For Halo fans, Halo Infinite‘s December 8 release date can’t come fast enough. But it might come a little quicker — or at least seem to — if you read Troy Denning’s new Halo novel, Halo: Divine Wind (paperback, Kindle, audiobook). In the following email interview about it, Denning discusses what inspired and influenced this sci-fi space opera spy thriller, including why he thinks it might not work as a Halo game.
While there are times when science fiction stories are too much about the humans involved (I’m looking at you, Cloverfield), it does always help to have some humanity in your sci-fi to ground the story or make the consequences more real. Which is what writer, real-life NASA employee, and Lost In Space consultant Les Johnson is doing in his novel The Spacetime War (paperback, Kindle). In the following email interview, Johnson discusses what inspired and influenced this romantic sci-fi space opera story.
There’s no shortage of funky robots in sci-fi: Bender, Marvin, Murderbot, Claptrap, R2-D2… But that doesn’t mean we don’t want more, especially when they put a unique spin on the idea.
Which brings us to Unit Four, the “biological soft” maintenance robot from Marina Lostetter’s new sci-fi space opera thriller Activation Degradation (paperback, Kindle, audiobook).
In the following email interview, Lostetter discusses what inspired this robotic story, as well as whether this is the end for our favorite new ‘bot.
In the board game Terraforming Mars, you have to turn the red planet into a place humans can live, and comfortably. The kicker being that every turn isn’t a new minute, hour, or day, it’s a generation. But while this works great for a game, it makes telling a compelling story kind of tricky. Which is why, in her connected hard sci-fi adventure novel, Terraforming Mars: In The Shadow Of Deimos (paperback, Kindle), writer Jane Killick eschews this aspect of the game. In the following email interview about the novel, she explains why she made the time frame change, as well as what else inspired and influenced this story.
As a scientist, it’s not surprising that writer Premee Mohammed would write a story about an apocalypse that’s both environmental and biological in nature.
It’s also not surprising that, as she admits in the following email interview about her post-apocalyptic sci-fi novella The Annual Migration Of Clouds (paperback, Kindle), she sometimes found her writer’s instincts running up against her scientific ones.
People have long speculated how a third World War might start and play out. But in the alt-history military sci-fi short story anthology Weird World War III, we got to see what might happen if things got, well, you know. With this collection newly available in mass market paperback (it was originally released as a trade paperback and on Kindle last year), I decided to get weird with its editor, Sean Patrick Hazlett, for the following email interview.
In the twenty years since she released her hard sci-fi novel In The Company Of Others, Julie E. Czerneda has written more than a dozen novels, novellas, and short stories. But in the following email interview about the 20th Anniversary Edition of In The Company Of Others (paperback), she not only discusses what originally inspired and influenced this story, but how it influenced what came afterwards as well.
While surrealism works well in such visual mediums as painting and film, it’s a bit trickier to pull off in print, especially prose. But if anyone can pull it off, it’s writer Lavie Tidhar, who — in the following email interview — describes his new sci-fi / fantasy / what-have-you mash-up novel The Escapement (paperback, Kindle) in terms art critics might appreciate.
