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McMullen'ing it Over
One of the brightest new voices in science fiction writing to hit
the genre for a long, long time. And struth cobber, he's Australian.
Author Sean McMullen is most definitely interviewed by fellow SFF
writer Stephen Hunt.
I am a full-time, senior computer engineer working for a large scientific organisation. I do about 250,000 published words per year, all in my spare time. When and why did you begin writing? When did you first consider yourself a writer? I was writing SF stories back in high school at the age of fourteen, for English Literature assignments. As I recall, there were three assignments where I submitted SF stories, and I got an A for all three. One of them was The War of the Worlds from the Martians' perspective. Interestingly, Terry Pratchett had his first story published at the same age.
How has becoming a published author impacted your lifestyle? Pretty heavily in some ways. My wife is a very senior library manager with an interest in SF and fantasy, and my daughter is a high-IQ kid with 7 SF stories published professionally (in the US, UK and Australia) since the age of 10, so a lot of what we do for recreation involves SF in particular or literature in general. We see a lot of authors, fans, publishers and editors socially, and a lot of the scientists, engineers and librarians who we socialise with are also fans of my work, so being an author tends to permeate everything I do. Even the guy I do weights with is an author/editor. How do you see the future of science fiction literature in the 21st century? I think we are already seeing what the future will bring, in terms of a split between leading edge and mass-market SF. Mass-market SF will be huge for a long time, and leading-edge SF, which will remain hard to sell to a general audience. With the prospect of increased conflict and terrorism being within reach of pretty well everywhere in the world, there may also be an increase in feel-good/optimistic/utopian SF, because people can take the 'things are terrible but are going to get worse forever' theme for only a limited amount of time. Do you tend to read the work of many other SF/F authors? When I get a chance, yes. I think it is particularly important to keep track of what people are doing, no matter how busy you are. I tend to check anything that authors like Gaimen, Pratchett or Sterling have written, and when there is a lot of fuss being made about someone less established, like Mieville, I buy the book and check it through. Some authors send me works in semi-final draft stage, and invite advice and comments (I got to see Neil Gaimen's Coraline that way, although I think my only comment was "Wish I had written it."). Some publishers also send me final drafts to get a one-liner for the cover blurb. All this tends to keep me up with what is new and pretty hot. That said, my PhD reading is fairly heavily grounded in 12th Century, west European fantasy, so I have been reading (or re-reading) Chretian de Troye's Arthurian Romances, The Lays of Marie de France, Andreas Capellanus's The Art of Courtly Love, all that sort of thing. The European medieval outlook really is quite a alien, and some
of the material is quite difficult (and even upsetting) to read,
but it certainly grinds a pretty sharp edge onto one's own fiction. A show will have to be pretty bad before I would hate it, but it would have to be stunningly good for me to watch it a second time. The series BLACK ADDER, SHARPE, HORNBLOWER, and the new SCARLET PIMPERNELL impressed me immensely, but they are not SF/F. NEVERWHERE, BABYLON 5, the early to middle X-FILES seasons, parts of FARSCAPE, early RED DWARF, and the Australian series SPELLBINDER are pretty close to the top of my list of favourite SF/F shows. I watch sample episodes from just about everything, but with most shows I find myself predicting what is going to happen, and that annoys me. I want to be surprised by something clever and interesting. With movies, we watch them in the theatres as family outings. I like shows with some sense of humour (even if they are not comedies), and a sense of romance (yeah, us techos are as romantic as anyone else), but I get annoyed if the martial arts and action scenes are done badly (I am a senior karate instructor, after all). DOCTOR STRANGELOVE, ALIEN, FORBIDDEN PLANET, BLADE RUNNER, DARK CITY, THE MATRIX, THE TERMINATOR, SHREK, and ALADDIN rank pretty high as a sample of favourites, but once again, I like to look outside the genre every so often, in order to get a fresh approach to genre material. For example, MISS CONGENIALITY had some great fighting scenes, THE BOURNE IDENTITY was a fantastic thriller, NOTTING HILL was an excellent romance, THE NAME OF THE ROSE was stunning crime fiction, SEVEN SAMURAI was chivalry at its very best, and the last remake of EN GARDE had real flair in the sword fights. I did enjoy