Friends, we have artwork:
If you’ve read Paul’s previous novels, you may recall the Amundsen being mentioned in The Madness Engine. Here are a couple of paragraphs from that portion of the novel:
One of the towers stood empty, but three had giant rockets standing ready for an order to launch that would never come. Those must be the colony ships, Drake thought to himself. Gerhardt had launched the Roald Amundson to Alpha Centauri in hopes of finding inhabitable worlds. It was an amazing feat, given the primitive technology of twenty-first century Earth.
Of course, the war had interrupted the whole mission. The explorers had launched in the Roald Amundson only months before the virus outbreak. They would be traveling for years to come. Drake had found a note that said Gerhardt had sent a message to them, telling them of the war, but they were in coldsleep. They wouldn’t know what had happened until they woke up at Centauri. It would be too late for them then. The trip had been one way. They were depending on the colony ships to bring the supplies needed to come back. They would die out there, never able to return home.
Anyway, I’m delighted to finally have a mission patch for the Amundsen. Now I just need to get this put on a coffee mug… 🙂
“Why a coffee mug, Weaver? Why not a t-shirt or something?” Because the captain of the Amundsen drank a lot of coffee, that’s why. I’ll probably also see about getting an actual patch like this at some point, but really, the coffee mug is more important to me.
*”That novel” is what I used to call this particular WIP; last year, Paul gave it the working title of Necessary Precautions. The Amundsen‘s mission to [redacted] isn’t the main focus of the novel, but it is very important backstory. (Also, when the first manned anything to go beyond the Sol system is assumed lost for more than a century, but then it comes back… Yeah. Scary times for all involved, I’m sure. Except that old guy at Jellico, who knows far more than he’s telling, and even he’s worried.)
