The adventures in outer space continue!
Humankind has always been able to evolve because of its unique ability to dream and seek new horizons. Every book, both before and now, comes to change the rules of this imaginary world forever.
The adventures in outer space continue! Fasten your seatbelts, because this book will make you hold your breath and stay awake all night, captivated by the interstellar space and the imagination of Robert E. Vardeman.
On the run like a common criminal! Remy controls the alien technology to build entire solar systems, but he has crossed megacorp owner Sir Trig and is slated for destruction. As he flees, the vital crystal controlling the ftl drive shatters. He is forced to take an assignment for the only aliens capable of supplying a replacement.
The Time Crystal Divers have troubles of their own. Their pilots and scoop ships are being destroyed when they attempt to dip into the spacial anomaly known as the Hole, preventing them from manufacturing piezotemporal crystals. Loss of life, destruction of ships and a threat to their entire world economy force them to beg Remy for help.
Remy dares to scoop out the star core stuff and learns his problems and those of the Time Crystal Divers have the same source: Sir Trig and his space pirate henchman.
Book 2 in the Engineering Infinity series is crammed with fierce space battles, alien duplicity and questions of loyalty and honor only Remy can address.
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I asked Bob where he got his ideas from. How he manages to create a whole world he has never seen. And here is what he answered me.
Ideas spring up from all over. In fact, getting ideas for a story, science fiction or otherwise, isn't hard at all if you just look around and wonder what's going on. My Engineering Infinity series has a lot of small ideas tossed in behind the main one of artificially creating entire solar systems. One of the problems with taking a few billion years (using a time travel device) might well be panspermia ruining your world with unwanted life forms.
How's that? What? More than a century ago Arrhenius (an actual Nobel Prize winning scientist–I came across him originally for his diffusion and permeation equations) put a scientific approach to the notion of rivers flowing through space carrying spores. If the spores landed on a planet, voila! Life. (A very early Isaac Asimov 1955 book, The Currents
of Space, is of note). If these currents flow through interstellar space, the implications are astounding. All life might look similar if planets all get a spore-fall from the same current. Maybe it's not lack of imagination in the earliest sf that we land on Venus and there are
dinosaurs snorting about eating ferns. The real leap of imagination is going to Mars and finding tharks.
Backtracking the idea of life "blowing" in on comets or asteroids or meteorites has to bring up the question of where the life source originated. Maybe we're part of a giant cosmic gardening project from really old aliens. Accidental? Or intentional? From intelligent design
or random combination of amino acids? All are ideas worth exploring and they will become more than background notions in my future titles in the Engineering Infinity series. I loved the old "galaxies smashing together" space operas and am going to give future books this more epic, universe-spanning style a whirl. I just finished book #3, The Crown Joule, and have introduced a relic that will surface again in book #5, The Galaxy Lens.
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For those who have not yet read the first book in the sci-fi series Engineering Infinity, you can catch up here.
The books can be purchased on Amazon. Enjoy them!
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Robert E Vardeman has published 200 westerns under various pen names and more than 100 science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and high tech thrillers. He has worked as an editor for My Family Magazine, the SFWA Forum, and still works on the editorial staff for four magazines, including the 2013 FSTA award-winning Fantasy Football ProForecast and the 2016 FSWA award-winning Fantasy Sports Diehards. He co-edited Golden Reflections with Joan Spicci Saberhagen and Career Guide To Your Job In Hell with Scott S. Phillips. Vardeman's awards nominations include five Arizona-New Mexico Book Awards nods, in addition to Scribe, Peacemaker, and World Science Fiction Convention Hugo fan writer nominations. In 2017 he was honored with a lifetime achievement award for his western writing from the Western Fictioneers.
He taught at Longridge Writers Institute and has served as a judge for the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers and awards chair and three-time short story judge for the Western Fictioneers. He holds a BS in physics and an MS in materials engineering and worked at Sandia National Laboratories in solid-state physics research before becoming a full-time writer.
You can read an interview with Robert E Vardeman here.
