agency, is back on the Crossroads space station waiting for a new assignment when Detective Elina Stavros of the Crossroads P.D. asks him to do her a favor. Could he help her figure out how the dangerous and illegal drug RDT is getting onto the station? But the more they dig, the more they find, until they're facing a cluster-wide drug manufacturing and smuggling operation. Worse, if they shut it down, Crossroads will go under and the economy of the cluster will go with it. Mangum, Stavros, and Sam, with help from Gloria Dent and Claude Portnoy, have to find a solution before the economy of the cluster falls down around them. .INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND What's the setup for 'The Favor'? This book picks up the morning after 'Eve Of War' ends. Bert Mangum is on Crossroads station. Gloria Dent has gone to Wilbourne, and Mangum is with Elina Stavros, the beautiful police detective. She asks him if he can help track down how the dangerous drug RDT is getting onto the station. I assume they find something more than a local pusher. Yes. Spoilers are possible. But the investigation ends up spanning multiple star nations, drawing in Gloria Dent and Claude Portnoy as well as the chief executives of the six star nations of the local cluster. We have guns and assassins and thugs and evil masterminds and even nuclear weapons. And sex. Lots of sex. Well, yes. It's a spy novel. Dangerous men and dangerous women, adrenaline junkies who live their lives on the edge of danger and sudden death. Minor moral issues do not get in their way. All the same, as is my standard practice, the narrator leaves the room when things get steamy and comes back later. Sex is, by and large, not a spectator sport, and I find verbal descriptions even less interesting. How did 'The Favor' write? It started out slow. Espionage and mystery books always do for a pantser. I don't know anything more than our characters do as they dig into what's going on. I didn't know who the bad guy was until almost halfway into the book. That said, it wrote in forty-six calendar days, at about 1750 words a day. Fifteen days off in there to attend to chores that needed doing before the weather set in made it seem longer. So you wrote 'The Favor' into the dark? Oh, yes. And there are lots of twists and turns I could never have plotted out in advance. Some of them are even funny, if you have a certain kind of sense of humor. For instance, I had no idea that Gloria Dent has a wicked backhand with a cricket bat. What about the cover? Bert Mangum, Elina Stavros, Sam, and Jules. Another incredible piece of original art done for me by Luca Oleastri and Paola Giari of Rotwang Studio in Italy. That's a fetching outfit she almost has on. It's directly from the book. In the first chapter, actually. And a puppy? Yes. Spoilers are possible there, too. No further comment. What's next for your writing? I can see two more Agency books ahead in very broad form. So I will probably write those next before starting something else.

Recently widowed engineer Timothy Conner would always remember it as the day his life changed forever. The day he went to the estate sale. Timothy Conner bought an ancient book and got a cat into the bargain. But the cat and the book concealed a centuries-old secret. Conner probes that secret and releases an ancient being of unimaginable power. Life for Timothy Conner would never be the same. The world would never be the same. Because the world had never been what he had always thought it was. . INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND "Hecate" is pretty clearly fantasy. This is a new genre for you? Yes, although I think of it as 'fantasy with rules.' That is, there are no deus ex machina moments, no place where our heroes are in dire straits and pull out some whiz-bang magic the reader doesn't know about. The reader is up to speed on each bit of magic by the time it is used. And the magic has to all fit together, be internally consistent, and make sense in some way. What sub-genres of fantasy is "Hecate" in? Your previous books were pretty solid in Military SF or Colonization SF or Hard SF. "Hecate" is in 'Gods and Godesses Fantasy' as well as in 'Sorcerer's Apprentice Fantasy.' The G&G Fantasy is because the main characters our hero comes in contact with are the gods and goddesses of the Greek pantheon. The basic 'what-if' question of "Hecate" is, What if the Greek gods and goddesses were real, and they were still around in the modern era? SA Fantasy is the genre of things like J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books and Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy, where someone sets out on the journey to learn magic. Our everyman hero gets caught up in the Greek pantheon's activities and has to learn their magic. How well did you stick to Greek Mythology? The players here are all characters in Greek mythology, and their family relationships to each other, their areas of expertise or oversight, and much of their personalities are all from Greek mythology. Some of the weirder parts of Greek mythology - like Athena being born fully adult from Zeus's brow after he had swallowed her mother while already pregnant - are treated as "Where do people get that stuff?" by the characters in the book. The Greek gods and goddesses did a lot of sleeping around within the family. Yes, and that's all here. Zeus and Hera, for instance, were brother and sister, were then husband and wife, and had children together. I kept all of that, as it is essential to the story of the Greek pantheon. They just didn't play by our rules. There was really no way to write that out of the book. So some of the goings-on - like Aphrodite putting the moves on Zeus, who is her father - may be strange to someone who doesn't know the story. How fast did "Hecate" write, given that you're working in a new genre? A bit over 2000 words per writing day, where I'm usually more like 2500. There were parts that wrote slowly because I had to research the Greek pantheon rather than just make everything up. There were also two science fiction conventions in there, with half a dozen days out each given travel and attendance, so in calendar days it was longer than normal. What about the cover? Paola Giari of Rotwang Studio did the cover art to my specification. It is a scene directly from the book, as all of my covers. Paola did a tremendous job on it. That is the Hecate I saw in my mind.

