Like many people who’ve written science fiction novels, author Bethany Jacobs cites other writers of sci-fi as influences in the following email interview about her space opera / space fantasy novel On Vicious Worlds (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), which is the second book of The Kingdom Trilogy after 2023’s These Burning Stars.
But unlike her fellow science fiction writers, Jacobs also cites a certain cult classic fantasy TV show as being just as big an influence on this saga.
In 2006, author David Weber published a revised and expanded version of his 1992 military science fiction novel Path Of The Fury, which he retitled In Fury Born.
Well, now he’s adding more to the story with the Ascent To Empire novels, a prequel series he’s co-writing with fellow sci-fi author Richard Fox.
In the following email interview, Weber and Fox talk about the newly released second installment of the Ascent To Empire series, Rebel (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), as well as the first, Governor, which has also just come out in trade paperback.
With The Armageddon Protocol (paperback, Kindle), author Dan Moren is presenting the final book in The Galactic Cold War series.
Though as he explains in the following email interview about this sci-fi space opera spy novel, “final” might not be the right word…
Given what’s going on with the Israel-Hamas War, and how some people have reacted to it, it would be understandable if the editor of a short story anthology by Palestinian writers said something about how their collection shows that Palestinians are people, too.
But in the following email interview about Thyme Travellers: An Anthology Of Palestinian Speculative Fiction (paperback, Kindle), editor Sonia Sulaiman says that while it features “…writers who identify as Palestinian in the diaspora,” she notes that, “…none of these stories are meant to ‘humanize’ us. We’re already human.”
They say the third time’s the charm.
But that isn’t the case for the characters in Rumor Has It (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), the third book in author Cat Rambo’s Disco Space Opera series.
As Rambo explains in the following email interview about this hopepunk- and military fantasy-infused science fiction space opera story, “things there don’t go as smoothly as they hoped.”
With Megacosmic Rift (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), author Abby Goldsmith is presenting the fourth entry in her six-part science fiction space fantasy series Torth.
In the following email interview, Goldsmith talks about the origins of this series, and her plans for it moving forward, while also noting that Megacosmic Rift is, “…secretly my favorite of the series.”
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.