the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies, but they are not quite favourites: not enough romance and humour, perhaps, or maybe the problem is that I know the stories already. Do you use an agent, and if so, who? Yes. Chris Lotts of the Vincinanza Literary Agency in NY. I had just dropped my previous agent, then placed THE CENTURION'S EMPIRE with Tor by myself. Chris had just read one of my Australian small press books. He wrote to me asking of I needed an agent, I wrote back saying yes, and btw I just sold a book to a NY publisher, so would he mind walking down the road and handling the deal for me? Chris and I get along very well, we meet every year at the Worldcons. He's a dynamic and sociable guy, and he has a very sharp professional focus. How long did you spend in rejection letter hell before you were first published? You never truly escape from rejection letter hell. I started sending stories out seriously after winning the Worldcon writing competition in 1985, and I got about one sale for every five submissions for the first ten years. The sales I did make were to F&SF, Omega, Analog and Interzone, however, so I suppose it was a bit like having an apartment in rejection hell, and a holiday house in acceptance heaven. Did you always want to be a writer? Sort of. As a kid I read SF and wrote SF stories for school assignments, but writing was only one of a number of interests. I also built my own rockets, telescopes and radio telescopes. The rockets tended to do anti-social things like explode or hit neighbours' roofs, and then there was the night that a power transistor shorted out in my radio telescope's amplifier and nearly set my bedroom on fire. Then my sister gave me a guitar for my fifteenth birthday, and I discovered that girls took an interest in you if you were up on stage playing in a band - even of you could only play two chords (There were rumours that my parents and neighbours gave my sister a medal...) After several years in rock bands, folk groups, madrigal consorts, and even the State Opera (where I earned my first SF money singing in an SF opera), I returned to writing SF when rehearsals and performances started to seriously interfere with my post-grad studies. One evening my girlfriend of the time gave me an anthology of Australian SF. I read it and decided that even I could do better, so I started writing for an amateur university fiction magazine. I won the occasional readers poll and amateur writing competitions, then I won the Worldcon competition. After that I started sending stories out to professional magazines, and by then I was long gone from the music scene.
Where, when, and how do you write? I have a laptop, so I can work anywhere, but most of my work is done in my study, while my wife and daughter watch videos on my television. One of those ironies of life, I suppose. We have a very big house, but everyone ends up in my study, which is one of the smallest rooms. Most of my writing is done on weekends and evenings, and I average about 2 hours per evening and maybe 5 hours per weekend day on fiction. Most of my plotting is done while commuting to work on my motorcycle. What are you reading now? For recreation I am reading Pratchett's Night Watch (which is rather fun), and for my PhD I am reading a book of verse by female troubadors of the 12th Century (which is rather sweet), along with a thick book of literary theory (which is rather boring). Did you come up through the writing short-stories route, or did you get published in novel-form first? I did start with short stories in the mid-80s, but I had a novel completed and submitted by 1986. That was an early version of Voices in the Light (the first half of Souls in the Great Machine).. I tried sending it out to US publishers without an agent, and got nowhere. One bit of feedback was "get rid of the psychopathic librarians, the Calculor, and that horrible, immoral Glasken and you might have the basis of a promising book". Meantime I kept writing short fiction, and slowly building up a reputation and winning awards. I also broke several short stories out of Voices and had them published separately, just to convince publishers that the book was a winner. Aphelion published my collection Call to the Edge in 1992, then asked if I had anything else. I showed them Voices in the Light, they bought it, and it came out in 1994. The publishing world suddenly discovered that "the psychopathic librarians, the Calculor, and that horrible, immoral Glasken" were fantastic selling points, and my career finally got off the ground. Did the fact you were first published by published in Australia by Aphelion Press make it easier to get your foot in the door with the US's Tor? Yes and no. I submitted The Centurion's Empire to Tor, and they bought it, but Chris Lotts had just read Voices in the Light and he liked it so much that he made an offer to become my agent in NY. Chris then played a major role in selling Souls in the Great Machine