EARTH OWNS THE COLONIES? Anup Patel gets out of the slums of Kolkata by stealing the money for his education, changing his name, and lying about his age. Now Jonathan David Wilson, Chairman of the World Authority, he believes Earth owns the colonies. When ChaoPing and the Endeavour show up to extend the trade agreement to Earth, it all goes into the dumper. Wilson instead plans to finish his own hyperspace project and assert World Authority sovereignty over the colonies. In his way stand Chen JieMin and Chen ChaoLi—now Chen Zufu and Chen Zumu—and the Chen's old friend Janice Quant. Wilson and the Chen are both playing for all the marbles in this earth-shattering finale. THE STUNNING CONCLUSION OF COLONY ..... AN INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND "EARTH" is the finale for the COLONY series? Yes. All the plot lines and tensions, all the way back to the first book, "QUANT", are resolved. What's the story here? Janice Quant and the colonists have always known Earth was going to be a problem. When they developed the hyperspace drive, they didn't go back to Earth. They instead set out to find the other colonies. The thinking was that the colonies would have a much easier time dealing with Earth as a whole, rather than piecemeal. Why would Earth be the big problem? Earth is the 400-pound gorilla in the room. It has four billion people on it at this time, where all twenty-four colonies taken together have just over a billion. It would be natural for Earth to figure that, as the big guy on the block, they can dictate terms. To Earth, it's all about them. How can the colonies deal with Earth then? The colonies have one huge advantage. Janice Quant will still not allow interstellar war. If Earth tries to impose its will on the colonies through force, she will not allow it. The big question for her is how to do that without revealing her existence. There's a lot of humor in this book. Yes, but that's been true throughout the series. "QUANT" is something of a farce, because Decker's computer keeps doing the most outrageous things and getting away with it. The humor here is in some of the characters, like Oliver Nieman and the robots, and in some of the situations just spinning out of control. How long did "Earth" take to write? 34 days for 80,000 words, which is 2370 words per day. That's a bit slow for me, but there was a lot of setup here. This book has a lot of moving parts, so it started slow while I got all the pieces in place. I also had to make sure I tied up all the loose ends from elsewhere in the series. But you wrote it from beginning to end in one go? Yes, of course. I always do. I can't write something later in the book and then double back to fill in, because I don't know where the book is going as I write it. I just sort of follow it along. So the reader doesn't know where it's going, because I don't as I write. But you do foreshadow things, don't you? Yes, but I foreshadow multiple different possible things, and then pick which ones to spin off of when I get there. What's on the cover this time? Chen JieMin and Chen ChaoLi, who are now Chen Zufu and Chen Zumu, and Jonathan David Wilson, who is the World Authority Chairman. The Earth is shown englobed in Quant's planetary transporter, a geodesic sphere. Another excellent offering from Luca Oleastri and Paola Giari of Rotwang Studio in Italy. They did a number of the EMPIRE covers, and all of the COLONY covers. That's another thing. How can you get away with calling a series EMPIRE or COLONY? Kind of bold, but they all have their own titles. COLONY and EARTH are both pretty common, but EARTH isn't. What's next? A new series, but I have no idea yet what. I'm playing around with some ideas, but nothing has gelled enough yet to talk about.