Though it’s his fourth collection of short stories, and eighth book overall, in the following email interview, writer Richard Thomas says he thinks Spontaneous Human Combustion: Stories (hardcover, paperback, Kindle, audiobook) — a collection of fantasy, sci-fi, horror, new-weird, etc. — is the best place to start exploring his unique oeuvre.
With Hunt The Stars (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), writer Jessie Mihalik is kicking off a new — and shhhh, romantic — sci-fi space opera trilogy called Starlight’s Shadow. In the following email interview, Mihalik explains what inspired and influenced this series, and why she might want to take a certain masked stranger to dinner to thank him for the idea.
Like a lot of people who’ve written space opera stories about total badasses, Ciel Pierlot cites the TV show Firefly as an influence on her new sci-fi space opera novel Bluebird (paperback, Kindle). But in the following email interview about it, she says that what really inspired this story is something a badass might have handy. Well, two things.
Writers sometimes say they got the idea for their new novel by thinking about a character. Which is what T.R. Napper says about his new cyberpunk sci-fi / speculative fiction novel, 36 Streets (paperback, Kindle, audiobook).
But what he also says about it in the following email interview is that this story was also inspired by a place that person might be.
One of the things that made the movie Alien so scary was that Ripley and her crewmates were not soldiers or scientists or in any way prepared to take on a hostile invader, they were space truckers.
Which is just one of many things they have in common with the crew of the LINA, the small beacon-repair vessel at the center of S.A. Barnes’ sci-fi space horror novel Dead Silence (paperback, hardcover, Kindle, audiobook).
But what’s interesting is that — in the following email interview, in which Barnes discusses what inspired and influenced this novel — she actually says it was Aliens not Alien that had the biggest influence on this scary story.
With Tyger Bright, writer T.C. McCarthy has reached the halfway point of the sci-fi space opera series he began in 2019 with Tyger Burning. With Bright newly released as a mass market paperback — after originally coming out in trade paperback, for Kindle, and as an audiobook — I present the following email interview, in which he discusses what did, and did not inspire and influence this second installment.
It’s hard enough deciding who to invite to your wedding, and what table to sit them at; imagine if you had to decide who lives and who dies because you only have so many available seats on a spaceship. Which is the predicament faced by the twenty-two kids in James Breakwell’s new sci-fi novel The Chosen Twelve (paperback, Kindle, audiobook).
In the following email interview, Breakwell discusses what inspired and influenced this odd, humorous, and thought-provoking story.
With multiverses being all the rage these days (just ask Spider-Man), and virtual reality video games becoming more and more common (hello, PSVR2), it was probably inevitable that someone would combine them into a story in which something goes awry. And that someone is writer Ron Walters. In the following email interview, Walters discusses the story in question: his new sci-fi thriller Deep Dive (paperback, Kindle, audiobook).
As irritating as they may be in real life, Nazis are actually interesting when they’re IN SPAAAAACE! Y’know, like in Star Wars. Which brings me to John Birmingham’s The Cruel Stars trilogy, in which Space Nazis who were driven from Earth attempt to make a comeback. In the following email interview, Birmingham discusses the newly released second book in this sci-fi space opera series, The Shattered Skies (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook).