Posts Tagged: Interview

Interview

The End Has Come: An Interview with Nancy Kress

By Aidan Moher May 13th, 2015
Buy The End Has Come, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey

Buy The End Has Come, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey

In collaboration with editors John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey, A Dribble of Ink is proud to introduce a series of interviews with the authors of The End Has Come, the final volume in the The Apocalypse Triptych. Following on The End is Nigh, and The End Is Here, The End Has Come contains 23 stories about life after the apocalypse.

Interview with Nancy Kress about “Blessings”

(Interview by Jared Cooper)

“Blessings” shows two sides of an alien invasion—an apocalypse for some, a new life for others. What elements of the story did you focus on while writing this third triptych piece?

“Blessings” follows the previous two stories in this series, carrying my “apocalypse” forward another few generations. When I started the first story, I wanted to write about a different apocalypse from the usual, so I chose this: an incident that makes everyone nicer. Less aggressive, biologically incapable of violence. That raised questions: How could such a thing come about? Who would desire it? I knew from before I began that aliens wished to remake us, and that genetic alteration of the entire world was the way they could do it.

This third story was thus free to explore how such an experiment ends. The aliens have succeeded—but only temporarily. Regression to the mean is a real, inescapable biological phenomenon (which is why children of Nobel winners don’t also win Nobels). Human beings have had millions of years in which they were biologically hierarchal and—yes—violent under the right circumstances, which vary from person to person. Violence is, unfortunately, a survival trait. It reappears, despite the Dant. And as with all human change, some gain and some lose. To me, that’s reality, and any good fiction must reflect that reality. Read More »

Interview

The End Has Come: An Interview with Ken Liu

By Aidan Moher May 12th, 2015
Buy The End Has Come, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey

Buy The End Has Come, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey

In collaboration with editors John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey, A Dribble of Ink is proud to introduce a series of interviews with the authors of The End Has Come, the final volume in the The Apocalypse Triptych. Following on The End is Nigh, and The End Is Here, The End Has Come contains 23 stories about life after the apocalypse.

Interview with Ken Liu about “The Gods Have Not Died In Vain”

(Interview by Georgina Kamsika)

I love the format of the story. Did the story come first, then the formatting, or did the format help shape the narrative at all?

I decided from the start that I’d write all three of the stories in the series as a mix of “chat” transcripts and traditional narrative, so the format was determined at the start. The way the story is told is of course part of the *story* itself, and the two are inextricably linked.

I understand that you love researching for your stories. Can you tell us about any research you might have undertaken for this one.

One of the persistent themes in my science fiction is dealing with the social and economic challenges of artificial intelligence. Even without fully self-aware AI, increased automation threatens the employment prospects of many workers, including those in the service industry and “white-collar” office jobs that are traditionally understood as being relatively free from such threats. For this story, I did more reading about the field, especially companies like Narrative Science that are trying to use automation to perform some tasks that are usually thought of as the domain of “knowledge workers.” Read More »

Interview

The End Has Come: An Interview with Tananarive Due

By Aidan Moher May 7th, 2015
Buy The End Has Come, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey

Buy The End Has Come, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey

In collaboration with editors John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey, A Dribble of Ink is proud to introduce a series of interviews with the authors of The End Has Come, the final volume in the The Apocalypse Triptych. Following on The End is Nigh, and The End Is Here, The End Has Come contains 23 stories about life after the apocalypse.

Interview with Tananarive Due about “Carriers”

(Interview by Jude Griffin)

I was very excited to see another story in this world with Nayima—how has the character changed since you first began writing her?

