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Category: Interviews

Rolling Cities and Ship Building: A Talk with Frederic S. Durbin

Rolling Cities and Ship Building: A Talk with Frederic S. Durbin

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Philippe de Champaigne's Vanitas Still Life with Skull
Philippe de Champaigne's Vanitas Still Life with Skull

In a Frederic S. Durbin story, you’re as likely to get a chattering, boxed skull secreted away on an enormous mobile city as you are to get an ominous underground world directly beneath a funeral parlor. Durbin writes dark stories with a light touch. His detailed settings come close to becoming characters themselves. Though his audience is mainly a younger crowd, his fantasy novels can be enjoyed by all. All, meaning me. I like his books. You should too. Don’t even get me started on his short stories. I might squeal all over you.

Durbin was born in Illinois, taught English and creative writing in Japan for twenty years and now resides in Pittsburgh, PA. His most recent novel, The Star Shard, was released in February.

Black Gate had a sit down and discovered the secrets of Frederic S. Durbin’s soul. Ish. OK. That’s a lie. More so we booktalked, but if you ask him nicely on his GoodReads or blog, “Mr. Durbin, what secret(s) does your soul hold?”… he might tell you. And if he does, report it back to the big BG so we get the scoop first. In the meantime, here’s Black Gate’s talk with Frederic S. Durbin.

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Black Gate Interviews Nathan Long, Part One

Black Gate Interviews Nathan Long, Part One

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nathan-longNathan Long is a novelist best known for his work in the Warhammer universe, most notably for his Black Hearts series and Ulrika the Vampire series, as well as penning the new adventures of the classic Warhammer duo, Gotrek & Felix. Recently, Nathan’s Jane Carver of Waar has been released to some great reviews, and is getting a lot of attention in light of the recent big budget movie adaptation of the Burroughs novel that inspired it.

Welcome, Nathan, and thanks for sitting down with Black Gate to talk about your latest novel.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Jane Carver of Waar is a Barsoomesque adventure for the modern reader, and something that treads the line between loving homage and knowing send-up of classic pulp SF. Tell us a bit about the book, and do you think readers need to be familiar with Edgar Rice Burroughs, Barsoom, and other stories of that era to fully appreciate Jane Carver?

Jane Carver of Waar is what I used to call, before I knew any better, a “Sword and Raygun” adventure. Now I know I’m supposed to call it a Planetary Romance, but I still like mine better. It tells the story of Jane Carver, a hard-riding biker chick who gets herself on the wrong side of the law and ends up hiding in a cave that transports her to a world full of strange aliens with stranger customs. There she has a sequence of wild adventures while trying to help a not-very-heroic young alien noble rescue his kidnapped bride.

I really hope readers won’t need to be familiar with the Planetary Romance genre to enjoy the book. I did my best to make sure they wouldn’t, as that is one of my pet peeves. I dislike parodies and homages that require some knowledge of the thing being parodied. It is my belief that a book should stand on its own, even when commenting on another book or genre. A book should be a book first, thoroughly enjoyable by itself, and anything else the author wants to make it second.

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My Sword is Bigger than Yours, or, When Size Really does Matter

My Sword is Bigger than Yours, or, When Size Really does Matter

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v-next-book

After meeting Violette Malan at ConFusion in Detroit a few weeks back, I wanted to find out a little more about her take on the genre near and dear to my heart, sword-and-sorcery. I asked her if she’d be interested in dropping by Black Gate to say a few words about how she approached her own work in the field, and here’s what she had to say:

When I found sword and sorcery in my teens, there weren’t a lot of strong female protagonists for me to relate to. Jirel of Joiry comes to mind, maybe Red Sonya – but they were already very old by the time I got to them. When I think now of the books and stories I read then, I’m hard pressed to come up with female characters, let alone female protagonists. There must have been some. You know, needing rescuing or marrying or something, but I didn’t find them memorable then, and I don’t really find them memorable now. Okay, I do remember the women that Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser loved, they were well-drawn, significant people. But we all know what happened to them, don’t we? They pretty much continue the tradition of female characters in western literature: if it’s a comedy they marry, if it’s a tragedy, they die. (Hint: for all their humorous elements, the F&GM stories aren’t comedies)

Flash forward a few years and I’m a writer of sword and sorcery, not just a reader. I’m a woman, living in a post-feminist western society, a person who’s written feminist literary criticism (okay, on 18th-century pastoral poetry, but it still counts). Now I get to actually create the kind of female characters I used to imagine when I was young. Protagonists, mind you, real, more-or-less human women. Not the good (or evil) fairies, queens, and goddesses that sociologists and feminist critics call examples of women as “other”.

