My newest novel, The Scarab Mission, hits the stores today. If you pre-ordered from Amazon it should be on your doorstep.
So . . . what's it all about, anyway? Where did this book come from and why did I write it?
The Scarab Mission is the second novel in my expanding "Billion Worlds" series of books and short stories. It's kind of a non-prequel to the first book in the series, The Godel Operation. I say non-prequel because there's only one character in common between the two books, and no direct plot links. The story takes place in the year 9965, about thirty-three years before Godel Operation begins.
The central idea of Scarab Mission — a rag-tag group of salvagers explore a space habitat full of perils — goes back to before I actually thought of the Billion Worlds setting. (If you really want to dig deep, I suppose it goes back to 1978, when I got my first Dungeons & Dragons set.) Some time in the early 2000s I had the notion of a group of "junkrats" exploring a vast alien derelict, possibly building whole communities inside the wreck.
Part of that notion — the vast alien artifact with humans living in and on it — became my short story "Object Three," which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 2011.
But the story of people exploring a vast wreck hung around, and when I began devising the Billion Worlds setting I realized it would fit perfectly. I got the idea of adding a "ticking clock" time limit to the story to create more tension. Initially I thought it would be a decaying orbit, with a space hab spiraling down to break up in the atmosphere of one of the outer giant worlds.
But the more I thought about that, the less plausible it seemed. For one thing, a decaying orbit is a bit fuzzy. It's more like a range of probabilities about when something will fall out of the sky, rather than a looming deadline. Not as dramatic.
And for another, who would throw away a whole space habitat, even if it is deserted? That's a lot of valuable material, and in a fully-colonized Solar System, metals and heavy elements would be in high demand. That realization gave me the idea of kicking the derelict hab into a "gravity slingshot" encounter with Jupiter to sent it off into the far outer reaches of the Solar System, where the comet-dwellers would be especially desperate for those resources.
That, in turn, gave me a different time limit: the crew have to get off the hab in time to use Jupiter's atmosphere for braking, or risk going off on a decades-long orbit into deep space. It also gave me a reason for them to be there at all! If you're the crew sending the wreck into its new orbit, then it's perfectly natural to spend a little time poking around to look for some useful stuff to take off for extra profit.
Once I had the basic physical realities of the story, the rest was simply an exercise in brainstorming Bad Things to happen to my scavenger crew. Hazards and death-traps aboard the station. Various villains who want to kill, enslave, or maroon them. A couple of dark secrets to motivate people. And a fabulous treasure for them to seek.
Enjoy!
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