In the first story, Nayima was a young woman forced to come of age against the backdrop of a super plague. That story was really me processing the true end of my own childhood, with the long suffering and death of my mother. But at least Nayima had a sense of moving on to the next phase of her life. In the second story, Nayima was shattered. I believe she was forced to give up her last notions of communal humanity–she herself was toxic, and her dreams of building a village were silly and, in a way, even selfish because of her deep denial that she was a carrier. So the Nayima of “Carriers” is a hardened, solitary woman who had given up hope of a “normal” life. And she has lost her trust in everyone. Read More »

Interview

The End Has Come: An Interview with Jonathan Maberry

By Aidan Moher May 6th, 2015
Buy The End Has Come, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey

Buy The End Has Come, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey

In collaboration with editors John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey, A Dribble of Ink is proud to introduce a series of interviews with the authors of The End Has Come, the final volume in the The Apocalypse Triptych. Following on The End is Nigh, and The End Is Here, The End Has Come contains 23 stories about life after the apocalypse.

Interview with Jonathan Maberry about “Jingo and the Hammerman”

(Interview by Hannah Huber)

What do you think it is about zombies that make them work as the source of an apocalypse?

Zombies are the perfect storytelling metaphor if you want to spin a tale about an extreme crisis, which makes them perfect for apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic storytelling. They represent a massive shared threat: something so big that it impacts every person, every relationship, every aspect of infrastructure, and every element of culture. Nothing escapes that impact. The zombie’s nature, threat, and potential are all easy to grasp, so once they’ve been introduced, they often fade into the background so the story can concentrate on what is most important: human people in the midst of life-changing events. People facing crises is the basis of all drama, and therefore the writer is able to tell any kind of story he or she wants. No other monster is so generous in enabling this, or in sharing the stage.

In a zombie apocalypse the crisis is so overwhelming that there is no time for us to maintain our affectations of who we pretend to be in day-to-day life. None of us are ever really ourselves – we edit ourselves depending on the situation. We are different people in public, at home alone, at work, in love, when heartbroken, and so on. Often we play roles that are vastly different from our natural selves, such as feeling ‘powerful’ because we have money, good looks, or position. In a zombie apocalypse, none of that matters. A captain of industry or a supermodel expect deference as a matter of course, but they might be the first to fall in an apocalyptic scenario. Whereas the bag-boy at the local supermarket might have tremendous but untapped leadership and survival skills. Steel is forged in the heat of a furnace, not while it is ore in the ground. Read More »

Interview

The End Has Come: An Interview with Chris Avellone

By Aidan Moher May 4th, 2015
Buy The End Has Come, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey

Buy The End Has Come, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey

In collaboration with editors John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey, A Dribble of Ink is proud to introduce a series of interviews with the authors of The End Has Come, the final volume in the The Apocalypse Triptych. Following on The End is Nigh, and The End Is Here, The End Has Come contains 23 stories about life after the apocalypse.

Interview with Chris Avellone about “Acts of Creation”

(Interview by Georgina Kamsika)

Tell us a little about “Acts of Creation.”

Aside from an obsessive drive to gamemaster superhero role-playing games (pen and paper superhero games, like Dungeons and Dragons, except… superheroic), Acts of Creation was my first foray into science-fiction prose – the idea of exploring a universe populated by artists with the potential to crack suns and detonate fleets with the ease of painting with watercolors appealed to me. Not only that, but exploring the idea of how you would attempt to contain and disarm such weapons in the wake of the apocalyptic war they won… in a manner of speaking.

I played around with a few other ideas and stories in the universe. Strangely enough, the stories often veered into family and romantic relationships, often with a mentor figure seeking to inspire a disciple with far more potential, sometimes older, sometimes younger, a character set-up I’ve often used in digital role-playing prose as well, from Planescape: Torment, to Knights of the Old Republic II, to New Vegas. I guess I haven’t quite gotten a satisfying answer on it yet, but arguably, each game universe comes with its own interesting twist that makes it fresh again in my eyes.

I always carried the hope of being able to share the story one day. And when John Joseph Adams brought up The End Has Come anthology and asked if I wanted to contribute, it seemed a great fit. And it helps that John and Hugh (Howey) are nice folks – Hugh, in fact, writes some of the nicest critiques I’ve ever seen from an editor, he makes sure you know what you’re doing well along with what you need to improve on. Read More »