It’s always interesting when an author takes inspiration from their work life in writing their stories.
Which is one reason why I got excited when, in the following email interview, author Mark Salzwedel explained that his new sci-fi space opera novel The Lever (paperback, Kindle) came out of his experiences working as a hypnotherapist and doing “research on genetic factors in sexual and gender orientation.”
With The Veiled Masters (paperback, Kindle), author Tim Pratt is once again exploring and expanding the sci-fi space opera universe of the tabletop strategy game Twilight Imperium he previously visited in his novels The Fractured Void and The Necropolis Empire.
In the following email interview about Masters, Pratt discusses what influenced this espionage-infused story and how it connects to both the game and his previous Imperium novels.
With Artifact Space (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), writer Miles Cameron is kicking off a sci-fi space opera series called Arcana Imperii.
But while, in the following email interview, he cites other sci-fi space opera stories as influences, this writer of historical fiction confesses he couldn’t help but get historical in these books as well.
With Our Child Of Two Worlds (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), writer Stephen Cox is completing the Coryverse duology he started in 2018 with Our Child Of The Stars. In the following email interview, Cox discusses what inspired and influenced both this second half and this series, and why it’s just super.
Ten years ago, after writing A Beautiful Friendship, the first book in his Star Kingdom series — a young adult spin-off of his long-running Honor Harrington sci-fi series — writer David Weber turned to friend and fellow scribe Jane Lindskold to collaborate on the second book, 2012’s Fire Season. And clearly she did a good job because the two have just released the fourth Star Kingdom novel, A New Clan (hardcover, Kindle). In the following email interview, Lindskold discusses what inspired and influenced this story, as well as why, despite being the fourth book in a sub-series that itself has dozens of novels, A New Clan may be a good place to start this saga.
In another reality, Chelsea Vowel wrote her Master’s thesis on Métis identity, and left her thoughts about how non-Indigenous people justify claiming their and her identity to academia. But in the following email interview, she explains why the version of her in our reality instead decided to do in the genre of speculative fiction, and in the form of the short story collection called Buffalo Is The New Buffalo (paperback, Kindle).
They say you should never meet your heroes. It’s a lesson that Uma, the engineer of the science space ship Gallion, learns the hard way in Ren Hutchings’ new sci-fi space opera novel Under Fortunate Stars (paperback, hardcover, Kindle, audiobook). In the following email interview, Hutchings discusses what inspired and influenced this epic story.
The last couple of years really screwed up a lot of things. Weddings were delayed or reworked; TV shows were cancelled because they couldn’t film them correctly (R.I.P., Stumptown); and don’t get me started on my plans for world domination. But on some occasions, the terrible times we’ve been living through may have made some things better. Take The City Inside (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), Samit Basu’s near-future anti-dystopian science fiction novel, which, he reveals in the following email interview, was originally a rather different novel.
Like other writers with an expertise in something outside of writing, author and archeologist Kathleen O’Neal Gear imbues her science fiction stories with science facts. In the following email interview, she explains how this influenced her new hard sci-fi cli-fi novel, The Ice Ghost (paperback, hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), the second installment of The Rewilding Reports trilogy.