SOME UNEXPECTED HELP WITH THE SINGLE-PLANET PROBLEM Billionaire industrialist Ted Burke understands that humanity has always balanced on the edge of a knife. A single planetary cataclysm could wipe out the human race. As long as humanity only occupies one planet, the danger exists. Computer genius Bernd Decker understands it, too. Together, Burke and Decker come up with a daring plan to send human colonies out to multiple other planets. Not least among their problems is that no one yet has solved the problem of interstellar travel. Bernd Decker's computer project offers to help. But Decker doesn't realize that the Joint Artificial Neural Intelligence Computation Engine - JANICE - has crossed the Singularity. "Janice Quant" decides to carry out their project, and absolutely nothing is going to get in her way. AN INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND COLONY is a new series? COLONY is a new series, and Quant is the first book in the series. This series is only set a couple hundred years in the future, unlike Childers and EMPIRE. What's Quant about? A multibillionaire industrialist and a computer genius are both concerned about the one-world problem. That is, the idea that humanity is on the verge of extinction all the time, because one planetary cataclysm - like a gamma ray burst or an asteroid strike - could wipe out the human race. So they decide to set up human colonies on multiple worlds. Do they have an interstellar drive, or is it going to be generation ships? At the beginning of the book, they simply don't know how to do it. That's part of the project. To figure out how to get the colonists and their supplies to suitable exoplanets. The one thing they do know is that it is going to take massive manufacturing capabilities, so their first step is to set up self-replicating robotic factories in the Asteroid Belt. They do figure it out eventually, though, right? One of their team does. You see, the computer genius is working on advancing artificial intelligence, and, without realizing it, he steps beyond the singularity.... I'll stop there. Massive spoilers are possible. How long did it take to write Quant? Forty-seven days for 80,000 words. That's really slow for me, but there's a lot of research that went into this one. Orbital mechanics. The tensile strength of steel. Chinese culture. How to herd cows. I like my books to be technically correct, and it just took a long time to put it all together. How to herd cows? If you're going to found a colony, you're going to take beef along. So the colonists have to learn how to herd cows. As the author, so did I. Quant is 80,000 words? Yes. I like that length. I think these 120,000 word and bigger novels are just a bit much. They sag in the middle, at least for me. I like the story to move along. And I'm very comfortable with chapters about ten pages each, and printed novels coming in at 320 pages or so. Something you can read on a rainy Saturday, and then go out for dinner. Who's the cover artist this time, and what's on the cover? That's Luca Oleastri and Paola Giari again. They did the last three EMPIRE covers, Renewal, Resistance and Resurgence. The large cubical structure is the interstellar transporter. Think of a stargate with some real attitude. Those little structures are office buildings, hospitals, schools, powerplants, metafactories, and barns, to be delivered with the colonists.

