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.
You’d be forgiven for thinking no one reads poetry. You never see a poet on The Tonight Show. Or someone wearing a t-shirt they got when their favorite poet performed at the local football stadium. And yet, amid all the talk of AI created art, there’s been a lot of conversations about computer generated poetry.
Which leads us to Do You Remember Being Born? (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), a new novel by author Sean Michaels in which a famous poet is asked to collaborate with an AI. In the following email interview, Michaels discusses what inspired and influenced this story, as well as how he used AI to write it.
In science fiction, subgenres often give birth to other subgenres. Solarpunk, for instance, begat lunarpunk. It’s also how we got dieselpunk out of steampunk. But what exactly is dieselpunk? That’s one of many questions I put to Danielle Ackley-McPhail and John L. French, co-editors of the new short story anthology Grease Monkeys: The Heart And Soul Of Dieselpunk (paperback, Kindle), in the following email interview.
As someone who’s hit middle age, and hard, I find myself appreciating stories about older heroes more these days. Like Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny. Or Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It’s a similar position that author Valerie Valdes finds herself in, one that led her to write her new space fantasy novel, Where Peace Is Lost (paperback, Kindle, audiobook). In the following email interview, Valdes discusses what else inspired and influenced this story.
For nearly fifteen years, writer Jonathan Maberry has put former detective Joe Ledger in increasingly more dangerous situations, originally as an agent of the Department of Military Sciences, and now as a member of Rogue Team International. Which is where we find him in his newest adventure, Cave 13 (paperback, Kindle, audiobook). In the following email interview, Maberry discusses what inspired and influenced this thriller.
Jazz musician Sun Ra used to tell people he was from Saturn. But while smooth jazz saxophonist Jackiem Joyner makes no such claims — he’s from the planet of Norfolk, Virginia — he does have some spacy connections as well. Literary ones. Along with such albums as 2012’s Church Boy, 2019’s Touch, and the recently released Missing You, Joyner has also released two young adult science fiction novels: Zarya: Cydnus Final Hope and the new sequel Zarya Episode II: Sochi Unleashed (Kindle). In the following email interview, Joyner discusses what inspired and influenced these sci-fi stories, as well as his plans for future space adventures.
As any writer who’s done it will tell you, it’s a challenge to tell a new story about a popular character. But in the following email interview about Descent: Dreams Of Fire (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), his second novel based on the dungeon-crawling board game Descent: Legends Of The Dark, Davide Mana talks about how eager he was to get to tell Vaerix what to do.