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.
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.”
When you write a review of a video game, especially a game as big and deep as Star Wars Outlaws (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC), you think of a lot of things that just don’t belong in a review. Like, how you’d make it better, or how you wish it a different kind of game. You’re supposed to review the game as it is, not as you want it to be.
But you still think of these things. And I had a lot of these thoughts when I was writing my review of Star Wars Outlaws.
Here are a couple I could remember now that my review is done and the game is out.
One of the cardinal rules of modern life is “Don’t engage the trolls” (followed closely by “Don’t read the comments” and “Get guac on that!”).
But for once, I’m glad someone didn’t follow that rule because — as she explains in the following email interview — it’s why Beth Revis wrote her sci-fi space opera novella Full Speed To A Crash Landing (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), which is the first installment of the Chaotic Orbits series.
They say the only guarantees in life are death and taxes.
But what if the former wasn’t a problem anymore…and you still lost someone.
This is where things start for Amber, the twenty-something history professor at the center of Mattie Bukowski’s new science fiction space opera novel Up The Entropic Hill (paperback, Kindle).
In the following email interview, Bukowski discusses what inspired and influenced this story, as well as his famous namesake.