Influences aren’t just things as a writer that you pull from — they can also be things that you push against. And sometimes you do both at once. Saladin Ahmed knows about this; in his widely acclaimed debut Throne of the Crescent Moon (which has garnered starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews) he’s looked at his favorite works both as inspiration and things to rebel against. What are those works, and what are their qualities and flaws, as Ahmed sees them? He’s here to tell you.

SALADIN AHMED:

The Big Idea behind Throne of the Crescent Moon had to do with writing something that was both an homage and a response to the heroic fantasy I grew up reading and watching. I was born in post-race riots Detroit at the beginning of the slow social and economic meltdown of that city. I grew up down the street, in the working-class Arab American enclave of Dearborn, MI. My Dad was a union activist and community organizer who instilled in me pride in my Arab heritage and a strong sense of social justice, but also a deep love for fantasy and science fiction.

Fast forward 30 years, and these things are still a big part of my consciousness. Sometimes, over the years, they’ve bumped up against each other, and Throne of the Crescent Moon is my first attempt to…transcribe the sound of that bumping, if that makes any sense.

But concrete examples are sometimes more useful than such abstraction – voila!

- I love Arya Stark and Tyrion Lannister from A Song of Ice and Fire. But I don’t like that royalty and nobles – or royals and nobles in disguise – are almost always the main POV heroes in fantasy. So my characters are mostly lowborn.

- I love the Aiel from The Wheel of Time (and that Rand is one by blood!). But I don’t like that Fantasyland’s pseudo-Arabs are usually depicted in a marginalizing manner. So I put the pseudo-Middle East at the center of my series.

- I love Sturm Brightblade from Dragonlance . But I don’t like that fantasy novels have tended to depict holy warriors/paladins as noble and inspiring when wearing pseudo-European garb but scary when wearing pseudo-Muslim garb.

- I love Star Wars (indulge me, please, by calling it fantasy), but I don’t like the way youth and self-discovery are so often the focus on fantasy plots. So I wrote a 60-something main character who damn well knows who he is – and just wants the world to leave him the hell alone.

- I love Aragorn… But I don’t like the way heroic fantasy celebrates hereditary power so uncritically. So I slapped my heroes in the middle of a plot to usurp a dynasty.

And so on. Throne of the Crescent Moon is, in a sense, a tightrope walk. Might be I’ve fallen a few times, but I hope I’ve taken some entertaining – maybe even thrilling – steps along the way.

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Throne of the Crescent Moon: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Well, I hope you folks have had your coffee this morning, because author Rod Rees is about to get deep on you all, on the subject of the nature of reality. He’s doing so in the context of The Demi-Monde: Winter, the first in a series of books in which the real world mixes and merges with another world entirely… and neither world appears particularly safe, or sane. So, you ready? Good. Here you go.

ROD REES:

The examination of the duality of life is the bedrock of all fiction: the battle of the sexes, the war between good and evil, the struggle between the weak and the strong and so on and so on. We take the yin and yang of life for granted … but what if ying and yang merged … what if we had to cope with a world of a uniform yin, where there was no conflict, no competition and no privacy? It’s a situation that may be closer to reality than we think, because there’s a new kid on the block intent on overturning this long-cherished dichotomy of life, and that kid’s the Internet.

Thanks to the Internet, factual reality (if that isn’t tautology I don’t know what is) and fictional reality (a wonderful contradiction in terms) are merging. BI (Before Internet) the imaginary was distinct and readily distinguishable from the real. AI (After Internet) this separation has begun to blur. For instance some individuals operating on the web take the names and personae of celebrities (living and dead), so that it is almost impossible for the veracity of a real celebrity’s cyber doodlings to be accepted or even established. And as even the most spaced-out wacko has the same ability to spout his or her nonsense on the web as do “normal” people, everything on the internet has to be taken with several grains of salt, because everything has a veneer of cyber-credulity. Consider Wiki, the most used reference resource in the world. Wiki has become so adulterated by mischievous editing that every time you use it you have to question whether what you are reading has been infected by twaddle.

