When putting together the alt-history military science fiction short story anthology Weird World War III, editor Sean Patrick Hazlett did so with the one limitation that the titular conflict be between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But in the following email interview about the follow-up, Weird World War IV (paperback, Kindle), Hazlett says that while it is about Earth’s fourth all-invitational conflict, the previous restriction as to the participants was lifted.
With Inheritors Of Power (paperback, Kindle), writer Juliette Wade is presenting the third novel in her five-part sociological science fiction series The Broken Trust. But as she explains in the following email interview, Inheritors was originally going to be where this saga started.
From robots to mobile phones to self-driving cars, science fiction stories have often predicted the future.
Which bodes well for the hospitality industry, since writer Rob Hart has just predicted time travel luxury hotels in his new romantic sci-fi novel The Paradox Hotel (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook).
Well, except that — as he and I discuss in the following email interview about Paradox — this story starts with a murder…
With Sisters Of The Forsaken Stars (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), writer Lina Rather isn’t just continuing the Our Lady Of Endless Worlds series she started in 2019 with Sisters Of The Vast Black, she’s presenting the aftermath of that sci-fi space opera novella. In the following email interview, Rather discusses what happens to her intrepid space nuns in this second adventure, and why she’s putting the sisters through it.
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.