Sometimes we just need to get away, to be by ourselves, collect our thoughts, figure out what to do next.
But Halley may have taken it too far when she took a job as a caretaker on a spaceship full of cryogenically frozen people. And not just because the people-sicles are terrible conversationalists.
In the following email interview about her scary sci-fi novel Cold Eternity (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), author S.A. Barnes talks (non-spoilery) about what happens to Halley…and why.
Some authors like to put their own spins on classic novels. Others like writing sequels to those iconic stories.
But with Don’t Sleep With The Dead (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), author Nghi Vo is having her martini and drinking it too by writing a sequel to her 2021 novel The Chosen And The Beautiful, which was her reworking of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.
In the following email interview, Vo discusses what inspired and influenced this noir historical fantasy novella, as well as how it connects to Chosen.
I don’t remember where I heard this, but supposedly the hills are alive with the sound of music. And supposedly this music makes people do weird things when they’re in charge of children who are also on the hills.
Which brings me to Meredith Hambrock’s potentially disturbing new novel, She’s A Lamb! (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), in which a woman doesn’t land the lead in The Sound Of Music and, well, it kind of gets worse from there.
In the following email interview, Hambrock discusses what inspired and influenced this story.
In his 2022 hard science fiction novel Summer’s End, author John Van Stry introduced us to Dave Walker, who ends up on a space cargo ship in an attempt to better himself.
Now Dave is back in Sometimes In The Fall (paperback, Kindle), in which — as Van Stry explains in the following email interview — now has “a more ‘settled’ or perhaps at least ‘legitimate’ life.” Though clearly that won’t last since, well, otherwise there’d be no point to this second book.
Sometimes people joke that the only way they can escape their family would be to move to Mars.
Clearly author Joe Mungo Reed doesn’t think this way because, in his speculative fiction / science fiction novel Terrestrial History (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), he tells a multi-generational story in which a family is pivotal in the colonization of the red planet.
In the following email interview, Reed talks about what inspired and influenced this sci-fi story.
It’s always annoying when a creative person refuses to admit that their work is similar to, or influenced by, someone else’s. “So, it’s a movie about a kid who learns he has powers and he uses them to take down an evil empire lead by the father he never knew, and you say it’s nothing like Star Wars!?! Really!?!”
Thankfully, author C.J. Dotson doesn’t try my patience in the following email interview about her psychological horror novel The Cut (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), in which she admits that this story, which is set in a scary hotel, “Yeah, I don’t think I could have written a hotel horror story without thinking of The Shining, too.”
In the following email interview about her new novella Deception (paperback, Kindle) — a side story to her Divided series of young adult dystopia science fiction action / adventure novels — author C.C. Robinson admits that, “I love novellas featuring secondary character side quests, as readers see more of the world and gain greater insight into the main characters.”
It’s easy to look at the world today and think our days are numbered…and it’s all our fault.
But in Lauren Stienstra’s speculative fiction novel The Beauty Of The End (hardcover, paperback, Kindle, audiobook), our days are numbered…and it’s a built-in feature.
In the following email interview, Stienstra talks about what inspired and influenced this thought-provoking science fiction story.
Zombie stories often take place in dark, foreboding places.
But in Robert E. Hampson’s new zombie novel Across An Ocean Of Stars (paperback, Kindle), which is the 14th novel in John Ringo’s ongoing (and often collaborative) Black Tide Rising series, he has the living impaired taking a vacation to Hawaii. And man, are the buffets plentiful.
In the following email interview, Hampson — who is a neuroscientist and a professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina — talks about what inspired and influenced this story, as well as how it connects to the other Black Tide Rising novels and stories.