The result is that as time has passed – as the Internet has becoming increasingly all-pervasive – fantasy has begun to merge with reality. On the Internet reality and surreality, fact and fiction, rumour and truth have to co-exist, but they can’t do this without contaminating each other. The result is sort of nu-reality – a faux-reality – which is simultaneously truth and lies. There was a nice phrase in a recent article in the Sunday Times by Camille Paglia about Lady Gaga (“What’s Sex Got to do with It?”) which said “In the sprawling anarchy of the web, the borderline between fact and fiction has melted away.”

Now, the idea of reality and make-believe becoming malleable and interchangeable isn’t new (Orwell explored this to great effect in “1984”), but what is different today is that it is so easy to do. The real world and the cyber-world are becoming increasingly intertwined, creating a Gordian Knot of competing realities, which are often impossible to disentangle. And that is what intrigued me as a writer.

Of course before I started merging realities I had to set them up. The dualities running through the Demi-Monde books are easy to identify. For a start there’s the Real World (our world of 2018 but with a twist and a slice of lemon) juxtaposed with the Demi-Monde (a virtual dystopia inhabited by 30 million Dupes – digital simulacra of living people). Next there’s the religious/political systems rife in the Demi-Monde which are bizarro representations of their Real World counterparts: Fascism/UnFunDaMentalism, Hedonism/ImPuritanism, Feminism/HerEticalism and so on. And then, of course, there’s the apposition of the über-psychopaths from history (Heydrich, Robespierre, Shaka Zulu et al) who rule the Demi-Monde and the more sane members of the resistance.

But setting these up is “World Building 101”: the interesting thing for me as a writer was coming up with a mechanism where they begin to merge and overlap and then exploring the consequences when they do. The plot device to achieve this came by accident. The disease afflicting a lot of writers intent on world building is the horror known as Too-Much-Exposition-itis: info-dumping so much “stuff” on the reader that the pace of the book is destroyed (and the patience of the reader along with it). In a desperate attempt to avoid this contagion I invented PINC – a Personal Implanted nano-Computer – which allows the character so equipped to automatically download information from ABBA – the quantum computer running the Demi-Monde – directly to their brain. At a stroke (sorry!) the character knew things, and I didn’t have to describe at long and boring length how they knew things.

Originally I envisaged PINC as a sort of super-Radio Frequency Identification Device, but as I was writing the story the implications of PINC became ever more interesting. So as the books progress PINC grows both in importance and in capability, and I find myself increasingly fascinated by what the implications would be if humanity was equipped with a PINC.

A PINC’d world would be one where all of humanity has instant access to the sum total of human knowledge (ABBA’s a very powerful computer!) which would, in turn, make de Chardin’s noösphere – the merging of minds – a reality. So what, I asked myself, would be the ramifications of the world adopting a political and social system based on PINC – which one of my characters calls InfoCialism – within which all the citizens of a State enjoy collective ownership of all information gathered and held by that State. As I see it the principal one would be that the traditional concept of privacy would be rendered obsolete. Everyone would know everything about everybody.

Duality would be replaced by unanimity. Individuality would be conflated into the universal consciousness.

As one of my characters in the final book of the series The Demi-Monde: Fall says:

“To face down the daemons that lurk amongst us we must allow others to see our Real Self and to do this we must embrace individuation, the process by which the individual is integrated with the consciousness of the whole. Humanity has reached its Omega Point when it must slough off the habits and the inclinations of yesteryear. From henceforth homo sapiens – knowing man – must become homo sophia – wise man – and our relationships based on understanding and not on secrecy … on openness and not privacy … on mutual support and not violence.”

That, ultimately, is the idea I set out to explore in the Demi-Monde.

—-

The Demi-Monde: Winter: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Watch him read from the book. Visit the author’s blog.

