While some authors are hesitant to admit their influences, others understand that no one lives in a vacuum, and that it’s okay to admit that yes, you were shaped by those who came before you.
And then there’s author James Bow who, in the following email interview, not only says what authors had an influence on his young adult sci-fi The Sun Runners (paperback, Kindle), but he also notes that he paid homage to one of them in a rather clever way.
It’s been said that an army travels on their stomach.
But in his new military sci-fi novel Shrouded Loyalties (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), writer Reese Hogan gives us an army that travels on their stomach…through a parallel dimension infested with monsters.
In the following email interview, Hogan discusses what inspired and influenced this story.
We all know the line: “Space…the final frontier.” But with all due respect to Kirk and crew, Star Trek wasn’t about people colonizing other worlds. Sure, they sometimes looked in on them, dropped off supplies, but it was never about how those colonizers got to their new homes.
But that is what you get in the sci-fi space Western short story anthology Last Train Outta Kepler-283c (paperback, Kindle), which, according to editor David Book, features stories “…about colonists, from miners to law keepers to gunslingers, and everything in between.”
In the following email interview, Boop explains how this book and this series — which also includes 2021’s Gunfight On Europa Station and 2023’s High Noon On Proxima B — came to be, and how he finds the stories to fill them.
Over the last fifteen years, author Seb Doubinsky has written ten stand-alone novels in his dystopian noir and more series, the City-States Cycle, including the newest, the sci-fi and espionage-infused The Sum Of All Things (paperback, Kindle).
But while he went into writing The Sum thinking it would also be the end of the story, it seems this series has different ideas.
In the following email interview, Doubinsky talks about why The Sum was going to be the end of the City-States Cycle, why it’s not, and how thinking it would be influenced how he wrote it.
With careers that have included stints working for and with NASA, it’s safe to assume that authors Les Johnson and Travis S. Taylor are no dummies.
Though you could probably also glean that from reading the novels they’ve written, most notably 2021’s hard sci-fi thriller Saving Proxima.
Now the duo have completed a sequel to that sci-fi story, Crisis At Proxima (hardcover, Kindle), which is the second book in a trilogy they call Orion’s Arm.
In the following email interview, Johnson — speaking for himself and Taylor — discusses what inspired and influenced this second story, including how they rectify conflicts between science fact and science fiction.
At a time when you have to actively try not to be reachable, the idea of not being able to contact someone can be frightening.
So imagine if it wasn’t someone you couldn’t reach, but ten thousand people, and they all lived so far away that it would take more than a year to get there.
This is the problem that kicks off author David Wellington’s sci-fi horror / space adventure series Red Space, which he launched last year with Paradise-1 and now continues with Revenant-X (paperback, Kindle, audiobook).
In the following email interview, Wellington explains how Revenant-X picks up this story, his plan for this series moving forward, and the surprising author who influenced this middle installment.
Science fiction has often served as a vehicle to explore aspects of the human condition. Including ones that are not comfortable to look at.
Which is where we find Iraq War veteran turned author Richard Fox, who, in the following email interview about his military sci-fi space opera novel Men Of Bretton (hardcover, Kindle), says he, “…wanted to write a series that shows how soldiers change during the course of a war and how hard it can be to get home.”
When people start naming names in the genre of military science fiction, they naturally name Starship Troopers author Robert A. Heinlein, Aliens writer / director James Cameron, Lois McMaster Bujold, author of the The Vorkosigan Saga series.
But they also often mention Honor Harrington, the central character in David Weber’s Honorverse series, which, over the course of 30+ years, has encompassed numerous novels, novellas, and short stories.
The latest of which (sort of) is 1993’s Honor Of The Queen, the second Honorverse novel, which has just been rereleased as a trade paperback as part of Baen Book’s ongoing reissue series.
In the following email interview, Weber looks back on this early adventure for Honor.
Having previously collaborated on a comic book as well as a novel in which characters from their individual novels work together, writers Rob Hart [Assassins Anonymous, The Warehouse] and Alex Segura [Secret Identity, Alter Ego] have teamed up again, this time on a sci-fi space opera spy novel called Dark Space (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook).
In the following email interview, Hart and Segura talk about what inspired and influenced this sci-fi story, as well as why they decided to write it together.