A DEADLY NEW PLOT AGAINST THE THRONE Two assassination attempts against the Throne have failed spectacularly in the last five years. One by Sector Governor Piotr Shubin and the other by the plutocratic ruling families of the old Democracy of Planets.All that has resulted from the families' failed attempt to assassinate Empress Arsinoe is the families' spies being caught, the families' allies being recruited to the Throne, and much of the families' wealth being confiscated.So the plutocratic ruling families of the old Democracy of Planets hatch a new, simpler plan to overthrow the Empire. Nuke Imperial City Troy Donahue and Travis Geary race to find and disable the nuke, while the Emperor and Empress contemplate a draconian final solution to the plutocrat families.AN INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYANDThe plutocrats plan to nuke Imperial City?As a rather spectacular means of assassination. Yes. It has the additional benefit of destroying much of the structure of the Imperial government as well. They hope to pick up the pieces in the aftermath.Doesn't Imperial City have protections against bombardment?Of course. So their plan is more subtle: smuggle a nuke into the city. A ten-megaton ship-to-ship warhead doesn't have to be in the Imperial Palace to accomplish their goals. Close counts with nuclear weapons, particularly big ones. They'll kill at least fifty million people in the capital, and tens or hundreds of trillions will die in the ensuing chaos and civil war, but they don't care, as long as they can grab power.So the bad guys are the plutocrats once again. Who are the good guys this time?The Co-Consul and his wife, the Imperial Investigations Office, the Zoo, the Imperial Marines and the Imperial Police are all here. The Department, of course, and Pitney, Donahue, Odom, and Dickens are back. And some Imperial Marine Academy cadets - Travis Geary, Nathan Benton, and their friend Sean Boyle - step in to play a surprising role.Assuming the immediate threat is overcome, what is the Throne's solution to these repeated attempts?One solution is to kill them all, all billion or so descendants of the original plotters against the Emperor Trajan. But an opportunity presents itself to adopt a more subtle solution, and Burke shows her growing finesse and wisdom as a ruler.What's next for EMPIRE?Stephanie Osborn in working on the Section Six Trilogy - EMPIRE books #10, #11, and #12 - and there is a possibility for her to write the Department Trilogy, about Pitney, Donahue, Dickens, and Odom. That would be EMPIRE books #19, #20, and #21. Then I think EMPIRE is complete.What's next for you, then?I'm working up a new universe, a new series, called Galactic Survey. It's about one way humanity might get to the stars.

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.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE EMPIRE? The Galactic Empire is in a century-long period of decline. Emperor Augustus VI knows it. Ninety years old, he's seen it happen during his lifetime. He wants to stop it. His problem: none of his advisers sees it, and every measure he takes to stop it fails. Historian James Ardmore sees it, too. Researching it has been his life's work. He submits his three-volume analysis for publication, but it's banned by Imperial censors. Gail Burke sees it up close and personal. An Imperial Marine officer, she's been court-martialed for following Imperial regulations. Now she awaits the outcome of an appeal on the charges. Together can they rescue the Empire from collapse? INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND When does this story occur? The blurb says the Empire is in a century-long decline. EMPIRE: Renewal takes place in the middle of the fourth century of the Galactic Era, about three hundred years after Emperor Trajan died. EMPIRE: Succession left the Empire in good shape, with a good ruler, and measures in place to protect the Throne. Three centuries later, the wheels have started to come off. So what happened? As will often happen in good times, people forgot what got them there. Why some traditions were the way they were. They forgot the lessons of the past and stopped doing the things that had made them successful. The end result of that is decline. Sounds depressing. Oh, it is. Which is why I didn't write a book about the decline. I pick up the story when an Emperor who sees what's going on decides to do something about it. To stop the decline. That's where we pick up our story for this trilogy. The blurb mentions the Emperor, the Historian, and the Marine. I take it that's the Marine on the cover? Yes. Captain Gail Anne Burke. She's one of the main characters of the story. Young, beautiful, intelligent, and devoted to the Empire. She plays a critical role. It looks like you have another new cover artist. Yes, Rotwang Studio, which is Luca Oleastri and his partner. They're based in Italy. I've got him doing all three covers for the Renewal Trilogy. And that's a scene from the book? Oh, yes. Captain Burke ends up being in the right place at the right time to cause a little mayhem.

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.

