They say you should write what you know. And while no one has any idea who “they” are, it’s still good advice. Take writer Clifford Royal Johns, who — in the following email interview — discusses how both he and the hero of his neo-noir sci-fi novel Velocity Blues (paperback, Kindle) are rather restless souls.
Given how publishing works, we are only now beginning to see novels that were influenced (but not inspired) by the COVID-19 pandemic. But while Bethany Clift’s new sci-fi novel Last One At The Party (hardcover, Kindle) is one of them, as she explains in the following email interview, this story, “…has never been a novel about a pandemic. It is a novel with a pandemic in it.”
We’ve all been there: You commit some war crimes as a medic, and now you’re just trying to get by while living on a desert moon at the ass end of space. But while Stark Holborn’s new sci-fi space opera Western novel Ten Low (paperback, Kindle, audiobook) may be non-fiction for most of us, she says it was actually — get this — influenced by some works of fiction, both literary and not. Too weird.
With the release of Adrift (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), writer W. Michael Gear is continuing the Donovan series of sci-fi adventure stories he began in 2018 with Outpost. In the following email interview, Gear not only discusses “what” inspired and influenced this fifth installment, but “who” as well.
While there’s some debate to their size, and to whether they’re cute or scary when they’re babies, everyone agrees that dragons are lizards. Everyone, it seems, except writer Ty Drago, who apparently thinks his name entitles him to rewrite the rules of biology however he sees fit for his new science fiction novel Dragons (paperback, Kindle). In the following email interview, Drago attempts to justify his perversion of biology, while also explaining what inspired and influenced this sci-fi story.
For Frontier (paperback, Kindle), the fourth book in his loosely connected sci-fi series, writer Patrick Chiles is giving us the hero we all need: a bored guy who wishes his job was more exciting…until it is. In the following email interview, Chiles talks about what inspired and influenced this military sci-fi technothriller, and how it connects to his previous novels.
Having humans be the real monsters is so common in post-apocalyptic stories that it’s moved past being a trope and is now a cliché. Which is why Gene Doucette avoided it like the plague when writing his “cozy apocalypse” novel, The Apocalypse Seven (paperback, Kindle, audiobook). In the following email interview, Doucette explains what inspired and influenced this story, and why he decided to buck convention.
With the release of his new time travel sci-fi thriller novel Scorpion (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), writer Christian Cantrell completes a journey he actually began eleven years and far fewer words ago. In the following email interview, Cantrell discusses what inspired and influenced this story, which will also soon be coming to a theater near you.
They say you shouldn’t take your work home with you. And for homicide detective Sammy H.K. Smith, this would’ve been good advice…had it not led to her writing the dystopian thriller Anna (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook). In the following email interview, Smith discusses what (aside from her job) inspired and influenced this novel, as well as her plans for more stories.