Cover art: Bob Eggleton
Baen Books has posted a Teacher’s Guide for Into the Hinterlands.
Into the Hinterlands–the first book in The Citizen Series– is a space opera built around cultural situations very similar to those obtained during the youth of George Washington. John Lambshead developed the plot from my outline with a great deal of interchange between us.
The odd thing about Hinterlands is that while it’s a space opera with a plot as intricate as that of, say, Northworld, it’s also hard SF. I hadn’t expected, let alone intended, that to be the case, but John is a world-class molecular biologist. That became implicit in the work.
Some readers may expect hard SF to be boring. I understand that concern, but books I plot are not boring. That’s true in spades of Hinterlands.
The book exists because Jim Baen’s enthusiasm for George Washington drove me to learn more about the man. I didn’t always wind up agreeing with Jim, but I did this time. The more I learned about Washington, the more amazing Washington became–and the more interested in him I became.
More to the point, I became increasingly convinced that there was a heck of an SF story to be built from Washington’s life. Into the Hinterlands proves that I was right.
The original cover, used on the Advanced Reading Copy