Foreword
AS PREDICTED,
LIADEN UNIVERSE® CONSTELLATION
NUMBER FOUR
In the general run of readers there’s an expectation that SF writers are all about prediction. In that case, we’re doing it right. Back in June of 2014 we made a prediction about the future, and truth told we were pretty sure it would happen.
We—that is Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, authors of the Liaden Universe®—predicted that eventually you, or someone very much like you, would be holding this book in hand. Right. We predicted the advent of Liaden Universe® Constellation Number Four and here you are, listener in the forest, proof that our prediction was accurate.
Understand that we had good cause to predict this book. People were reading our novels, of which there were already more in train, and our publisher, Baen, had been coming to us—still comes to us in fact!—with a request that we turn in a shorter work in support of each new novel. The editors at Baen add that story to the free monthly offerings at Baen.com and—voila, over time there builds up a backlog of Liaden stories that may not have been seen by you, our constant reader, on account of them only being featured in electronic format.
The “in support of” story at one per novel would take a long time to accumulate into a hundred thousand word plus collection, and clearly we wrote the foreword to the third Liaden Universe® Constellation just four years ago. We’ve been lucky in our work, since our Baen editors have also asked us to write stories for several anthologies. We’re also lucky in our work because other anthologists have requested stories from us—some specifically asking for Liaden material. Since we have far more Liaden story ideas than we’ve outlined, much less written, each opportunity to aim at a specific deadline with a specific story concept helps us cross a “you know what would make an interesting story” off the list we’ve been accumulating for decades.
There, you see, is the area we have trouble predicting—which story idea will be asked for strongly enough or often enough that we have to start work on it, which will fit an anthology theme perfectly. “Balance of Trade,” the short story, became Balance of Trade the novel after a cascade of requests, and several stories in other Constellation volumes grew out of a simple, but oft-asked question, such as, “What happened to the taxi driver?” from Cheever McFarland’s first stop under Korval’s roof.
Thanks for reading the stories here, and thanks for helping editors and other readers ask for more of our work. Whether this is your first read or your thirteenth, we hope you’ll keep your eyes on our Liaden Universe® Constellations as a good way to keep up with the characters who people our stories.
Oh yes, about predictions . . .
Are we predicting the eventual appearance of a fifth Liaden Universe® Constellation?
Well . . . what we know for sure is that we’re still writing.
So! Watch the skies!
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
Cat Farm and Confusion Factory
August 2018