For her sixth and latest collection of short stories, A Place Between Waking And Forgetting (paperback), author Eugen Bacon has assembled a collection that — as she explains in the following email interview — “largely comprises black people stories exploring affection, dread, anguish, or hope.”
When we think about the multiverse, we often think it started with that episode of Star Trek with evil Spock (1967’s “Mirror, Mirror”).
But the writers of that episode — and everyone else who’s ever written a multiversal story — owe a debt of gratitude to Gertrude Barrows Bennett who, under her nom de plume Francis Stevens, pioneered the way of the parallel realities in some of the stories she wrote between 1917 and 1923.
Now six of those stories, including her 1919 novel The Heads Of Cerberus, are being collected in the new volume The Heads Of Cerberus And Other Stories (paperback, Kindle), which was edited by Dr. Lisa Yaszek, the Regents’ Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech, who also wrote the rather appropriately titled introduction, “The Mother Of Modern Genre Fiction.”
In the following email interview, Dr. Yaszek talks about the significance of these stories, as well as how she decided which to include.
Stories about prisons and prisoners are not new, and that’s as true in the realm of science fiction as it is in real world fiction (and horror, and fantasy…).
But in his sci-fi prison novel Alien Clay (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), author Adrian Tchaikovsky throws in the added wrinkle of having the central prisoner be a professor and xeno-ecologist (and, uh, political dissident) while the prison happens to be a place friendly to his area of expertise.
In the following email interview, Tchaikovsky discusses where he got the idea for this story, and the idea of making the main character a man of science.
Some writers are very intentional. They sit down each day with the intent of writing a story, one they intend to be published in a magazine or journal, and then collected in a book with their name on it.
But in the following email interview about A Bucket Full Of Moonlight (paperback, Kindle), his book with his name on it, author Christopher J. Burke says these short stories actually, “…started as a writing exercise…”
People often talk about our current political and social situation as being dystopian and a time when we have never been more divided, ideologically-speaking.
But in C.C. Robinson’s The Divided Series, the world actually is dystopian, and the divisions are not just social and political, but physical as well.
In the following email interview, Robinson discusses the first installment of this dystopian Y.A. science fiction series, Divided (paperback, Kindle), as well as her plans for the other books.
With numerous science fiction authors putting their own unique spins on classic stories — be it Rich Larson’s Ymir rewriting Beowulf or Darusha Wehm going full Shakespeare with Hamlet, Prince Of Robots — it was probably inevitable that someone would do a sci-fi version of Alexandre Dumas’ The Count Of Monte Cristo.
But while that’s kind of what Suzan Palumbo is doing with her sci-fi space opera novella Countess (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), as she explains in the following email interview about it, “…Countess has its own unique concerns.”
In the following email interview, author Cameron Johnston says his new novel The Last Shield (paperback, Kindle, audiobook) is a “gender-flipped Die Hard.”
But while that might conjure images of Zendaya or Sydney Sweeny or some other actress of the moment crawling through a skyscraper’s air vents, Johnston says Shield actually takes place in a “mysterious castle” and is a “heroic fantasy [story], with shadings of grimdark thrown in.”
As she says in the following email interview, Ellen Datlow has edited the annual anthology series The Best Horror Of The Year, “…(in one form or another) for 37 years.”
But in that same time, she’s also assembled collections of horror short stories around a theme or type of scare, including Body Shocks: Extreme Tales Of Body Horror, Screams From The Dark: 29 Tales Of Monsters And The Monstrous, and When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired By Shirley Jackson.
Which brings me to her latest thematic anthology, Fears: Tales Of Psychological Horror (paperback, Kindle), which has stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Josh Malerman, Stephen Graham Jones, Priya Sharma, Margo Lanagan, and others.
In the following email interview, Datlow talks about how she defined the term “psychological horror” for this anthology, as well as how she chose the stories to include in it.
There’s no end to the variety when it comes to vampires. Some are horrific, some are comedic; some are sexy and some are sparkly; still others are suave while others are feral.
But they usually share one common trait: an aversion to the sun.
Usually.
In Lindz McLeod’s new erotic horror novella Sunbathers (paperback, Kindle), she gives us vampires who thrive in the sun, while humans are forced to live underground, away from the light.
In the following email interview, McLeod discusses what inspired and influenced this story, how sexy and scary it gets, and how it connects to her short story of the same name.