Ten things maybe you didn’t know about Zanzibar’s Rings

Ten things? Well, these are the ten things I sent for the Blog Tour in February and March. You may well have seen them at Shannon: the Warrior Muse website. What surprised me, was that having done three ’10 things’ posts, I only saw this one (in several places) till right at the end.

I found this article difficult to put together. I mean, how do I know who the reader is and how much they will have already picked up about my book? Assuming ‘absolutely nothing’ is a good first step. But… I suspect that many who read this post knew quite a lot of this, especially the science bit. Also, I assumed the “about” is about the book, rather than the planet. But does it matter?

Ten things you didn’t know…

1.     Zanzibar’s Rings is the third book of the Viridian System series. Dolores and Maggie now have their own businesses; Pete is occupied with his family, now settled in the southern part of their world, Sunset Strip, and Lars is, well, Lars is wondering what role he has now.

2.     Pete and Lars got rich by mining asteroids for a rare element called orichalcum. So rich they don’t plan on doing it, ever again.

3.     The Viridian System is the richest source of orichalcum in the galaxy. The asteroid belt is considered to be the property of the two planets in the third orbital ring, Pleasant Valley and Sunset Strip.

4.     Orichalcum is essential for instantaneous communication systems. Other faster-than-light communications systems allowed for inter-stellar navigation before the discovery of orichalcum, but this metal with its strange properties was a game changer. 

5.     Asteroid miners still use archaic radio (speed of light) to communicate with other spacers within the same planetary system.

6.     The Viridian System is so named because its sun, Viridium, emits a green-tinged light. It has long been held by Earth scientists that stars cannot emit green light, because of the way we see colour. In my science, it is green because of the presence of orichalcum, which produces the green effect throughout the system. In real science, astronomers have recently found something that is pretty much green, a star called Zubeneschamali.

7.     Zanzibar is a planet in the Viridian System, in the orbit beyond the asteroid belt. It is a gas giant with distinctive rings.

8.     Zanzibar is modelled on the planet Saturn, of course. Much of what we know about Saturn was produced by the Cassini-Huyghens mission. Cassini orbited Saturn for 13 years, and took a total of 453,048 images. You can browse them on the Cassini mission pages. 

9.     Saturn is light enough to float on water, if you could find an ocean big enough.

10.  I asserted somewhere that ringed planets are now thought to be common. I didn’t find the exact reference, but they are more common than water worlds like Earth (and Sunset Strip). Astronomers currently think that exoplanets classed as ‘puffy’ may in fact be ringed planets, much like Saturn—and with similar densities.

So… How many did you know?

Next time: The story behind the book!