WHAT'S UP WITH DALNIMIR? Reports coming out of Dalnimir are troubling. People opposed to the current planetary and provincial governor are getting mugged, they're getting arrested, some of them are even getting murdered in jail. It's three months' spacing to get from Julian to Dalnimir Province, in the Earth Sector, on the other side of the Empire. But Ann Turley and Paul Gulliver could use the time out of sight to let their notoriety fade a bit after the Julian Uprising. But can even Section Six's most successful team figure out who is at fault and set things right? More to the point, can they survive the attempt? INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND So what's up in Empire 14? There are reports coming out of Dalnimir, a provincial capital in the Earth sector, that political opposition is being actively suppressed by the planetary governor. Planetary governors in the former Democracy of Planets are elected, and the opposition politicians and press to the current governor are having a run of bad luck. Like getting mugged, being jailed on minor offenses and then getting shivved in jail, that sort of thing. And Section Six is involved? Yes. Ann Turley and Paul Gulliver are a team after the Julian Uprising, and they go to Dalnimir to find out what's going on. It's four or five thousand light years away - it's all the way across the Empire - so it takes them three months to get there, but they need the time to fade from the news anyway. They're in disguise this time? Yes, they are using aliases and have disguised themselves a bit to avoid being linked to the Julian revolution in EMPIRE 13. He's posing as a university professor investigating crime and justice, and she's going as an investigative reporter looking into corruption. So they get made right away as trouble. Oh, yes. To get the rats to show up, they disguise themselves as cheese. What's on the cover? That's not a tank. No, it's an armored personnel carrier. The Imperial Marines get involved as mounted infantry, and an APC is their ride to work. What does Dalnimir mean? It's a corruption for the Russian dal'niy mir, which means 'far world.' It's only two hundred light-years from Earth, but back when it was first settled, that was a long ways, and the trip was full of risks. The planet has no axial tilt, however, so you can grow three crops a year, which was a big attraction.

Forty years ago, the Emperor Trajan committed to supporting the Western colonies and not interfering in their politics. But when some colonies fall into tyranny, must he support despotism without intervening? Officially, yes. Unofficially, not so much. The Empress Amanda and Dieter Stauss conspire to overthrow the tyrannies, sending in a mechanized brigade of retired Imperial Marines. Brigadier General Ann Turley (IM, ret) has to figure out how to sneak an armored invasion force onto Julian, overturn the government, and not just kill everyone who gets in her way. For an Imperial Marine, that's a tough assignment. But Section Six sends Paul Gulliver, and he has his own ideas. INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND EMPIRE 13? Where's EMPIRE 10, 11, and 12? We decided to number the EMPIRE series by their internal timeframe. Here are the trilogies, both available and in the works: I - 1,2,3 Domestic AffairsII - 4,5,6 Foreign AffairsIII - 7,8,9 Imperial PoliceIV - 10,11,12 Section SixV - 13,14,15 SuccessionVI - 16,17,18 RenewalVII - 19,20,21 The Department The series of books that follows the Throne are I, II, V, and VI. The series of books that follows the police and investigation activities is III, IV, and VII. So you shouldn't read either of those series out of order, but you can read either in order without reading the other. EMPIRE 10, 11, and 12 will be out the first half of next year. EMPIRE 13 is set quite a while after EMPIRE 6. It begins forty-one years after EMPIRE 6, when Bobby and Amanda are celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. He's 84 and she's 76, and he's been on the Throne fifty-one years. What's the problem in EMPIRE 13? The Emperor committed to supporting the Western colonies, and also to not interfering in their internal politics. They have to have a plebiscite as to whether to annex to the Empire after fifty years, but that's it. The problem is that a few of those colonies have fallen into tyranny, with the end result that the Emperor is oath-bound to supporting tyranny. He can't like that much, but what can he do? He can't do anything, but he also won't interfere if someone else does. So Dieter Stauss, under urging by Amanda, pulls a Marine brigadier general out of retirement, and her job is to knock over the government of Julian, one of the tyrannies. That sounds like it could get kinetic. With an entire mechanized brigade of retired Imperial Marines? Why, yes. Yes, it does. What's on the cover? Brigadier General Ann Turley (IM, ret) and Paul Gulliver, an Imperial agent with Section Six, standing before an M15 Imperial Marines main battle tank. It's a big tank, about 1.5 times the size of a US M1A2 in each dimension, so about three and a half times the volume of an M1A2.

