FanLit Asks: July 3, 2012

Some of your favorite authors take some time to answer our questions:

Got any news to share with us?

J.A. Pitts: Forged in Fire was just released from Tor. I’m currently on my book tour in San Diego and San Francisco. I have more events planned in the next month which can be found on my website under appearances.

James Barclay: I’m on the jury for this year’s British Fantasy Awards which is an honour and a privilege — there is so much quality on the shortlists this year and I’m really buzzed about reading it all though picking the winners is going to be a tough job. I’ll be at FantasyCon 2012 in Brighton for the whole weekend — that’s Friday 28th September to Sunday 30th September.

What are you working on these days?

Laura Bickle / Alayna Williams: I’m working on the sequel to The Hallowed Ones. The sequel is due for publication in spring 2013. I’m enjoying working on a story that takes place in a rural setting — farm country, actually — and I’m finding myself obsessed with ravens. They’re such intelligent creatures, and so tied to magic in folklore. In my story, they are able to sense the approach of evil before humans can, and my characters first realize that something is seriously amiss in their world when the sky fills with ravens fleeing golden fields… and that’s just the beginning of the creepiness. My heroine has a deep rapport with nature. She lives in an Amish community, and the natural world is part of her everyday life. In an early draft, I considered giving her a pet raven that speaks — ravens have very sepulchral voices, and once you’ve heard it, it’s not a sound easily forgotten.

Read any good books lately?

Steven R. Boyett: A very long series of delayed flights was recently made much more pleasurable by the presence of several Cory Doctorow e-books. His Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town instantly became one of my favorite books — it has the techno-rebellion you expect from Cory, but it also has an astonishingly unfettered imagination reminiscent of the best Jonathan Carroll. Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus was a recent nonfiction book that I think would benefit people interested in the social and productive impact of collaborative digital technology. I admire Shirky greatly. I think a lot about these subjects, but Shirky codifies and articulates them remarkably well.

Tim Pratt: I quite enjoyed Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas — it’s not really science fiction or fantasy, but it’s about SF and fantasy, to a certain extent, and even more about the nature of stories.

Jennifer Armintrout: I really enjoyed Soul Song by Marjorie M. Liu. She’s one of those writers who consistently makes unexpected choices that work out incredibly well. I was also recently introduced to the manga Bizenghast, by M. Alice LeGrow, which is a lot of fun. Very reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, Labyrinth, etc., a somewhat ignored young girl having to navigate a frightening hidden world.

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KAT HOOPER is a professor at the University of North Florida where she teaches neuroscience, psychology, and research methods courses. She occasionally gets paid to review scientific textbooks, but reviewing speculative fiction is much more fun. Kat lives with her husband and their children in Jacksonville Florida.

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