Author Interview: Devin Madson

Today I am interviewing Devin Madson, author of the new fantasy novel, We Ride the Storm, first book in The Reborn Empire series. 

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DJ: Hi Devin! Thanks for agreeing to do this interview! 

For readers who aren’t familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself?

Devin Madson: : I’m an Australian epic fantasy author… as in I’m from Australia not that I write epic fantasy about Australia. Honestly, I don’t think I could out-fantasy the animals we already have here. I self-published my first book in 2013 and was picked up by Orbit in 2019, I work a stupidly obsessive amount, love video games but never have time to play, love plants but never have time to garden, love doing jigsaws but… well, you get the idea.

DJ: What is We Ride the Storm about?

Devin: We Ride the Storm is the story of an empire built by war being brought down by war, crushed beneath its history of division and inherited hurts. We follow three different point-of-view characters, one from each of the three cultures clashing here. A snarky assassin with a voice in her head she can’t escape, an honourable warrior trying to hold on to his tenets while being forced to fight in a foreign war, and an ambitious princess who wants to rule the empire in her own right whatever the cost. There’s a lot of intrigue, tense battles, trippy necromancy, respectful head severing, tea, and my favourite of all – disaster humans.

DJ: What were some of your influences We Ride the Storm and the series? 

Devin: We Ride the Storm is the continuation of a generational story I started in my novella, In Shadows We Fall, and then continued on through The Vengeance Trilogy (also being re-released by Orbit and will be available early August). So while I deliberately wrote them to be read in any order, it means there wasn’t as much unique inspiration for this story. When I first started writing in this world, the story I wanted to tell informed much of the world building, but now the world and its history informs the stories I want to tell.

The world itself has lots of inspirational sources as it’s been growing slowly in my mind and in my books, trunked and finished, for more than ten years. The magic system came from listening to my aunt talk about the past lives she’d been regressed through, a lot of the world history is inspired by little bits of our own history, and the whole Levanti culture was born from the original first line of the book because I’m that much of a pantser.

Author Interview: Timothy Zahn

Today I am interviewing Timothy Zahn, author of the new space opera novel, Queen, final book in The Sibyl’s War trilogy. 

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DJ: Hi Timothy! Thanks for agreeing to do this interview! 

For readers who aren’t familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself?

Timothy: I’ve been writing full-time for the past forty years, with 58 novels and over a hundred short stories published. I’m best known for my 13 Star Wars books (beginning in 1991 with Heir to the Empire), but have several other series to my name, including the Cobra, Dragonback, and Quadrail series and the Blackcollar and Conquerors trilogies. 

DJ: What is Queen and then The Sibyl’s War trilogy about?

Timothy: A young woman, Nicole Hammond is snatched from the streets of Philadelphia and taken aboard a giant spaceship, the Fyrantha, to help with the (mostly human) crews that are repairing it. Nicole is a “Sibyl,” which means that with the aid of a special inhaler she can telepathically hear the ship tell her crew what needs to be repaired. One day, she happens upon a large terraformed chamber and two groups of different aliens, intent on killing each other. Against her better judgment she begins to investigate the Fyrantha’s secrets.

DJ: What were some of your influences for The Sibyl’s War trilogy? 

Timothy: Nothing in particular, though I read a lot of SF in my youth and so there are undoubtedly a lot of subconscious influences from those books and authors. Mostly it was to be a combination of puzzle-box, space opera, and redemption arc.

Author Interview: Scott Coon

Today I am interviewing Scott Coon, an accomplished short story writer and author of the new science-fiction novel, Lost Helix. 

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DJ: Hi Scott! Thanks for agreeing to do this interview! 

For readers who aren’t familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself?

Scott Coon: Hello, DJ. Thank you for having me. Though Lost Helix is my first published novel, I have had several short stories published. Bewildering Stories recently featured “The Loneliest Advertisement Bot” and have published a few other stories over the years. My work is often influenced by my career as a computer programmer and also by my six years as intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army. Both played a role in Lost Helix.

DJ: What is Lost Helix about?

Scott: Growing up in a space station, DJ dreams of writing music but he can’t make a living on it, not in the Stone River Asteroid Belt. Thanks to company’s never-ending contracts and impossible to afford transit, leaving isn’t an option. DJ expects to end up working for Black Mountain, just like his dad and everyone else. When his father goes missing, DJ finds an encrypted file and other evidence that his dad was a hacker in the company’s secret war of industrial sabotage, sometimes claiming lives to knock competitors off the most valuable asteroids. To recover the evidence, the company sends a lifelong family friend, Agent Coreman. DJ is forced to make a run for it, hoping to find justice and maybe his dad.

DJ: What were some of your influences for Lost Helix? 

Scott: My ideas often come from asking the question, “Yeah, but what next?”  Terraforming is a recurring concept in science fiction, like in James S. A. Corey’s Leviathan Wakes, but what happens when the planet is done? How does humanity go about populating it? The world of Lost Helix is my answer to that question. Another source of inspiration was the video game Sid Meier’s Civilization. Every time I built the domed spaceship bound for Alpha Centauri, I wondered what would become of it after the colonists stripped it for parts and left its remains in orbit. In Lost Helix, I give my science victory colony ships a second life as a farm, feeding the miners of Stone River.

Author Interview: Ferrett Steinmetz

Today I am interviewing Ferrett Steinmetz, author of the new cyberpunk, romance novel, Automatic Reload.

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DJ: Hi Ferrett!! Thanks for agreeing to do this interview! 

For readers who aren’t familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself?

Ferrett: The marketing department always refers to me as a “quirky” author, which means “I write books that don’t fit into easy categories.”  My Flex series was about a magic caused by obsessions, where if you were truly devoted to your cats, you would become a magnificent felimancer – master of cat magic!  Except you wouldn’t want to rule the world, you’d just want to take care of your ever-growing hoard of kittens.

Then I wrote The Sol Majestic, which is a space opera about a restaurant – there are no warships battling, just chefs trying to make soup for the most personal of reasons.  

So my books are a little weird.  

DJ: What is Automatic Reload about?

Ferrett: It is a cyberpunk romance.  Think about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, except they’re both faster-than-human killing machines with PTSD and panic disorder, falling in love while they murder people.  

DJ: What were some of your influences for Automatic Reload? 

Ferrett: They say that all books are a conversation with each other.  In this case, Automatic Reload is very specifically a word I’m having with K. C. Alexander.  

Don’t worry, though.  It’s a good word. 

See, I read K. C. Alexander’s cyberpunk novel Necrotech, and in it they had a marvelously violent female cyborg who exuded a steady stream of don’t-give-a-fucks.  And because K. C.’s prose is so sharp and evocative, I kept watching their heroine Riko and her artificial limb wake up in garbage-smeared alleyways and lice-filled jailbeds and all manner of disgusting places…

And while I loved following Riko around, I kept asking one question:

When does she field-strip and clean that damn thing?

I mean, Riko kept landing in slimy, gunky situations and her artificial limb never seized up.  And while I was waiting for the scene where Riko had to spend the day oiling and tightening her neglected limb, I started imagining my own “maintenancepunk” novel where I had a guy who did some serious tuning.

So not only is Automatic Reload about cybernetic action, it’s about a realistic cybernetic firefight where you have to worry about degrading weapons loadouts and proper configuration files.