to Tor, so to answer the question, yes the Aphelion books helped make it easier to get established in the US market by getting me an agent, but my first American sale was nothing to do with my previous books. How would you quickly summarise the Greatwinter Trilogy for someone who hasn't read any of the novels yet? I get this question quite a lot, and it is pretty much like asking Tolkein to do the same sort of job on Lord of the Rings. Getting 570,000 words into about 600 forces one to leave out the duels, love affairs, infidelities, battles, strange and eccentric characters, beautiful American cities, turbulent Australian cities, weird computer technology, hacking and debugging, and even exotic cuisine. Nevertheless, here we go: Souls in the Great Machine: The original cover blurb said "Would you fight a duel for the honour of your computer?" and that captures the spirit of the book pretty well. In Fortieth Century Australia, society and technology are at a sort of Eighteenth Century level, with no heavy industry. A caste of librarians rules the place, and one of them, Zarvora, realises that ancient AI technology on the moon and in Earth orbit has been slowly building a vast orbital sunshield-band. This was to counter the greenhouse effect, which is no longer a threat, so it might trigger a new ice age. Zarvora needs computing power to work out ways to counter what is being called the Mirrorsun band, so she assembles a couple of thousand numerate prisoners in the hall of Libris, a huge library, and turns them into a computer using a couple of thousand abacus frames - the Calculor. Her attempts to fight Mirrorsun head-on are only partially successful, but by the end of the book Zarvora realises that Mirrorsun is controlled by an artificial intelligence, which is rather friendly when one talks to it the right way. I have left a vast number of sub-plots out, of course, but an important one is that electricity can be used again by the end of the book, and electric calculors replace the human ones. The Miocene Arrow: A couple of decades after Souls ends, an artificial sub-species of humanity, the aviads, makes a covert attack on a small group of American kingdoms in the Rocky Mountains. A species of intelligent whales has rendered large areas of Australia and America uninhabitable with a psychic weapon, the Call. The oceans are totally off-limits to humans as well. The aviads are immune to the Call, and are thus persecuted by normal humans. The Americans have a strictly monarchical society, and only the upper classes are allowed to fight in wars. They do this in tiny diesel-powered ultralight aircraft with handmade machine guns. Using ancient ozone-generation flyers, some avid radicals sent a small group of infiltrators to America and touch off an old-fashioned total war between two American kingdoms, hoping to steal gunwings, reaction guns and artisans in the confusion. They hope to use the technology to conquer the humans back in Australia. Glasken and some other Australians arrive on the scene, and foil the radical aviads. Both Zarvora and Glasken are killed, but via ancient technology their consciousnesses are uploaded into the memory banks of the Mirrorsun band. The Australians are known to still have both, so a Project Apollo - style plan is drawn up. A fleet of huge powered sailplanes is constructed, and the young and dynamic Princess Samondel is put in charge. When she reaches Australia in the first of her long-range sailplanes, she is immediately shot down by the local authorities. She goes into hiding as a university student, and meets the ex-monk Martyne, who is a martial arts expert and an agent of the authorities. Martyne has a friend named Velesti, who was once left brain-dead by a brutal gang rape, but who was revived using Mirrorsun technology. Unfortunately that revival involved downloading John Glasken's consciousness into Velesti. Putting the incorrigibly heterosexual Glasken's mind into a frail young girl's body quickly turns him into a dangerous and unstable psychopath, frantically exercising to put on muscle, hunting down and killing Velesti's attackers, and beating to a pulp any guy who tries to cruise him/her. In spite of terrorism and religious fanaticism, and even a forced duel between the lovers Martyne and Samondel, a trade pact is eventually negotiated between Australia and America. If your Greatwinter series was going to be made into a film, who would be your dream producers/actors for the role? This one is difficult too. I've been an instructor in the university karate club for two decades, so a lot of my main characters are modelled on my students, who are either in their late teens or early twenties. This produces characters who are very young, very intelligent, incredibly fit, and great fighters. Big-name actors with the skills to do all that tend to be a little older. Here is a sample of my thoughts, however: SOULS IN THE GREAT MACHINE John Glasken - Hugh Grant, provided he can be taught to shoot flintlocks
