Towards the end of the following email interview about his military sci-fi space opera novel The Deep Man (paperback, Kindle), writer Michael Mersault says, “Science fiction should broaden the reader’s view of the world and the future, not cause it to narrow.” A point he actually reinforced earlier by talking about the deep thoughts and big picture implications of his book.
As they are wont to do, Baen Publishing are now systematically rereleasing the four books in Wil McCarthy’s hard sci-fi space opera series The Queendom Of Sol as mass market paperbacks nearly a year-and-a-half after reissuing this out-of-print series from the 2000s as trade paperbacks and on Kindle.
With the mass market paperback version of book two, The Wellstone, being released recently, I thought it time to subject Mr. McCarthy to the following email interrogation about this book, this series, and this new edition.
Having twice explored the Alien universe, and created one of their own in their Salvagers trilogy, writer Alex White is going where they’ve never gone before with their new Star Trek novel, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Revenant (paperback, Kindle, audiobook).
In the following email interview, White explains how this novel came together, when in the show’s chronology it takes place, and what non-Trek stuff influenced this noir-flavored sci-fi space opera story.
Some of the best things happen when you mix disparate elements together, like when you inject magic into science fiction or cross Back To The Future with nihilism or put tater tots in a breakfast burrito. It’s also where you find Brendan P. Bellecourt’s deco-punk science fiction novel Absynthe (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), which, in the beginning of the following email interview, he describes as being a mix of a classic movie, a classic novel, and a movie that may some day be considered a classic.
When left unchecked, sibling rivalries can tear a family apart. But what’s terrible for families is good for fiction, as writer Kristyn Merbeth shows with her sci-fi space opera series, The Nova Vita Protocol trilogy.
In the following email interview, Merbeth discusses what inspired and influenced both this series and its recently released conclusion, Discordia (paperback, Kindle).
As someone who lives near where the sinkhole opens in the new time travel sci-fi TV show La Brea (as well as where everyone’s on a paleo diet), I’ve been a little on edge lately when it comes to large holes and people visiting the Paleolithic era.
But since they say you should face your fears, I decided I would do the following email interview with writer Michael Z. Williamson about his time travel military sci-fi novel That Was Now, This Is Then (hardcover, Kindle), the sequel to 2015’s A Long Time Until Now.
While the Dune novels and Star Wars saga are clearly as entrenched in the genres of science fiction and space opera as the Foundation novels and the Star Trek saga, there are also fantastical and spiritual elements to those former stories that place them in the realm known as space fantasy or science fantasy.
It’s also where you’ll find the stories collected in a new anthology called Sword & Planet (paperback, Kindle).
In the following email interview, S&P editor Christopher Ruocchio discusses how this collection came together.
Having explored the time before the first game (Karen Traviss’ Aspho Fields and The Slab), the time between the second and third (Traviss’ Jacinto’s Remnant, Anvil Gate, and Coalition’s End), after the fourth game (Jason M. Hough’s Ascendance), and both during the fifth and before the first (Hough’s Bloodlines), the novels based on the Gears Of War games are now mining the previously untapped era between the third and fourth games with Michael A. Stackpole’s military science fiction novel Gears Of War: Ephyra Rising (paperback, Kindle, audiobook). In the following email interview, Stackpole discusses what inspired and influenced this story, as well as why you don’t need to have played all of the Gears games, or any of them, to understand it.
While the current crop of conspiracy theories are ridiculous at best and infuriating at worst, some of the oldies are still goodies. Especially when they get co-opted by science fiction writers for their own purposes [insert evil laugh here]. Which brings me to this email interview with writer Ian Douglas (a.k.a. William H. Keith, Jr.) about his new military sci-fi novel Alien Hostiles (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), the sequel to 2020’s Alien Secrets and second book in his Solar Warden trilogy, in which the “Reptilians” of UFO conspiracies are real…and invasive.