For her sixth and latest collection of short stories, A Place Between Waking And Forgetting (paperback), author Eugen Bacon has assembled a collection that — as she explains in the following email interview — “largely comprises black people stories exploring affection, dread, anguish, or hope.”
When we think about the multiverse, we often think it started with that episode of Star Trek with evil Spock (1967’s “Mirror, Mirror”).
But the writers of that episode — and everyone else who’s ever written a multiversal story — owe a debt of gratitude to Gertrude Barrows Bennett who, under her nom de plume Francis Stevens, pioneered the way of the parallel realities in some of the stories she wrote between 1917 and 1923.
Now six of those stories, including her 1919 novel The Heads Of Cerberus, are being collected in the new volume The Heads Of Cerberus And Other Stories (paperback, Kindle), which was edited by Dr. Lisa Yaszek, the Regents’ Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech, who also wrote the rather appropriately titled introduction, “The Mother Of Modern Genre Fiction.”
In the following email interview, Dr. Yaszek talks about the significance of these stories, as well as how she decided which to include.
Some writers are very intentional. They sit down each day with the intent of writing a story, one they intend to be published in a magazine or journal, and then collected in a book with their name on it.
But in the following email interview about A Bucket Full Of Moonlight (paperback, Kindle), his book with his name on it, author Christopher J. Burke says these short stories actually, “…started as a writing exercise…”
As she says in the following email interview, Ellen Datlow has edited the annual anthology series The Best Horror Of The Year, “…(in one form or another) for 37 years.”
But in that same time, she’s also assembled collections of horror short stories around a theme or type of scare, including Body Shocks: Extreme Tales Of Body Horror, Screams From The Dark: 29 Tales Of Monsters And The Monstrous, and When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired By Shirley Jackson.
Which brings me to her latest thematic anthology, Fears: Tales Of Psychological Horror (paperback, Kindle), which has stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Josh Malerman, Stephen Graham Jones, Priya Sharma, Margo Lanagan, and others.
In the following email interview, Datlow talks about how she defined the term “psychological horror” for this anthology, as well as how she chose the stories to include in it.
Science fiction is often about looking to the future, and this is especially true about sci-fi space opera stories.
So it’s not surprising that a sci-fi space opera short story anthology called New Adventures In Space Opera (paperback, Kindle) would also be forward looking. As editor Jonathan Strahan explains in the following email interview, “I edited two books [of space opera stories] with my good friend Gardner Dozois toward the end of the 2000s. … I wanted to put together a book that looked at what came next.”
Most of the time when someone says “suggestions welcome,” they don’t mean it; they’re just being nice.
But apparently the good people at Baen Books are open to your ideas…sort of.
You see, when someone recently suggested they reprint an out-of-print anthology of science fiction short stories about power armor, they decided to instead put together one of their own.
In the following email interview, co-editor David Afsharirad discusses Tomorrow’s Troopers (paperback, Kindle), which collects classic sci-fi and military sci-fi power armor stories by Brandon Sanderson and Ethan Skarstedt, Joe Haldeman, and Harry Harrison, among others, including how he and co-editor Hank Davis (who had to bow out of this interview because of computer problems) picked what stories to include, what subgenres are represented…and whether the person whose suggestion inspired this book got a free copy.
In the new short story anthology The Chaos Clock: Tales Of Cosmic Aether (paperback, Kindle), writers including James Chambers, Jody Lynn Nye, and Jeffrey Lyman mix together the seemingly disparate genres of steampunk and cosmic horror.
In the following email interview, Chaos Clock editor Danielle Ackley-McPhail discusses how this anthology came together.
When President Donald Trump started talking about establishing the U.S. Space Force, a lot of people — myself included — thought it was an idea whose time had not yet come.
But as I learned while doing the following email interview with C. Stuart Hardwick, the editor of the new short story and essay anthology Tales Of The United States Space Force (paperback, Kindle), the Space Force’s roots actually go all the way back to the Cold War, albeit under other names, including President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.
In the following email interview, Hardwick discusses how this anthology came to be, as well as how it reflects both the truth and the possible future of the Space Force, while not shying away from the snarky comments of us doubters.