and fight properly. Highliber Zarvora Cybeline - Claudia Christian. She handles action
and leadership roles pretty well, which is what the Zarvora role
demands. Commander Lemorel Milderellen: - Sandra Bullock: I liked the way
she fought in Miss Congeniality, and she is a fairly versatile actor. Ilyire - Rowan Atkinson. Ilyire needs someone who can be seriously
peculiar. Theresla - Cate Blanchette, although she might have to take lessons in being seriously peculiar from Rowan Atkinson. To turn the thing into a movie, you would need someone who can squeeze an enormous and sweeping concept into three hours, so James Cameron, Ridley Scott or Peter Jackson would be my choice (depending on their commitments, of course). We thought Souls in the Great Machine and your other excellent Greatwinter novels might have benefited from the traditional map at the front - was it a conscious decision not to include one? The Aphelion editions had several very detailed maps. I pushed for maps in the Tor edition, but Tor decided not to use them. Tor actually asked for a map for Voyage of the Shadowmoon, then did not use the map that I sent. In general, I think maps are a pretty good idea. Of course I have the master reference maps in my files for when I am writing the books. Do you ever attend SF-cons, and what has your experience with them been? Yes, I attend the Worldcon every year, and generally do a few program items - I did nine in the 2002 San Jose Worldcon, including one panel with action demonstrations on defence against knife attacks, disarming attackers, real swordwork (as opposed to choreography), and so on. I even sang some English folk songs with Terry Pratchett, which attracted quite a crowd outside the dealers room - because nobody knew he could sing. It turned out that he went to the same sorts of folk clubs as me before he got into writing seriously. I shall be GoH at the Australian natcon in 2004, with Greg Benford. Generally when I go to a con as part of the program I offer to do a lecture on some special topic, like real chivalry, writing action scenes, or real medieval technology and science (standing room only last time I gave that talk - I bombarded the audience with polo mints from a scale model siege engine). Currently I'm doing a talk on medieval fantasy in folk music. I'll be in trouble if anyone invites me to do that one in America, because I'll have to bring my rather fragile lute over for some of the songs. Would you ever consider writing in a different genre, or are you content with SF/F? Yes and no. I have a project involving fantasy elements in an historical novel, and my agent thinks it could do very well on the mainstream mass market. I can't say much more without giving away the premise, however, and that would make my agent a bit cross. What are your hobbies? At the risk of annoying a lot of full-time professional authors who earn a lot less than me from writing ... writing SF and fantasy is my main hobby. I am also the deputy sensai at the Melbourne University Karate Club (I specialise in teaching women's self defence), and I do foil and sabre at the University Fencing Club. I used to be in various medieval re-enactment groups (eg, New Varengian Guard, SCA) and I have won four tournaments in mixed weapons, and sword and shield. I nearly forgot music. I have an 1865 George Case concertina, a 1950 Hofner guitar-lute, and a 13 string lute that I built myself. I just play and sing folk music and ballads to relax these days, but I am getting more and more requests to perform at SF/F cons. My daughter plays guitar and piano, and sings. Your man Glasken's adventures, the hero of Greatwinter, put us in mind of Flashman - the way he stumbles around following his dick from one crisis to another. Was this intentional? I've read all the Flashman books (they are historically brilliant), and while I love MacDonald Fraser's writing, I find Flashman just a bit extreme. I wrote Glasken as someone who would be a little more plausible. I mean let's face it, quite a few of my undergraduate university friends stumbled around following their dicks from one crisis to another, and I spent a lot of my time trying to keep them out of trouble. I did not keep notes, but I have a pretty good memory, so out of all that came Glasken. Martyne (from Eyes of the Calculor) probably comes closest to what I was as a student: not really a rake, but nevertheless quite partial to female company, song and drink. Given your Calculor was a computer with human circuits, we have to ask, are you - like most of us here at the 'Nest - a PC nerd? Depends on the definition of nerd. I got into computers through the Physics Department while at university (I studied physics, maths and history), then went to work for a scientific organisation doing datastream decoding programs, satellite tracking programs, satellite imagery enhancement, network design, protocol interfaces, and so