Several more extra-solar colonies follow. First on Shin-Zar. Then on Eidolon. Some of the cities/outposts are funded by corporations. Some by nations back on Earth. Either way, colonies are highly dependent on supplies from Sol to begin with, and most of the colonists end up deep in debt after buying the various pieces of equipment they need.
2154–2230:
Weyland colonized.
Numenism founded on Mars by Sal Horker II circa 2165–2179 (est.).
As they grow, colonies begin to assert their independence from Earth and Sol. Clashes between local factions (e.g., the Unrest on Shin-Zar). Relations with Earth grow fractious. Venus tries and fails to win its independence in the Zahn Offensive.
Ruslan colonized.
2230:
Kira Navárez is born.
2234–2237:
Discovery of the Great Beacon on Talos VII by Captain Idris and the crew of the SLV Adamura.
The League of Allied Worlds is formed, with much resistance and suspicion. Some colonies/freeholdings abstain. Passage of the Stellar Security Act, leading to the creation of the UMC and consolidation of much of humanity’s forces. Battles of sovereignty occur with several groups that insist upon remaining independent, including, most notably, the planetary government of Shin-Zar.
Severe winter storm on Weyland results in significant damage to the Navárez family greenhouses.
2237–2257:
Corruption scandal with Sasha Petrovich near the end of 2249 results in the resignation of Ruslan’s governor, Maxim Novikov.
2257–58:
Survey of the moon Adrasteia and subsequent events.
AFTERWORD & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1.
Greetings, Friends.
It’s been a long journey. Come in, have a seat by the holo, take the weight off your feet. You must be tired. There’s some Venusian scotch on the shelf to your side.… Yes, that’s it. Pour yourself a glass, if you want.
While you recover, let me tell you a story. No, not that one, another. One that begins all the way back in 2006–7 (the dates grow vague with time). I had finished my second novel, Eldest, and was nearly done with the third, Brisingr, and I was straining at the bit, frustrated that what had once been a trilogy had expanded into a tetralogy and that I would have to spend several more years working on the Inheritance Cycle. Mind you, I loved the series and was happy to finish it, but at the same time I wanted—no, I needed—to try my hand at something else. Discipline is a necessary prerequisite to creative success, and yet the value of variety should not be dismissed. By trying new things we learn and grow and maintain excitement for our craft.
So, while I spent my days in the land of Alagaësia, writing about elves and dwarves and dragons, I spent my nights dreaming about other adventures in other places. And one of those dreams involved a woman who found an alien biosuit on a moon orbiting a gas giant.…
It was a rough idea, more of a sketch than anything. But even from the very beginning, I always knew how the story would start (with Kira finding the suit) and how it would end (with her drifting off into space). The difficult bit was figuring out all the parts in between.
After finishing Brisingr, I took a stab at writing the beginning of To Sleep in a Sea of Stars. If you saw that early version, you would laugh. It was half-baked, underformed, but the bones of what would become this story were still there, waiting to be unearthed.
I had to put it aside to write and promote Inheritance. That took me until mid-2012 (touring for a popular book/series is no small thing). And after that, after finishing a series I had been working on from the age of fifteen to twenty-eight, I needed a break.
For six months, I didn’t write. Then, the old itch to create took over. I knocked out a screenplay (which didn’t work). I wrote a number of short stories (one of which was later published in The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm, a sequel to the Inheritance Cycle). And I began to research the scientific underpinnings to my future history.
That research occupied most of 2013. I’m not a physicist, nor a mathematician—I never even went to college—so I had to put in a lot of work to reach the level of understanding I wanted. Why go to such lengths? Because, as magic is to fantasy, science is to, well, science fiction. It sets the rules to your story, defines what is or isn’t possible. And although I envisioned To Sleep as a love letter to the genre, I wanted to avoid certain technical conventions that would undermine the setting. Mainly, I wanted a way for ships to travel FTL that didn’t allow for time travel, and that didn’t blatantly contradict physics as we know it. (I was okay with bending a few rules here and there, but outright breakage didn’t sit right with me.)
Of course, all the world-building in the universe doesn’t matter if the story itself isn’t sound. And that, I’m afraid, is where I met my greatest difficulty.
For various personal reasons, writing the first draft of To Sleep took until January of 2016. Three(ish) years of hard, hard work. Upon finishing, my first reader, my one and only sister, Angela, informed me that the book just. didn’t. work. Upon reading the manuscript myself, I realized she was, unfortunately, correct.
The year 2017 passed in a frenzy of rewrites. None of which fixed the underlying issues. The rewrites were, to put it metaphorically, like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, which did nothing to change the fact that the ship’s structural integrity was compromised.
The problem was this: after working on the Inheritance Cycle for so long, my plotting skills had gotten rusty from disuse. The problem-solving muscles I had built while developing the story for Eragon and sequels had atrophied in the decade since. And, I won’t lie, after the success of the Inheritance Cycle, I had, perhaps, been a bit cocky when starting To Sleep. “Well if I could do that, surely this won’t be a problem.”
Ha! Life, fate, the gods—call it what you will, but reality has a way of humbling us all.
The situation came to a head at the end of 2017 when my agent, Simon, and then-editor, Michelle, gently informed me that the rewrites just weren’t cutting it.
At that moment, I nearly gave up. After so much work and time invested, to be back at nearly square one was … demoralizing. But if I have a defining trait, it’s determination. I really hate to give up on a project, even when common sense tells me otherwise.
So in November 2017, I stopped rearranging the deck chairs and, instead, went back to the basic blueprint of the story. And I questioned everything. In a week and a half, I wrote (by hand) over two hundred pages of notes dissecting character, motivation, meaning, symbology, technology … You name it, I looked at it.
And only then, only once I felt I had a new and stronger skeleton to hang this story upon, did I start writing again. Most of part one, Exogenesis, remained the same. And some of part two. But everything after that, I wrote from scratch. There was no Bughunt in the original version of To Sleep. No visit to Sol. No trip to Cordova. No nightmares, no Maw, no Unity, no grand adventure beyond 61 Cygni.
In essence, I wrote an entirely new book—and not a small one—over the course of 2018 and the first half of 2019. During the same time, I also wrote and edited The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm, toured for it in the U.S. and Europe, and continued to tour the U.S. for the entirety of 2019 as Barnes & Noble’s writer in residence. Whew!