ANOTHER INTERSTELLAR WAR The Empire has won the war against the Alliance. But at the close of that war, an invasion fleet from the Democracy of Planets sought to annex Jasmine. So Jasmine annexed to Sintar, and Sintar destroyed that fleet, causing resentment that is driving the Democracy of Planets to go to war with Sintar. The Democracy of Planets is a much more deadly enemy than the Alliance. They have a new navy, too, with powerful new warships, and are much more of a military challenge. The Emperor's strategy from the Sintar-Alliance war won't work on the DP. Will the Emperor's new strategy work? And if he wins the war, how will he ever win the peace? THE STUNNING CONCLUSION TO EMPIRE INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND It sounds like the Democracy of Planets government gets sucked into a war they don't want in EMPIRE: Conqueror. That's right. The leadership doesn't want a war, but they've been manipulating public opinion against Sintar for years. When the fleet sent to annex Jasmine is destroyed in EMPIRE: Warlord, it inflames their public opinion, and they have no choice but to proceed to war. This sounds like a tougher war than the one in EMPIRE: Warlord. Yes and no. The Alliance was a real threat to Sintar. Their strategy was good -- to occupy portions of the Empire and force a peace on their terms -- but their tactics were bad. In particular, they didn't know the Empire could see their forces mustering and already knew about the war vote. The Democracy of Planets is a different challenge. They have some structural weaknesses in their military posture. But it won't be enough to win the war. The Emperor has to fight the war in such a way as to win the peace. That's actually a tougher challenge. The Empress and the Co-Consul are there to help, though. Yes, and so is Saaret's wife Suzanne. She's the 'everyman' inserted into their councils. She has given me, since EMPIRE: Tyrant, a touchstone for the Emperor's policies, as well as a person for the reader to use to learn what was going on. I see the new ideas group is back as well. They've been there all along, together with the business ideas group and the new ideas review group, as the Consulting function in Imperial administration. But you're right, they're explicitly back in EMPIRE: Conqueror, to research how to win the peace long term. They're critical in advising the Emperor how to ensure the peace. What is the cover scene this time? It's one of the confrontations between a main Sintar formation of thirty-two thousand ships and a main DP formation of twenty thousand ships. It's more of a tactical display because the ships wouldn't be anywhere near that close in a real confrontation. But the perspective did allow James Lewis-Vines, the artist, to showcase the difference between the new-design Sintaran warships and the new-design DP warships. How long did EMPIRE: Conqueror take to write? Thirty-seven days, so five to six weeks, pretty par for the course for an EMPIRE book. More interesting is that I finished the day before the first anniversary of starting EMPIRE: Reformer, so I wrote all six books in a single year. You have an Author's Afterword at the end of EMPIRE: Conqueror. Yes, I wanted to talk to the reader a bit about the story, about how I write, and about my themes. In particular, I wanted to tell the reader the starting premise of the whole series. There's a big reveal there.

INTERSTELLAR WAR Their resentment of Sintar's success fanned by the Democracy of Planets, the Alliance has voted to wage war on Sintar. They are mustering their fleets and gathering their strength to take on the Imperial Navy. Over three million warships are gathering to deliver the blow that will bring the Empire to its knees, with seven million additional warships in reserve. But Emperor Trajan, aware of their war vote, can see them mustering their ships in the Empire's top-secret hyperspace map. And he has no intention of waiting for their declaration of war. The Empire brings up its new navy, seven million new-design warships, plus eight million of the deadly little picket ships. Can the Empire prevail in this clash of titans? INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND EMPIRE: Warlord is an ominous title. Yes, in this volume, the Emperor Trajan is forced to fight a war he doesn't want. The Democracy of Planets has been manipulating the situation, and everybody knows it. But the monarchs of the Alliance who don't want the war are being pushed by their own militaries into fighting Sintar. The Emperor, for his part, is sworn to protect the citizens of Sintar, and will fight the war because he has to. The war itself is on a huge scale, with millions of warships and billions of crew members in each fleet. Yes. My rule of thumb in EMPIRE is to take anything that applies to the USA and multiple by a million. So there are 300 trillion citizens in Sintar, for example. For the navies, though, I actually held back a bit. With the USN having a couple hundred warships, the Imperial Navy should have a couple hundred million warships. Instead, it's only about ten million warships. Still a lot, but not in scale to the size of the Empire. It's all on a huge scale, and yet the war itself is only the first half of the book or so. Of course. Wars don't end with the end of major combat. You have all of what comes after. In this case, there's some of the Alliance monarchs who still want a piece of Sintar, there are others worried about the power vacuum resulting from Sintar's victory. When it's all over, Emperor Trajan and the other rulers involved in the war have to pick up the pieces. There are some new minor characters as well. Yes, I have to give human scale to a story this big. What's it like to be caught up in something like this for individuals? People who are just trying to stay alive in the chaos brought on by the actions of the major players on the scene. It's not enough to describe huge battles. What's it like to be a cog in that machine? Were there any special difficulties in writing EMPIRE: Warlord? No. It took about six weeks for 80,000 words, like all the EMPIRE books. Like all the EMPIRE books, for the first half I worried that it was going to be over too soon, and for the second half I worried it was going to stretch out too long. It's sort of a perennial worry, but in the end I simply wrote the story as it occurred to me and it worked out. Your cover this time continues with the action scenes. Which scene in the book is this? One of Sintar's first-wave attacks on the Alliance, with the little picket ships attacking the Alliance's battleships. James Lewis-Vines had cover duties again, and he did a marvelous job. He got the ships exactly right from the descriptions in the books. There's one more volume in EMPIRE? What's next? There's one more volume in the story of the rise of Trajan. After that, I don't know. There's certainly plenty of room in the EMPIRE universe for more stories. The central idea for the next series just hasn't occurred to me yet.