on. I may have been on the borderlands of nerdism some years ago, but now my job is all committees, contracts and design, so I suppose I am now one level below the nerds - management. What advice would you give to budding SF writers? Try to gain fairly wide experience in both life and literature. Sample all books and shows, and when you find areas that you really love, read and view everything of that type that there is available. You have to work out what it is that you enjoy, rather than doing something just because it's hot at the moment. If you enjoy it, you will never give up, and will probably be good enough to do something truly original. It's also important to never grow up, and to always resist the pressure to become mature - all of that is a clever marketing trick, designed to make you think about retiring and dying by the time you are 25. I get paid lots of money to write fantastical stuff that I love, I get to meet interesting and famous people, I appear in TV and radio shows, and I can claim comics, videos, conventions, movies, books and suchlike on tax because they help me earn money. Mature, grown up people are not allowed to do all that. Are you from the 'writing tightly against a full outline school' or the 'make it up as you go along' school? I write quite detailed plot outlines - then never look at them again. True. It drives my agent and editors crazy. If something works better than what was in the original plan, I always use it, but I have an overall structure that generally stays roughly the same as the book evolves. I like it that way, because writing the book becomes a quite exciting series of twists for me as well. Why should you readers have all the fun, discovering where the story is going to go? When it comes to your drafts, how much do you tend to re-write? Pretty heavily. On average a rewrite about four times. Without word processing tech, I'd be sunk, in fact before 1985, when I got my original 8088 PC running Wordstar 2 on Dos 2, I was almost continually retyping entire stories and my productivity was very low. Of the work you've penned, what's your favourite novel to date been? Hard to tell, and it changes with my mood. Currently it's a tie between Voyage of the Shadowmoon (2002) and Souls in the Great Machine (1999). I also have a soft spot for Eyes of the Calculor (2001) because it is intensely romantic. The Miocene Arrow (2000) was the most interesting novel to write, because I always wanted to give Americans a monarchy and a beautiful, ancient yet clearly American civilization. I even took flying lessons in a biplane to get the air combat scenes right for that book. Of all your books, what's been your best selling work? Er ... not sure, I don't read sales reports as closely as I probably ought to ... (ten minutes of searching) and now I can't even find them! Well, I get very nice royalty cheques, so the books are obviously selling. From the royalties, it is probably Souls, although apparently Voyage has been doing pretty well in the couple of months since it was released. Tor is releasing all the Greatwinter books in mass market paperback (I'm proofing the reformatted The Miocene Arrow right now) so they must be doing pretty well as a trilogy. Maybe if I did not have my day job I would worry more about the sales figures. What's the state of the Australian SFF scene at the moment - both professional and fan? Very healthy, especially in fantasy. In 1990 the local commercial publishing companies discovered that local genre authors were a good business proposition, and in the dozen years since then the size of the market has gone up by over an order of magnitude. SF is definitely carried by fantasy, on the other hand, but a lot more SF is selling than ever before. The profile of Australian authors is now a lot higher overseas, and it's rare for a year to go by without an Australian winning something somewhere else. My novelette Tower of Wings got the Analog Readers' Award last year, for example. The top Australian authors earn quite a good living from writing alone. So why do I keep my day job? Not sure. Last year Terry Pratchett told me that I might be making a big mistake if I didn't go full-time as a writer in the near future, so maybe I need to do some serious strategic thinking soon. The Australian fan scene has always been very strong - like all the way back to the 1930s, or so I am told. Australian fans were getting Hugo nominations decades before us writers of fiction, and all through the 60s, 70s, and 80s Australian fans, reviewers and critics were pretty well the only bit of Australian SF that was visible to the world outside. The fan movement never really went into decline with the rise in popularity of the local authors, it's just that they have to share the spotlight with us authors now. What kinds of manuscript changes have been made to your published works? Virtually none. I am actually very flexible about taking advice from editors, but