Five down; one to go. It’s what fans of Seth Ring’s science fiction / LitRPG / progression fantasy series The Exlian Syndrome must be thinking now that he’s released the penultimate installment, Shattered Glory (hardcover, paperback, Kindle, audiobook).
In the following email interview, Ring discusses what inspired and influenced this fifth novel, as well as his plans to conclude the series…and maybe continue it.
There’s no denying that Star Trek has had a big influence on a lot of the science fiction that followed in its wake. But in the following email interview about her new sci-fi novel What We Are Seeking (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), author Cameron Reed mentions that one of the influences is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that she found rather interesting but also somewhat unsatisfying.
In Frost Bite, the first book of her trilogy, author Angela Sylvaine set alien worms loose on a small town in North Dakota. And now, for the second installment, Cold Snap (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), she’s doing the same to our neighbors to the North.
In the following email interview, Sylvaine discusses what inspired and influenced this sci-fi horror comedy, as well as why she wanted to hurt Canadians specifically.
While a lot of mystery writers make their main character a detective or a cop or some other member of law enforcement — or someone who wishes they were — author Mark Stevens went a different route when he introduced Flynn Martin in the noir mystery novel No Lie Lasts Forever by making her a disgraced TV reporter. Now Flynn has another mystery to solve with Two Truths And A Lie (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), the second book in Steven’s Flynn Martin Thriller series.
In the following email interview, Stevens discusses what inspired and influenced what he says is the middle story in a trilogy.
Given that the working title was The Big Sleep Meets Time Bandits, you might think you know all you need to know about John Chu’s new multiverse hard science fiction novel The Subtle Art Of Folding Space (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook). But you don’t. Not everything, anyway.
To learn what else you need to know about this sci-fi story, check out the following email interview.
In the immortal words of Kyle B. Broflovski, “[The Cure’s] Disintegration is the best album ever!” It’s a sentiment that may be mirrored by poet Nathan Hoks, who, in the following email interview about his fourth poetry collection, Moony Days Of Being (paperback), cites The Cure’s frontman Robert Smith as a big influence on these, and all of Hoks’ poems.
A fair number of stories about soldiers who go AWOL end up being about how they wrestle with that decision. But in Philip Fracassi’s new historical horror novel Sarafina (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), the soldiers who go AWOL have bigger concerns than if they’ve made the right decision or not.
In the following email interview, Fracassi discusses what inspired and influenced this Civil War-era story, which he stresses is “a Horror novel with a capital H.”
In the following email interview about his near-future, epistolary-adjacent, speculative fiction novel Your Behavior Will Be Monitored (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), author Justin Feinstein says, “I’m no tech expert or visionary, but I do like imagining the potential human implications of technology.” Which may be why this story — in which corner-cutting people and scheming robots launch a new advertising initiative — isn’t the dystopian science fiction tale you might expect.
When aliens finally do stop to say hello — and yes, I said “when” not “if” — one of the issues we will have communicating with them is language. And that’s if we’re lucky. In Joshua T. Calvert new hard science fiction novel The Object (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), the aliens are, as he says in the following email interview, “…so fundamentally different from us … that finding any common ground for communication seems almost impossible.”