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.
As someone way smarter than me once said, “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” It’s why getting from one planet to the next can be tricky. In some science fiction stories, traversing the vastness of space takes faster-than-light travel. In others, cryogenic sleep is involved. And in still others, it takes a willingness for some people to start the journey knowing that their ancestors will finish it.
Then there’s Aliette de Bodard’s science fiction space opera novella Navigational Entanglements (hardcover, Kindle), in which traveling through space involves eldritch monsters and…y’know, we’ll just let her explain it in the following email interview, as what as everything else you need to know about this character-focused sci-fi story.
From the beginning, the Star Wars saga has had good guys and bad guys. But some of the more interesting characters — be it Han Solo, Lando Calrissian, or Anakin Skywalker when he was an impetuous young Jedi — are the ones who manage to be mostly good but also a little bad at the same time.
It’s to that list that we can now add Kay Vess, a low-level criminal who’s the main character in the new open world action game Star Wars Outlaws (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC).
And she’s an apt choice for this game, too, since Outlaws is also mostly good but a little bad as well, while also managing to be interesting.
When someone first coined the term “final girl,” they did so in reference to how, in many horror movies, the lone survivor is often a woman.
But in Chase Gamwell’s young adult sci-fi space opera novel Aiko’s Dive (paperback, Kindle), the final girl is not just the only person to survive a massacre, she’s the last human. Anywhere. Like, in the entire galaxy.
As for why, and what happens when she tries to figure out what’s going on, I direct you to the following email interview with Gamwell, in which he discusses what inspired and influenced this story.
When we talk about iconic cyberpunk stories, we usually mention Blade Runner, The Matrix, and the novels of William Gibson, Philip K. Dick, and Neal Stephenson.
But we should also talk about Cameron Reed’s The Fortunate Fall, which took what Gibson et al. did and took the genre in a unique direction.
And maybe now we will, since Tor Books are releasing A Tor Essentials version of The Fortunate Fall (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), which augments the 1996 novel with a new intro by sci-fi writer Jo Walton [Tooth And Claw].
In the following email interview, Reed discusses what originally influenced this story, as well as why the main character has an implanted camera as opposed to just some snazzy video glasses.
Be it the Marvel movies, Rick & Morty, or Star Trek, a lot of recent stories involving the multiverse have people visiting different versions of their world, complete with variants of their friends and coworkers.
But in Brenda Peynado’s new novella Time’s Agent (paperback, Kindle), she takes a different approach by having this science fiction story be about pocket universes.
In the following email interview, Peynado discusses what inspired and influenced this sci-fi story.
Science fiction is often about looking to the future, and this is especially true about sci-fi space opera stories.
So it’s not surprising that a sci-fi space opera short story anthology called New Adventures In Space Opera (paperback, Kindle) would also be forward looking. As editor Jonathan Strahan explains in the following email interview, “I edited two books [of space opera stories] with my good friend Gardner Dozois toward the end of the 2000s. … I wanted to put together a book that looked at what came next.”
Plenty of people have written stories in which someone tries to stop World War II by using a time machine.
But in his time travel sci-fi adventure novel To Turn The Tide (hardcover, Kindle), author S.M. Stirling is instead trying to stop World War III, and other terrible things…and thinks sending a college professor and some students back to the time of the Roman Empire is how to do it.
In the following email interview, Stirling talks about what inspired and influenced this novel, as well as his plans for further adventures in the To Make The Darkness Light series.