With Ghostdrift (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), author Suzanne Palmer is concluding The Finder Chronicles series she launched in 2019 with Finder, and continued in 2020 and 2021 with Driving The Deep and The Scavenger Door, respectfully.
In the following email interview, Palmer discusses what inspired and influenced this humorous sci-fi space opera novel, as well as why it’s time to give this series’ main character, Fergus Ferguson, some well-deserved time off.
We’ve all accidentally murdered our bosses and then run off. That’s like a Tuesday for me.
But in Adrian Tchaikovsky humorous science fiction novel Service Model (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), the murderer on the run is not a middle-aged man, but a robot. And a robot butler at that.
In the following email interview, Tchaikovsky discusses what inspired and influenced this sci-fi story, which he says is “Mad Max starring C-3PO.”
When President Donald Trump started talking about establishing the U.S. Space Force, a lot of people — myself included — thought it was an idea whose time had not yet come.
But as I learned while doing the following email interview with C. Stuart Hardwick, the editor of the new short story and essay anthology Tales Of The United States Space Force (paperback, Kindle), the Space Force’s roots actually go all the way back to the Cold War, albeit under other names, including President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.
In the following email interview, Hardwick discusses how this anthology came to be, as well as how it reflects both the truth and the possible future of the Space Force, while not shying away from the snarky comments of us doubters.
There are a lot of anthologies ever year that claim to present the best science fiction, fantasy, and horror short stories.
But one book actually puts them to the test: the annual L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers Of The Future anthology, which presents the winners of the yearly Writers Of The Future contest. [https://www.writersofthefuture.com]
In the following email interview, Jody Lynn Nye, the editor of the newest installment, Writers Of The Future, Volume 40 (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), talks about what this series is all about, how the winners are chosen, and what went into this new installment.
Don’t you hate it when you upload your consciousness to a quantum computer, only to find that you’re sharing hard drive space with some criminals, and that you all have to work together to save the Earth?
Yeah, me too. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like reading stories about it. Stories like Robert J. Sawyer’s science fiction novel The Downloaded (paperback, Kindle, audiobook).
In the following email interview, Sawyer discusses what inspired and influenced this sci-fi story.
As anyone who was ever a kid on a playground can tell you, being able to call for a “do-over” would be as great in real life as it was in games of dodgeball.
Doubly so if the thing you’d get to do-over is the destruction of the Earth. Which is what happens, sort of, to Lieutenant Selene Genji of the Unified Fleet in Jack Campbell’s new time traveling science fiction space opera novel In Our Stars (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), the first in a two-part series.
In the following email interview, Campbell discusses what inspired and influenced this sci-fi adventure story, as well as why it’s a two-parter.
When you refer to yourself as a “cheerful Goth,” you probably like to keep people guessing.
Which seems to be what writer Angela Sylvaine is doing in her first collection of short stories, The Dead Spot: Stories Of Lost Girls (paperback, Kindle).
In the following email interview, Sylvaine discusses how this collection came together, as well as what inspired and influenced the stories in it.
While virtual reality doesn’t count as reality, yet, it someday might.
Which brings me to Keith Anthony Baird’s new dystopian / cyberpunk science fiction / urban fantasy novella SIN:THETICA (paperback, Kindle), in which a bounty hunter has to hunt his bounty in VR.
In the following email interview, Baird discusses what inspired and influenced this story.
If you’ve ever eaten Mexican food or Italian food or, really, more than one dish from any country or region’s dinner menu, you know that people can use the same or similar ingredients but end up with something very different.
Which brings me to Simon R. Green’s Jekyll & Hyde Inc. series, in which monsters fight aliens. Which would seem to occupy a similar territory as Green’s Ishmael Jones novels, in which an alien fights monsters.
But as Green explains in the following email interview about Hyde & Seek (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), the second book after 2021’s Jekyll & Hyde Inc., it’s not just who’s on which side that’s different in this sci-fi / fantasy / horror / mystery mash-up.