editors seldom give me advice. Advice tends to be at the level of 'this paragraph is awkward' sort of thing, rather than anything major or structural. Apparently I hand in manuscripts that need very little work. I keep saying that I will not be offended by changes, and asking what do people really think, but they keep saying everything looks fine. Of the feedback you have heard people come back on about your novels, what's your favourites? One net reviewer said of Souls in the Great Machine: "Full of psychopathic, amoral librarians who murder each other and fall in love at the slightest provocation. Recommended." To this day I've never been able to work out whether or not the guy liked the book. I also liked the second Locus review of Voyage of the Shadowmoon, in which Russell Letson said of Madame Yvendel's Academy of Applied Sorceric Arts: "Hogwarts, it ain't." This probably referred to the amount of amourous hanky panky that took place there, as Madame Yvendel was fairly liberal about that sort of thing. What amount of research do you do for your books? Does the science part of the fiction come easy to you? The science is easy. I keep up with the literature, I work in science, and some of the lower black belts at the club are quite senior scientists. I also read a lot of history, because it is a wonderful source of truly weird stuff, and of course I try some things out for myself. As I said, I had flying lessons while researching the air combat scenes in The Miocene Arrow, and I put my fencing background into swordwork descriptions. I've fired flintlocks and matchlocks, but I find modern guns boring. You pull the trigger, they fire. No sparks, no lurid flash, not clouds of smoke, no half-minute of frantic fumbling about to reload, no anxiety about whether the thing is going to fire at all - I mean what is interesting about that? Modern guns have no sense of theatre, they are too convenient. As for going on quests ... well last week I got back from the Strezleki Desert, when I did a series of treks in 12th Century costume and chainmail, while carrying a battleaxe, shield, 5 days supply of food, and two days supply of water. It was truly appalling. Seriously horrendous. 105 to 110 degree heat, nausea from near-heatstroke, difficulty getting up again after falling over in the sand because of leg cramps, socks filled with blood, blisters and shredded skin because the sides of my medieval-style boots were not entirely a good fit (the soles were fine, though), and tourists and outback police stopping their cars to see if I needed help - and getting seriously weirded out once they saw what they were offering help to. On the other hand, I can now write with some authority on the subject of medieval pedestrian travel in the wilderness. I have a bit of background with horses, like firing arrows at a canter and falling off in plate armour, so I don't think I need more research there. To give a specific example, while writing Eyes of the Calculor I wondered if someone who knew just enough flying to handle a biplane could also fly a primitive rocket interceptor without getting killed. I knew the basics of handling a biplane, so I used myself as the ... test subject. I spent a week studying the workings of the Me 163, as if I were a trainee pilot, then waited until I was alone in the house and fired up my daughter's copy of Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe on my PC. To truly put myself on the spot, I decided that if I managed to get myself killed on my first training flight, I would kill my character - who was one of the stars of the book, and whose death would have caused catastrophic plotting problems! I throttled up the Me 163 - and the damn thing was doing over 400 mph before I had even cleared the runway! I climbed, for what I thought were target balloons - and they shot at me! I had screwed up, and managed to select an operational mission instead of a training flight. I fired back at what turned out to be B-17s, missed completely, collected several holes in my windshield, shot past them as if they were standing still, then climbed until I was out of fuel. By now I had lost the enemy. I had also lost the airfield, and all familiar landmarks. I descended in a large spiral, but found no airfield. Finally my nerve buckled, and I decided to bail out. I was informed by the simulator that I was too low to bail out. I then selected a road and tried to land on it. The road suddenly turned sharply, and I glided off over a field. By now I was soaked in perspiration and my heart was hammering pretty hard, but I managed to drop the Me 163 to just above stall speed, eased it down onto the green background, and was then informed that I had crash-landed - as opposed to totalling the fighter and killing myself. I then ran through the house yelling "I'm alive! I'm alive!" Eventually I wrote my reaction into Eyes of the Calculor, after the great air battle above Launceston. Oddly enough it gave