I just spent four more days up in the mountains doing final edits on THE ASHES OF WORLDS and reading 21 short stories from the slushpile of an anthology I'm editing for the Horror Writers of America. Brian Herbert called me to give an update on the revisions of PAUL OF DUNE, which he'll send to me so I can read the manuscript while I'm on the road for THE LAST DAYS OF KRYPTON...I leave on Thursday morning for Salt Lake City.

In the meantime, HarperCollins asked me to do a guest blog for their main site, which follows:

Here I go, blowing up planets again.

From my early novels in the STAR WARS universe, I wrote stories wreaking a lot of mayhem with the Death Star and the (even nastier) Sun Crusher, which could extinguish stars. In my own big science fiction epic, "The Saga of Seven Suns," I've destroyed quite a few worlds there, too.

My wife likes to say that I have a high "celestial body count" in my work.

Maybe it stems from the thirteen years I spent working for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the nation's premier nuclear weapon design laboratories. I had a high security clearance and worked on many papers dealing with warheads, advanced conventional weapons, even the "Star Wars" missile shield concept. I also spent plenty of time at Los Alamos, home of the original Manhattan Project, and I even held in my hands part of the core for the third atomic bomb the US had developed at the end of World War II, which would have been used if the Japanese hadn't surrendered after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Several times I visited the Nevada Nuclear Test Site (yes, the one out near Area 51), where the landscape is cratered with giant holes left by test detonations, the kind that created giant mutant ants or amazing colossal men, if 1950s B-movies are to be believed. Given all that in my background, no wonder I'm so destructive in my novels.

THE LAST DAYS OF KRYPTON, however, is about what is probably the most famous planetary destruction ever. Everybody knows the story about how Superman -- Kal-El, the last son of Krypton -- was launched in a small ship mere moments before the planet exploded. We know that his father, the genius scientist Jor-El, warned of the impending end of the world, but nobody listened. "Gentlemen, Krypton is doomed."

But how, exactly, does a planet just . . . explode? Or was it Krypton's giant red sun of Rao that went supernova, as some versions of the story suggest? Thinking about this led to more and more questions. If Jor-El was such a brilliant and revered scientist, why did all of his fellow Kryptonians take his warning so lightly? And if Krypton was itself the most advanced world in 28 known galaxies (according to some continuities), how is it that all Kryptonians were home on the day their world ended? And why was there only one spaceship on the whole planet? And why was it only *baby* sized???

In my novel I answer these and many other questions, as well as develop an epic story of a doomed world and the vibrant, yet decadent, society that can't save itself. All along, I modeled this book after The Last Days of Pompeii, and I'm very pleased with how it turned out. I hope you enjoy the novel.