succession series
"In
the tradition of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and Frank
Herbert's Dune books . . . a literate space opera."
New York Times
This
was my attempt to write a space opera for my 14-year-old self, who always
wanted big, ass-kicking space battles and hostage rescues and armor-suited
ground actions, but ones that made some kind of scientific sense. (Um,
space ships don't bank when they turn, Mr. Lucas.) So I started with
that most cliched of sf protagonists, the starship captain, threw in
every kind of derring-do I could imagine, and still tried to make it
a pretty realistic novel. With, you know, characters and stuff.
Succession
has been published as two books in Russian (Eksmo/2004) and Spanish,
El Imperio Elevado (La Factoría de Ideas/2005) and El
Asesinato de los Mundos (La Factoría de Ideas/2005), and
as one book in the UK and Australia (Orbit/2005; entitled, perhaps confusingly,
The Risen Empire). In the future, there'll be a French edition
as well, but I'm not sure what format. In late 2003, the Science 
Fiction
Book Club came out with an omnibus edition with the original title,
Succession.
These were also my first books in hardback, which, like your first kiss,
you never forget. (Well, maybe your first mass-market book is your first
kiss, which would make these my first . . . well, never mind.)
Here's an interview
with me about the book.
Here's the site of Stephan Martiniere,
who did much awesome cover artwork for the book, including: the Risen
Empire
cover;
the Killing
of Worlds
cover; and the Science
Fiction Book Club cover.
One day, I will be writing more in this universe (see the faq).
But not right away. First there are the Midnighters and Uglies
trilogies to finish, not to mention a few other books.
The Splitting of Words
Risen Empire and Killing of Worlds were originally
one manuscript, entitled Succession. But this omnibus came
in at 180,000 words (about 700 pages). While the book was in production,
a certain large bookstore chain did an analysis of their sales, and
discovered that sales of most authors dropped off precipitously at $25.
So they announced that they would be buying in much smaller numbers
of any book that was priced over $25. (This amount has since inflated,
but the general rule still applies.)
So Tor and I were presented a choice between cutting the book in half
or having this very important chain cut their order in half. Tor suggested
the former, and I went along with it. That's why Risen Empire
ends kind of, you know, suddenly.
But I really can't complain, given that this is rip-roaring space-operatic
science fiction, a genre in which "fix-ups" (a bunch of short
stories strung together to make a novel) and magazine serializations
are a big part of the history. Just be ready to buy Killing of Worlds
within seconds of finishing Risen Empire.