How was I going to do that? Keeping in mind that – unlike the men – I didn’t have a lot of models I could use as a guide. And keeping in mind that I wanted to avoid either caricature, or cliché. (I think the phrase “no chain mail bras” will cover what I mean by that). I’m not going to talk about how a writer goes about forming any strong character – there are certain elements that apply no matter who or what the character might be. Instead, I’m going to address my own particular dilemma, how to create a strong, female, sword and sorcery protagonist.

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Walter Jon Williams Explains Why UFOs Are Actually Made of Bread, and Other Little Known Facts

Walter Jon Williams Explains Why UFOs Are Actually Made of Bread, and Other Little Known Facts

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williams1The first time I saw Walter Jon Williams, he was singing a song to mock Asimov’s then editor, Gardner Dozois. Melinda Snodgrass, Ellen Datlow, and Pat Cadigan sang backup.

My second sighting was a picture in that month’s Locus of Walter standing with Daniel Abraham and his bride, Kat, several other writers, and a toilet prominently displayed in the foreground. Said toilet was the writers’ group gift to the newlywed couple. Rather than slip a gift receipt into a card, or have the toilet delivered to the house, the writers group decided to carry the appliance into the reception on their shoulders.

And no, neither of those are the craziest stories I know about the award winning, bestselling author, Walter Jon Williams. By all means, read on!

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Real Magicians: Interviewing the Editors of Podcastle

Real Magicians: Interviewing the Editors of Podcastle

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bgpodcastleThe thing is, I love Podcastle.

I can’t help it. I love theatre and oral storytelling, I read a lot, I listen to audiobooks myself; I love big collaborative projects that involve massive influxes of talent, that are broad-minded and multi-faceted, that promote both exciting new voices and the old classics. Podcastle — with its podsisters EscapePod and Pseudopod — does all that.

Every time I hear a story over at Podcastle that guts me or makes me fly a little, I want the whole world to hear about it. I only wish my voice were louder.

So, one day in the not too very distant past, riding on some Podcastle story high — maybe a Tim Pratt or a Leah Bobet — I asked the editors, Dave Thompson and Anna Schwind, if they wouldn’t mind doing an interview for Black Gate magazine. Like most collaborations (especially the ones I’m involved in, oops), this took more months than anticipated, but — also like most collaborations — was ultimately worth it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I introduce you to the movers and shakers of the Fantasy Podcast?

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Michelle Muto talks Corpses, Deceased Protagonists, and Old Fashioned Piracy

Michelle Muto talks Corpses, Deceased Protagonists, and Old Fashioned Piracy

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pb092291-copyMichelle Muto has never properly observed Talk Like a Pirate Day, but can tell you how a human body decomposes. She managed to get that information out of city workers without having them turn her in to the police or psych ward. After a time with a large literary agency that decided, ultimately, that her work was too much like another client’s and thus they could not represent her, she took the plunge and became an indie writer, and I am so glad she did.

I discovered her first by reading five star review after five star review of her book, Don’t Fear the Reaper, and by the time I got around to reading it, knew immediately that I wanted to meet and get to know the author who wrote it. She kindly agreed to let me interview her.

Oh, and she should know how to talk like a pirate because she’s a direct descendant of William Howard. So it’s obvious right? Okay, maybe not. He was Blackbeard’s quartermaster.

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21 Questions for Ty Franck

21 Questions for Ty Franck

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jentaylor1
Ty Franck being hugged by Jen Taylor
I first met Ty Franck online, then in person at LosCon, and we’ve been friends ever since. He blames me for a lot of things that have happened in his life, but the truth is he warps the forces of space, time, and luck to create his own mini-universe with its own rules, as you’ll see from the interview below. My story of Ty that I think gives the most accurate impression of the kind of guy he is, is one he’s probably tired of hearing me tell. But it bears retelling.

Years ago he was held up at gunpoint at his workplace, after hours. Gangsters broke in, cut the phone lines, and tied up both him and another woman who was working late. Ty managed to keep talking to get the gangsters off guard, and then when they left the room, his coworker untied him and he used the company’s internet (which wasn’t connected to the phone lines) to message another office, who in turn called 911.

Yes, this is a true story, but I haven’t gotten to the most unbelievable part yet. After the police arrived and sat Ty down for questioning. The dialogue went something like this:

“What can you tell us about your attackers?”

