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From SCI FI Wire
12:00 AM, 14-JANUARY-08
by John Joseph Adams
Best-selling SF author Kevin J. Anderson told SCI FI Wire that his latest novel, Metal Swarm, is the sixth entry in The Saga of Seven Suns--Anderson's take on the SF epic.
"Fans are familiar with the long fantasy epics of Jordan, Martin, Goodkind and Brooks," Anderson said in an interview. "My forte, though, has been in science fiction, so I was inspired to try a big SF series. The Saga of Seven Suns pulls together everything I love about the genre: alien races, galactic empires, mysterious ruins, incredible creatures, exotic landscapes, giant black robots ... "
Anderson said that he has loved science fiction all his life. With the Saga, he wanted to demonstrate to as large a readership as possible the true potential of the genre. "I didn't hold anything back and filled this fictional universe with as many wonders as I could possibly imagine," Anderson said.
The Saga of Seven Suns is a huge space opera that spans several galactic empires, with incredibly alien creatures and a cast of characters large enough to fill a telephone book. "It's a continuous story, almost 5,000 pages long, and I've been working on it for seven years of my life," Anderson said.
Anderson recently delivered to his publisher the final volume, The Ashes of Worlds, which will be published next summer. "I planned this series from start to finish before I started work on the first volume," he said. "It's a very sprawling story, but it does follow a master plan. I wanted a sense of closure, and I think the readers also wanted to know that there's an end in sight."
The Saga has a wide spectrum of characters: impostor princes, evil politicians, star-crossed lovers, alien emperors and grunt soldiers. "I found that to be the only way I could tell the whole story, from all different perspectives from the high to the low," Anderson said. "After spending so much time and so many books with these people, they have become good friends to me, and I was sad to see them go by the end of the last page of the last manuscript."
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