Writer David Edison isn’t alone in being influenced by video games. Or Frank Herbert’s Dune. Or Tori Amos. Or anime. But being influenced by all of them…at the same time… In the following email interview, Edison talks about how these influences coalesced into the sci-fi space opera / epic fantasy mash-up that is his second novel, Sandymancer (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook).
Whenever we think of a hero who can save the world or the universe from an apocalypse, one image always comes to mind: grandma. If I had a dollar for every action movie in which an older woman saves the day… But while there’s a grandmother and an apocalypse in Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s new novel Candelaria (hardcover, Kindle), there’s more to this story than just an old woman saving the day, as Lozada-Oliva discusses in the following email interview.
In Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills Cycle, a historian cleric named Chih wanders a magical fantasy world strongly influenced by Southeast Asian history.
But in Mammoths At The Gates (hardcover, Kindle, aduiobook), Chih’s feet are taking them back home for the first time in years, only to find that not everything is as they left it. In the following email interview, Vo discusses what inspired and influenced this new novella.
As great as books may be, they are a passive experience. If you don’t like what a character does, too bad, you can’t change it. But that isn’t true for gamebooks, which combine elements of role-playing games and those Chose Your Own Adventure novels for a more interactive experience. Which is exactly what you get in Jonathan Green’s Moon Knight: Age Of Anubis (paperback, Kindle), the latest in Aconyte Books’ Multiverse Missions series of gamebooks. In the following email interview, Green talks about what inspired and influenced this superhero story.
Everyone knows Emily Brontë wrote the classic novel Wuthering Heights. What you may not know, though, is she also fought werewolves. Seriously. Would I make that up? No, because someone else did: Tim Powers, the author of the new ghostly horror novel My Brother’s Keeper (hardcover, Kindle). In the following email interview, Powers discusses what inspired and influenced this story, including its real-world connections.
In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Hydra used an algorithm to determine what people posed the biggest threats to their new world order. And in Jon Evans’ new hard science fiction novel Exadelic (hardcover, Kindle), an AI does something similar. Except that, in Exadelic, the threat is not a master of the mystic arts or a scientist with breathtaking anger management issues, but a mild-mannered member of middle management. In the following email interview, Evans discusses what inspired and influenced this sci-fi story.
For her first book, Other Minds (paperback), writer Eliane Boey has paired two of her novellas: the psychological sci-fi horror story Carrier, and the cyberpunk sci-fi mystery Signal \ Tracer. But while she says both take place in the same fictional universe as some of her short stories and a novelette, this is not, as I wondered, the birth of the Boeyverse.
Like Frank L. Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles Of Narnia series, and Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Jane Lindskold’s Over Where novels have someone going on an adventure that starts with a single step…through a portal. Though unlike other portal fantasy stories, Lindskold’s has one major difference, as she explains in the following email interview about the third Over Where novel, House Of Rough Diamonds (paperback, Kindle).
Poets influence other poets. But good poets are influenced by other things as well. Take Mary Jo Bang who, in the following email interview about her new poetry collection, A Film In Which I Play Everyone (paperback, Kindle), cites David Bowie, surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning, and even Back To The Future Part III as having an influence on these poems.