“Well, they were armed with a Glock 40.”

“So you know guns, then?”

“No, not really.”

“But you know Glocks?”

“No.”

“So how do you know it was a Glock 40?”

“Because they were holding it about here-” Ty mimes having a gun held to his forehead “-and you could read it on the side. It said, Glock 40.”

Ty would be my first choice of friend to have around during the zombie apocalypse. I call dibs.

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An Interview with Jeff VanderMeer

An Interview with Jeff VanderMeer

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jeff-vandermeerAre you interested in ominous cities covered in creeping, mysterious fungi? What about flamboyant narrators, noir and the New Weird? Yeah? Good. Sit down a spell and have a listen to a man who has written it all – Jeff VanderMeer. The two-time World Fantasy Award winner and creator of Ambergris talked a slice of time to Black Gate about music, new writers and a hep bit of miscellaneous more.

Black Gate:  What do you think are the three best, new albums to come out in 2011?

Jeff VanderMeer: That’s tough for me because I haven’t listened consistently to a lot of music. What I can tell you is that I’m really high on The Black Keys’ El Camino, and the latest releases by Ringside, Three Mile Pilot, Steve Wynn, and the Rosebuds.

Who are three bands that you “discovered” in 2011 and now can’t live without?

I really delved back into bands I already knew, for the most part. However, I can say I can’t live without Murder by Death, Black Heart Procession, and the sadly defunct Pleasure Forever.

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Black Gate Interviews James L. Sutter, Part Three

Black Gate Interviews James L. Sutter, Part Three

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dragonsofautumntwilight_1984originalThis week concludes Black Gate‘s interview with author and editor James L. Sutter with a discussion of the pros and cons of media-tie in fiction, the Before They Were Giants anthology which collects the first sale short fiction of many big name writers, and a look at what James is working on now. Be sure to check out parts one and two of this interview, as well as our review of James’ new novel Death’s Heretic.

You recently wrote an informative guest post at Inkpunks about the pros and cons of media tie in fiction from a writer’s perspective. What are your thoughts on media tie in books in general, from a reader’s perspective? They seem to be more popular than ever in stores, but would you say some of the reluctance or distrust many readers seem to have for tie in work is still an obstacle in the marketplace?

I think that science fiction and fantasy readers (the only genre I really feel qualified to comment on) have a love/hate relationship with media tie-in books. Many of us start out there–I know I read plenty of Star Wars and Dragonlance and Indiana Jones books as a kid. Tie-ins are a natural entry point into the genre, because those books deal with something you already know you like–movies, games, etc. Yet as we read further into the genre, I think many of us begin to associate those books solely with our humble beginnings. We fancy ourselves more sophisticated, and begin to define ourselves by our less mainstream tastes. Books with logos on the cover start to seem too lowbrow, or like blatantly commercial cash grabs rather than true art.

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Black Gate Interviews James L. Sutter, Part Two

Black Gate Interviews James L. Sutter, Part Two

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city-of-strangers-sutterLast week we were just getting started in our conversation with writer James L. Sutter; this week we talk more about James’ role at Paizo, the balance between editing and writing, and his early history as a writer and gamer.

Tell us a bit about your role at Paizo — not only are you shepherding the fiction line, but, as you mentioned, you’re the guy that makes sure the world stays consistent.

I’ve been at Paizo for about 7 years now, so I’ve worn a lot of different hats. At the moment, I’m the Fiction Editor, which means I’m the guy in charge of finding authors, commissioning stories and novels, developing them, solving any continuity issues, and doing much of the editing (though I’m backstopped by several other excellent editors). In addition to that, however, I still do a ton of development for the game products, usually as they relate to the world and continuity–I had the good fortune to already be on the creative team when we started Pathfinder, so while the company’s grown since then, there are a few of us who have followed and shaped the world’s expansion since the beginning.

Last but not least, I also get to do a fair bit of straight-up design work for Paizo: not just editing and developing freelancer content, but writing books and articles as a freelancer myself, which gives me a wonderful chance to create sections of our world out of whole cloth. Probably my favorite books that I’ve worked on are the two that I’ve done solo, a book called City of Strangers, which was essentially a travel guide to an anarchic, Mos Eisley cantina-style city that I invented, and Distant Worlds, which comes out in February and details the other planets in our world’s solar system. (The latter was a nice chance for me to kick back and indulge my blatant love of science fiction within the bounds of our fantasy setting.)

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