I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Jesse Abraham Lucas of PulpRev.com. He asked me about the Pulp Revolution, writing in general, and certain projects of my own.
The following is an excerpt.
Is there anything you can tell us about your WIP with Castalia House? Anything we should expect? Any way we can prepare ourselves?
Castalia House has engaged me to write the first three books in a planned ongoing series of space opera novels. The series is called Faraway Wars. It is part of Vox Day’s Creative Deconvergence project. His aim is to offer fun, high quality alternatives to SJW converged science fiction franchises.
As you’ve no doubt guessed by now, Faraway Wars is intended as a non-converged parallel to Star Wars. The last two feature films and the Aftermath series of tie-in novels have made it clear that Disney has co-opted George Lucas’ beloved franchise as a vehicle for social justice virtue signaling. Vox’s stated intent is to correct these abuses without stepping on anyone’s toes in terms of trademarks and copyright.
To that end, one of the editors at Castalia House devised a new space opera setting that will nonetheless be familiar to science fiction fans. Faraway Wars shouldn’t be thought of as an attempt to copy Star Wars. Rather, it draws inspiration from many of the same pulp and Campbell-era tropes that influenced George Lucas to create his iconic series.
Embers of Empire, the first Faraway Wars book, was pitched to me as, “What if Luke Skywalker had turned to the Dark Side at the end of Return of the Jedi?” Mind you, that hypothetical is meant as a springboard to jumpstart the creative process, like the “what if?” questions that serve as the impetus for all works of speculative fiction. The characters and situations in EoE aren’t mere carbon copies. I worked hard to put my unique mark on the book while making the FW universe a place where SF fans feel comfortable.
Still, Soul Cycle readers will know that you can’t rest easy for long in one of my stories.
And if you can’t wait for the deconvergence of space opera, my new novella The Hymn of the Pearl breaks high fantasy out of the psuedo-Medieval elf rut the genre has been languishing in by featuring an inventive, Sandersonian magic system in a world inspired by Late Antiquity.