me quite a close affinity with that character, because I had to fight so hard to keep him alive. That's the sort of research I do. How long does it take you to write a novel? Six to eight months in actual writing time, although the production process stretches out over two years. After ten books, I've become pretty organised. Before starting writing, how detailed a background did you build for your universes? Do you just dive in, or do you need to come up with the English-Austerlic dictionary before you put pen to paper? I look into the physics, astronomy, geography, etc in great detail, draw up realistic maps, keep detailed character glossaries, and so on, but I do it pretty quickly. In Eyes of the Calculor there is an original method of space propulsion, for example, and I had to verify that it was capable of achieving a Hohmann Transfer Orbit. For the Voyage of the Shadowmoon, I calculated the orbital dynamics of the Jovian-style Moonworlds system before I started writing, and I have an accurate calendar that keeps track of where objects are in the sky at any particular time and date in the Moonworlds system. How much of your working day do you devote to SF/F fiction these days? 2 hours of writing and 1 for administration, fan mail, talks, etc. Parties, dinners and movies are not counted. The trick is to work consistently and be pretty focussed about what you do, when you have another job. I have found that the trouble with being hot on the publishing scene is that people treat you as a full-time author, and demand a lot of your time. Tell us about Voyage of the Shadowmoon. Voyage is set on one of the Moonworlds orbiting the gas giant Miral. An ancient superweapon, Silverdeath, is unleashed accidentally, melting a continent in Chapter One. The motley crew of the wind-powered submarine Shadowmoon survives by sinking their craft just before the final firecircle. Laron, the vampire navigator, then guides them to safety on another continent. He has been 14 for seven centuries, has a name for every pimple on his face, sticks a false beard on to make people take him seriously, and would rather like to go on a date. Much of the story is about the characters trying to get Silverdeath back from Emperor Warsovran before he can do more damage with it. There is lots of belly dancing, sorcery, submarine warfare, seduction (remember the quote about Madame Yvendel's Academy?), a variation on the Helen of Troy theme, and even an artificial vampire. I probably don't have to tell you that it is a rather funnier than the Greatwinter series. Have you ever thought of trying your hand in other genres - crime, history, thrillers etc? As I said, I have incorporated a lot of history in my work already, and I plan to use even more in the future. I think I already use a lot of the best elements of crime and thriller novels in my SF and fantasy, and I have no real interest in writing exclusively in those areas. I've also written some technical papers, in fact I won a trip to the Tanegashima rocket launching facility in Japan for a paper on TCP/IP back in 1990. I've done a few articles on the history of SF and fantasy, but I'm not a serious critic or reviewer. < My wife just read that last sentence and laughed hysterically > Okay, I've written sixty critical genre articles, jointly written a book on the history of Australian SF, won five awards for criticism, and am currently doing a PhD on medieval fantasy literature, but I don't consider myself to be a serious critic or reviewer. < My wife, BA(Hons) in English Literature, is still laughing >. I sort of wrote all that critical stuff by accident. Truly. What new delights are you working on at the moment? The final draft of The Glass Dragons is due to be handed in at the end of February. It is the sequel to Voyage of the Shadowmoon, and it has some pretty interesting things in it. There's a guy whose penis turns into a dragon, a vampire with a drinking problem, a prince who controls his nobles by threatening not to invite them to his orgies, and so on. It is due out early in 2004. Beyond that, I owe various editors short fiction, and I have several hard SF and fantasy stories mapped out and partly written. There is another Moonworlds novel, set just after The Glass Dragons, which is partly written already. Before I do that one though, I should finish a fantasy/mainstream crossover novel set in early 13th Century France. That one is pretty close to real history, and thus is seriously weird, very exciting, rather tragic, but quite funny. I have a YA novel about a self-educated young sorceress under submission to a couple of publishers at present, and a local author has a proposal with a publishing company for a jointly written YA fantasy novel with me as the joint writer. Speaking of working, I had better get back to The Glass Dragons. I enjoyed the interview, thanks very much. Heck no Sean. Thank you. Related Links:
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