When you subtitle your short story collection “Ghost Stories,” you’re setting expectations for what those stories are about, and like. But in the following email interview with Adam Soto, author of the short story collection Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep: Ghost Stories (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), he reveals some of these tales may not be as horrifying as you’re expecting.
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).
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.
For more than 15 years Brooklyn’s Akashic Books have presented great noir stories from around the world in their geographic City Noir anthologies: Brooklyn Noir, Tel Aviv Noir, Nairobi Noir, and so on. Now they’re potentially launching a similar series for science fiction with Speculative Los Angeles (paperback, Kindle, audiobook). In the following email interview, writer and Speculative Los Angeles editor Denise Hamilton discusses what’s included in this inaugural collection, and how it — and this possible series — mirrors its Noir cousins.
It’s not uncommon for writers of science fiction to rework other people’s non-sci-fi stories. The classic 1956 movie Forbidden Planet was a retelling of William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, while the story in Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 movie Seven Samurai has been retold as both the steampunk anime Samurai 7 and as Stina Leicht’s sci-fi Western novel Persephone Station [which you can read more about by clicking here]. And now Jean Rhys’ 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea is getting similar treatment courtesy Marian Womack’s environmental speculative fiction novel The Swimmers (paperback, Kindle). Though in the following email interview about it, Womack not discusses why she wrote this rewrite, but how our current climate literally influenced it as well.
Everything comes with a price. Which is what Malachi learns when someone offers to graft him a new tongue, thus restoring his ability to speak, in T.C. Farren’s new speculative fiction horror thriller novel The Book Of Malachi (paperback, Kindle, audiobook). In the following email interview, Farren discusses what inspired and influenced this story, as well as why she didn’t write it as a movie.
In 2014, it was sadly unthinkable that a rich and powerful man might face consequences for his criminal acts, let alone his bad behavior. It was while she pondered how this might change that writer S.A. Jones conceived of the story that would ultimately become her new speculative science fiction novel, The Fortress (paperback, Kindle). In the following email interview, Jones discusses what inspired and influenced this tale in both positive and negative ways.
The idea of being able to hack the human genome to create prettier people and stronger soldiers has been kicking around since we first discovered genes were the blueprint of humanity. Some see it as playing god and a recipe for disaster; others a way to solve our problems. In the following email interview with writer Arwen Elys Dayton, she discusses why her new novel Stronger, Faster, And More Beautiful (hardcover, Kindle) explores all sides of this possible future.
Since the last presidential election, the novels 1984 by George Orwell and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale have been selling like hotcakes because people are worried their fictional dystopian futures could soon be non-fiction. Which is good news — though, also, when you think about it, bad news — for sci-fi writer Stanley Bing, whose new novel, Immortal Life (hardcover, Kindle) also posits a future that may not be so futuristic.