Given that she works for Meta on their Oculus VR gaming headset, you’d expect that writer Kimberly Unger’s day job would’ve had a huge influenced on her VR cyberpunk techno-thriller The Extractionist (paperback, Kindle, audiobook). But as she explains in the following email interview, not only was that not the case, but the reverse isn’t entirely true, either.
Bookstore shelves are quickly filling up with novels that are reworkings of classic tales (Madeline Miller’s Circe; Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne…). But you might want to wait a moment before adding Rich Larson’s Beowulf-inspired post-cyberpunk sci-fi novel Ymir (paperback, Kindle, audiobook) to that shelf. While he admits in the following email interview that Ymir‘s working title was Cyberpunk Beowulf, he also says that his novel doesn’t owe nearly so much to the original epic poem as his original title suggests.