Posts Tagged: John Joseph Adams

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 »

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 »

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 Will McIntosh about “Dancing with a Stranger in the Land of Nod”

(Interview by Georgina Kamsika)

What was your inspiration to write this story?

Over the course of the triptych, I’ve been trying to write about an apocalypse that is relatively devoid of violence, and to focus on regular people dealing with everyday interpersonal concerns made far more complex because they’re taking place before/during/after an apocalypse. So my first story explored a man who is struggling to grow up and find his vocation in life at an age when most people have sorted all that out. The second involved a guy whose wife leaves him, and he sets off to pursue his fantasy woman and show his wife how wrong she was to leave him. For this final story, I was interested in looking at two people who have an affair in the aftermath of an apocalypse. Or maybe it’s not an affair. I guess at its core it’s a story about balancing your own happiness with the happiness of your family. Read More »

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 David Wellington about “Agent Neutralized”

(Interview by Jude Griffin)

What was the seed for “Agent Neutralized” How does it relate to your book “Positive”?

The novel takes place twenty years after the end of the world, after the “Crisis.” The three stories I’ve contributed to the Apocalypse Triptych add some context to the novel. They set up a minor plot point in the book, and originally it was all supposed to be a kind of in-joke. As I started writing them, though, I found that the character of Whitman had his own tragic arc, and I just wanted to tell more of his story. I felt like I owed him that. Read More »

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 »