As the current Chair of the British Science Fiction Association, you’d expect science fiction writer Allen Stroud to cite his fellow Brits when listing his influences. But in the following email interview about his sci-fi space opera novel Fearless (hardcover, paperback, Kindle), Stroud shockingly lists writers from, gasp, the colonies.
Usually when a science fiction story revolves around blood it’s because there’s cloning or some terrible disease or space vampires.
But in Chris Panatier’s medical sci-fi story The Phlebotomist (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), blood has become a way of separating and segregating people.
In the following email interview about it, Panatier discusses what inspired and influenced this rather relevant tale.
There’s no denying that movies (and TV shows, and books…) can be a big influence on how we view people who are different from us. It’s why Jared, the robot dentist in writer Simon Stephenson’s new comedic and speculative science fiction novel Set My Heart To Five (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), decides to become a screenwriter to tell his story, to tell his people’s story. In the following email interview, Stephenson — a screenwriter himself — discusses what inspired and influenced what he calls a “misstopian” sci-fi story.
Like in a lot of video games, the co-operative “Escape” mode in last year’s Gears 5 added some colorful characters to the sci-fi shooting series. Now players of that game, and “Escape” mode, can learn more about those characters in Gears Of War: Hivebusters (paperback, Kindle), which collects the five-issue miniseries (and which also, in the first edition, comes with a code for the “Mechanic Mac” character skin and a Hivebusters banner). In the following email interview, Weibe explains what went into writing this comic, including how his work on the game itself influenced its story.
In Ted Hughes’ classic 1968 novel The Iron Giant, and the equally classic 1999 animated movie it inspired, a young boy has a giant robot for a best friend. But in her new novel The Mother Code (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), writer Carole Stivers takes a different approach to this protector / protectee relationship by making the mecha a mommy. In the following email interview, Stivers explains what inspired and influenced this sci-fi novel, including how her advanced degrees helped shape this story.
With Noumenon Ultra (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), writer Marina J. Lostetter is concluding the epic, multi-generational sci-fi space opera trilogy she started in 2017 with Noumenon and continued with 2018’s Noumenon Infinity.
In the following email interview about this series, and its concluding chapter, she explains how this third book concludes the saga, and how it took its name from a cartoon character and not, as we all suspected, Michelob Ultra Dragon Fruit Peach.
In his new superhero novel Bystander 27 (paperback, Kindle), writer Rik Hoskin doesn’t focus on the hero or the villain but (obviously) one of the people nearby whose lives are effected nonetheless. In the following email interview about it, Hoskin explains what inspired and influenced this novel, as well as why the title doesn’t have an “Issue #1” after it.
With Days Of Burning, Days Of Wrath (hardcover, Kindle) former military man turned military sci-fi author Tom Kratman is presenting the eighth and latest installment in his Carrera series. In the following email interview, he provides a primer on this ongoing series, how this new novel fits into it, and how it was influenced by another military writer…just not in the way you might think.
When Derek Kunsken released The Quantum Magician in 2018, his plan for The Quantum Evolution series was that it would be a trilogy with a prequel novel. But as he reveals in the following email interview about that prequel novel, The House Of Styx (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), the series will now include four novels, a collection of short stories, and a soon-to-be-released reprint of the novella that predated Magician, Pollen From A Future Harvest (paperback, Kindle, audiobook) , while Styx is now the first book in a prequel duology.