I had no shortage of interesting characters from the first book, Quant. I had set up the secondary characters of Quant to provide an interesting pool of people on Arcadia, so there was no problem there.
Ultimately I decided to write the eighty-thousand-word Arcadia as four twenty-thousand-word novellas, following the same family through the four major events in separate story arcs. I would follow Quant’s activities in short interludes between them.
Of course, those story arcs weren’t fleshed out at all. I started writing not knowing what was going to happen or how, just that I was covering the development of the Arcadia colony. I also thought the hyperspace drive would be invented on Earth at the beginning of the next book, given Earth’s deeper technology base and long-established centers of learning.
That’s not what history teaches, however. The airplane, the telephone, and the transistor were all developed in the United States, not in Europe.
So as I started the third novella of Arcadia, I changed my thinking and began the build-up to the hyperspace drive being developed on Arcadia.
The third book of the series – Galactic Survey – was the seminal idea out of which this series grew. The idea of lost colonies being searched for by an organization set up to do just that. Something like Star Trek, but not knowing where the other humans were.
Now, though, that search would be conducted not by Earth, but by Arcadia, as the center of dynamism and progress in the human race moves to the colonies. Egypt had once been the center of civilization and technical progress, then Babylon, Rome, Constantinople, London, and the United States.
So, too, with the colonies. Arcadia would be the dynamic center of the human race moving forward, as progress on Earth lagged.
What happens next in the series? Galactic Survey. What happens after that? What do they find? What are the other colonies like? Will Janice Quant have to use her geodesic transporter to break up a war? What else might she do with it?
I don’t know. I never do. We’ll just have to see where the story goes as it reveals itself to me. Should be fun.
Speaking of fun, I hope you liked reading Arcadia as much as I did writing it.
Richard F. Weyand
Bloomington, IN
May 8, 2021
