Thanks to social distancing and “stay at home” orders, some people are finally reading that really, really long novel they’ve been putting off for years. But for people who still can’t find the time, or the inclination, might we suggest a short story or two. In the following email interview, writer Kathe Koja discusses her new short story collection Velocities (paperback, Kindle), as well as the upcoming reissue of her 1991 novel, The Cipher (paperback).
As we’ve seen in The Matrix and Terminator movies, making slaves out of robots always ends well for us humans. Just swell. For instance, in the following email interview with editor Jonathan Strahan, he discusses Made To Order: Robots And Revolution (paperback, Kindle), an anthology of sci-fi short stories in which robots — get this! — rebel against their human masters. Oh, the imagination of writers.
While Jessica Reisman has been writing short stories for decades, she’s only now having them collected in a handy, take-home package, The Arcana Of Maps & Other Stories (paperback, Kindle). In the following email interview, Reisman talks about what inspired and influenced these stories, as well as how they relate to her novels.
In first contact stories, writers explore what might happen when we first meet aliens. But in the new sci-fi short story anthology Footprints In The Stars (paperback, Kindle), the focus is instead on what might happen when we first get evidence that aliens exist.
In the following email interview, Footprints editor Danielle Ackley-McPhail talks about how this collection came together, what subgenres of sci-fi are included, and why it features a bunch of writers with Star Trek novels in their oeuvres.
It would be very easy to introduce the following email interview with writer Erin McGraw with a reference to that Royal Teens song, “Short Shorts” (“Who wears short shorts / We wear short shorts”). Especially given that the short stories in her new collection Joy And 52 Other Very Short Stories (hardcover, Kindle) are all only three or four pages long. But I won’t do that. I have too much respect for you and for her. So don’t ask.
Writer Jane Yolen is clearly a lazy person. What else can you say about someone who’s written over 370 books? So it should come as no surprise that her newest short story collection, How To Fracture A Fairy Tale (paperback, Kindle), is just her doing twisted adaptations of famous (and not so famous) folk tales. In the following email interview, Yolen actually took the time to defend herself…and to tell me which stories in this book my mom might like.
In the following email interview, writer Bernard Cohen discusses his new short story collection, When I Saw The Animal (paperback, Kindle).