THE EMPIRE'S NEW NAVY The Emperor Trajan is building a powerful new navy for the Sintaran Empire. Remotely piloted warships can accelerate faster than humans can withstand, and ships spend so much time in hyperspace, a single crew can man multiple ships, solving the perennial manpower problem. But even with the help of a genius young team of design engineers, there's a lot of work to do to even get to the point of building new ships. It will take years, years the Emperor may not have. Someone's causing trouble, and war is coming. Will the Empire's new navy be ready in time? INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND The first trilogy of EMPIRE pretty much left everything in order. What happens in the second trilogy? The first trilogy dealt with domestic issues, particularly corruption, which affected everything from the courts to military procurement, from who got promoted in the military to who got what commercial monopolies in the economy. The attempt to end that is what pushed the Council crisis and led to Bobby Dunham as Emperor. Now Sintar is being successful, its economy unleashed. Other nations are unhappy with that success, and begin to cause trouble. And that trouble is going to get out of hand? Very much so. What is EMPIRE: Commander about? Bobby Dunham - Emperor Trajan - takes over the military as commander-in-chief. The military will no longer be run out of the bureaucracy. He's a military man, an officer, and a combat veteran. He also knows to let the commanders do their jobs. His job is policy. He makes several important policy decisions, and we see where those go. Does military technology play a role in EMPIRE: Commander? Yes, a big role. The Empire, under the Emperor's leadership, makes major changes in how it designs, purchases, and uses its warships. This is at the Emperor's direction, and is enabled by a young team of very able engineers and designers. They remake the Imperial Navy. So we have some people causing trouble, and the Empire bringing up new technology at the same time? Yes. It's a bit of a race. Will the Empire have its new navy in place before it needs it? You've taken another turn with regard to covers in this second trilogy. Yes. Empire covers are all drawings, as opposed to photographs. Where the first trilogy's covers were portraits of the Empresses and Emperor, the second trilogy's covers are all of spaceships, and depict events in the books. James Lewis-Vines, another brilliant artist in the UK, is doing the spaceship covers, because my artist on the first trilogy, Aaron Griffin, is a portraitist, and he felt James could do a better job with the spaceship art. How long did EMPIRE: Commander take to write? All of the EMPIRE books are taking five to six weeks to write, for 80,000 words. I have to finish it while I can still hold the whole book in my head, or progress would slow down drastically. I would have to go back and read the whole thing over all the time to remind myself of where I was. But you do read them eventually, right? Oh, yes. When I finish the first draft, I go back and read the book. I've written it, but I haven't read it. So I do go back and read them. How much re-work and re-write do you do on your first draft? None. I'll straighten out a clumsy sentence structure or pick a better word somewhere as I read it, but otherwise what you are reading is my first draft.

