book cover of Conflict
 

Conflict

(2024)
(The fourth book in the Talbot series)
A novel by

 
 
Humans and bird-people are friends, right?

Fortuna colony continues to grow with the effort of humans and bird-people both. Arnie, the artificial intelligence who pilots Earth's space effort, continues to look for new planets to colonize.

But there are some surprising new colonists and some surprising new discoveries.

Not all of them are going to work out.

Can Fortuna Governor Susan Talbot keep the colony moving forward?

Or will the whole project sink into conflict and war?
.

AN INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND

What's "Conflict" about? Who's fighting who?

Arnie's been looking for new potential colony planets. One of the planets he finds is not uninhabited. And it's not a bunch of primitives, either. Beyond that, it's all spoilers.

How was this book to write?

This one was difficult, because there were a lot of interruptions. There was a convention at the end of February that took a week, what with all the prep and travel and all. My wife and I got COVID again, a year after the last time. That took a week. The total solar eclipse in April went right over my house, and we had a lot of company for that. My trustworthy desktop computer, on which I had written all my books, turned into a brick. I had to buy a new computer and reload everything. It was just one thing after another.

Now I normally write every day, so the book is always cooking in my head. That makes writing easy. Every one of those breaks, however, cuts into that process, and I have to get back into it. So this book took seventy writing days over a ninety-day period. My average wasn't even 1200 words per writing day, and I'm normally twice that.

What about the plot? Was that hard?

I don't normally have the plot figured out when I start writing. It sort of develops as I go along. But there's a lot of moving parts in this story. With all the interruptions, that made it hard to see where the plot was going. I have to wait to write until I can see what's going to happen. So there was a lot of staring out the window on this one.

What's with the cover? That's a bird-man, right?

Another excellent cover by Luca Oleastri and Paola Giari of Rotwang Studio to my specification. Yes, that's a bird-man. The bird-people have been friends of the humans on Fortuna Colony from the beginning.

But not anymore?

Nope. No spoilers.

What's next for you?

There's at least one more volume in this series. I don't know what's going to happen yet with it, so I can't speculate beyond that. I may not even write it next. It just depends on what pops up in my head.


Genre: Science Fiction

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