With Resilient (hardcover, paperback, Kindle) writer Allen Stroud is continuing the military sci-fi space opera saga The Fractal Series that he started with 2020’s Fearless. But as he explains in the following email interview, Resilient is as much an expansion as it is a continuation.
As someone who has trouble falling asleep, I am envious of those who find it easy. But I draw the line at “…and then wake up in an alternate reality with no way to get home.” I hate when that happens. But as is so often the case, what’s terrible is real life is great in fiction.
This brings me to Tim Pratt’s multiverse sci-fi novel Prison Of Sleep (paperback, Kindle), in which the main character has the aforementioned sleep problem. In the following email interview, Pratt discusses this novel, and the one that preceded it, Doors Of Sleep.
Given how going digital has all but destroyed music, I can’t say I’m terribly excited for the prospect of digitizing humans. But what sucks in real life is often quite cool in fiction. Hence my interest in writer Paul Cornell’s science fiction novella Rosebud (paperback, Kindle), in which the main characters are people who’ve been digitized. In the following email interview, Cornell discusses what inspired and influenced this sci-fi story.
For the latest installment of their Systema Paradoxa series of novellas about cryptids, the good people of eSpec Books have enlisted Mary Fan…who used this opportunity to reminisce about her childhood. At least that’s the impression I got from the following email interview about her installment, Found Footage (paperback, Kindle).
In the following email interview about her speculative fiction novel End Of The World House (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), writer Adrienne Celt discusses what inspired and influenced this story of a time loop and a slow apocalypse, as well as why she set part of it in the Louvre instead of your local art museum.
Anti-intellectualism has always annoyed me, and the recent and unapologetic increase in it has made the last few years even more irritating than they already were.
So it’s exciting that the hero — yeah, hero — of Chris Panatier’s humorous new sci-fi novel Stringers (paperback, Kindle, audiobook) is someone who knows it all. Literally.
In the following email interview, Panatier explains where he got the idea for this science fiction story, as well as what influenced it.
In many novels about generational space ships, the problems that arise are with the crew. But in his new science fiction novel Braking Day (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), writer Adam Oyebanji presents a generational ship whose crew are not the problem. In the following email interview, Oyebanji discusses what inspired and influenced this story, which he says isn’t just a sci-fi one.
Like some of the best sci-fi and fantasy writing, N.E. Davenport’s science fantasy novel The Blood Trials (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook) is as much about our world as it about the Republic in which it’s set.
In the following email interview about it, Davenport discusses both the sad realities and the magical fantasies that inspired and influenced this story.
Don’t you just hate it when you get tossed out of your doomsday cult only to have doomsday happen a few days later? We’ve all been there. And by “we,” I mean Wynter Roth, the main character of writer Tosca Lee’s medical thriller The Line Between. Sadly, Wynter’s life isn’t getting any better in the sequel, the dystopian, post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel A Single Light (paperback, Kindle, audiobook) that’s also the final book of this duology. In the following email interview, Lee discusses what inspired and influenced this second (not entirely implausible) installment.