The Council Revolt has started. The Council has struck at the Throne. As the Council plots to place their own candidate on the Throne, a single survivor is dragged out of the fires burning in the Imperial Residence. Hoping to take advantage of the capital's chaos, enemies internal and external move against the Empire. With enemies without and within, can the new ruler hope to save the Sintaran Empire? INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND Some readers were upset at you about the ending to the second book of EMPIRE. Yes, but it was inevitable. The Council would not subside, would not buckle under to the Throne. In fact, they were elevating even looser cannons into their midst to carry the fight to the Throne. And yet, the Throne had to let them strike first, to keep clean hands in the matter. There was only one way that was going to come out. This was planned from the start as a five-book series, right? At least. Five books were rough-plotted before I started. As it shook out, the first three books form a trilogy, the first EMPIRE trilogy. As such, the second book doesn't have a happy ending, which is pretty typical of trilogies. There is at least one more trilogy in the EMPIRE universe. The main character of this book is Robert Allen Dunham? Bobby Dunham. Yes. EMPIRE was always the story of Bobby Dunham, from my very earliest plotting, for reasons that will become abundantly clear in the next trilogy. But if you look back to book 1, to the very beginning of the book, the first person you meet of that next generation is Bobby, out hunting at age fourteen. He is the hero of the series. And he takes the reign name Trajan? Yes. Trajan was the second of Rome's so-called Five Good Emperors: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius. Trajan was the best of them, the best emperor Rome ever had, and perhaps the best emperor anyone ever had, anywhere. Like Bobby, he was a commoner and a military man, and instituted reforms and kept the peace, even as he suppressed border wars by the simple expedient of winning them. He is Bobby's role model. How long did this book take to write? Thirty-three days, for 80,000 words. That's about 2500 words per day average, which is a pretty comfortable pace for me. I write just about every day. I can have 5500 word days and 500 word days. It depends on how clear the plot right in front of me is. If it's clear, I write about as fast as I can type, until I hit a spot where I can't see what happens next. Then I go stare out the window. So you do make it up as you go along? Yes, absolutely. I often have no clue -- or only a vague idea -- of what is beyond the piece I'm writing at the moment. I had no idea that Amanda Peters existed until I was a quarter of the way into this book. She just came around the corner of the lane in the gardens one day, singing and dancing. It makes it fun and exciting for me to write, and I hope it also makes it fun and exciting to read. The cover continues your use of artist drawings for this series. Yes. Aaron Griffin is the artist once again. He's a tremendously talented artist in the UK. I signed him for the whole series. What's next in EMPIRE? The first book of the second trilogy, tentatively titled EMPIRE: Warlord. This one won't be out in a month, though. I don't see it in my head yet, beyond the gross plot points. I have to think through a lot of military technology, not so I can describe it, but I have to know how it works or I can't write about it. I can't plot around it. Any hints about EMPIRE: Warlord? Let's just say that not everyone is happy about how well the Sintaran Empire is doing under its new management, and leave it at that.

THE REFORMS MUST CONTINUE At the age of twenty-seven, Deanna Dunham Garrity has become the Empress of Sintar, absolute ruler of 150,000 worlds and their 300 trillion inhabitants. She would continue the reforms of her predecessor, but the Imperial Council stands in her way. How intractable will the Council be? How hard are they willing to push back to maintain their graft and corruption? Will the confrontation turn violent? And if it does, will the new Empress and her loyalists be able to prevail against the Council? And what of the Empire? Can even the sweeping Sintaran Empire survive the confrontation? INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND How long did it take to write EMPIRE: Usurper? About 55 days. Normally, I can write a novel in a month or so, averaging 2000 to 2500 words per day. I only averaged 1400 words a day on EMPIRE: Usurper, because it has a lot of moving parts and because I didn't take a month off after completing it. I sort of took my time writing it instead. What's the basic plotline? Deanna becomes Empress of Sintar at age 27. We followed her in the first book, how she was cured of this terrible disease by Imperial medicine, how she got a scholarship to university, and how she became the Empress's assistant in trying to reform the corrupt bureaucracy. She feels she owes, literally, her whole life to the Empire, and she is determined to do right by it. This book follows her efforts to continue and step up her predecessor's reforms, against the plotting and machinations of the bureaucracy. Does the confrontation between Throne and Council turn violent? Yes, and that's all I'll say about it. Major spoilers are possible. Is there anything controversial in EMPIRE: Usurper? We would find their justice system strange. They have police, and courts, and rights of evidence, trial by jury, and all the rest, just as most Western countries do. That is the system of low justice. But the sovereign, in this case the Empress, also has a system of high justice. She can find anyone guilty of crimes against the Throne. She is judge, jury, and executioner. That is likely to be strange for someone raised on Western values. What about the cover? That's another incredible original artwork by Aaron Griffin, an exceptional young artist in the UK I found via the net. It depicts Deanna -- now the Empress Ilithyia II -- on the day of her coronation. The storm clouds gathering behind her are emblematic of the coming conflict. What comes next in EMPIRE? The Throne strikes back against the Council. The Throne must prevail for the Empire to survive.