Magic can do many things. It can raise fire. It can rain down dragons. It can make things move with the power of one man’s mind. But how does it stand up to bureaucracy? What if that bureaucracy is of a military bent? These are some of the things author Myke Cole has thought about. Some of the result of thinking is in his debut novel Shadow Ops: Control Point, which mixes magic with the modern military to produce unexpected results. Here’s Cole now to talk more about melding the world of spells with the reality of military regulations.

MYKE COLE:

You read a lot about war. You see it on film and TV constantly. I got cast as a “fighting extra” in the new Batman flick because of my military background. Once we wrapped up shooting, one of the casting agents told me, “We’ll most likely be calling you again. Military types are the most frequently used extras in the business.”

Military schlock is all over the media. You see the explosions, hear the agonized shouts. You hear heart pumping catch phrases:

“You do it for the guy standing next to you.”

“I’m a part of something bigger than myself.”

“Watch your six!”

And so forth.

You know what you don’t hear so much?

“Get in the manual.”

“I know it’s noon, sir. You still have to wear your reflective belt.”

“I don’t write the regs, son. The semi-colon is in the wrong place. You have to fill out the form again.”

Here’s the thing about the military (and not just the US military, but pretty much all militaries). It’s gigantic. You are trying to get hundreds of thousands of people, with all their quirks and neuroses and agendas to move in a united direction, with the price of failure usually pretty damned high. I have trouble getting five friends to agree on where to meet for drinks. So, I understand the contortions an organization that size must engage in to accomplish its goal.

Here’s what the military does to get all those fish swimming up the same stream: It writes rules, and then it sticks to them. Like all ginormous bureaucracies, it’s conservative, rigid and really slow to change. And like all major corporations (and it most certainly is one), it talks a lot about family and putting people first. And it means to, it really does. But you can’t accomplish a mission that big that way. People are complicated and troublesome. They zig when they should be zagging. So, instead, the military puts process first. When the soldier comes up against the regs, guess who wins?

And that’s the big idea behind Control Point.

I began what turned into a lifelong career in and around the military in the American military’s nerve center, the Pentagon. That labyrinth of paper, databases and regulation is so massive that the telecom workers get from point A to B by bicycle. And when you’re a nerd walking those halls (and we’re talking a nerd’s nerd here. Raised on Dungeons and Dragons, graduating to comic books and eventually the kind of compulsive reading that sees you spend your entire weekly allowance on mass market paperbacks off the Borders wire rack) what do you wonder?

Well, the first thing you wonder is where they’re hiding the aliens. Or which office door leads to the underground chamber where they’re training Storm Shadow from G.I. Joe. But after you’ve worked that stuff out, you start asking the cool what-if questions that are the genesis of all genre writing.

What if all the elves, rangers, wizards and goblins I loved from D&D were wandering these halls? You know that Ministry of Magic from Harry Potter? What would the COCOM (Combatant Command) equivalent be? How would the Senate appropriate funding for it? Would there be a special sub-committee? Okay, fine. Only a nerd living in DC would ask those last two questions, but you get the idea.

And, of course, I already know the answers. The military in spite of all its limitations, does some amazing things. You like satellite communications? The Internet? Space travel? Air travel? Military had a hand in all of that. Not to mention being one of the strongest forces for social mobility in America. I’ve been activated twice in the last three years. The first time was to clean up an oil spill. The second time I got to help respond to Hurricane Irene. The military is an incredible force for good.

But rigid. Process oriented. Risk and change averse. More importantly, it’s the arbiter of violent power, reserving that ability for the state. If something is to be hurt or killed, it’s the state’s job to make that happen through its military. That power isn’t supposed to accrue to individuals. When it does, you have an insurgency.

Go ahead, put magic in that mix. Give the power to fly, or call lightning, or raise the dead to your average Joe. How do you think the military would cotton to it? Add in the vested financial interests of all the “beltway bandits,” Eisenhower’s famed “Military-Industrial Complex,” the Haliburtons, the Northrop Grummans, the McDonnell Douglases. There are billions of dollars invested in the current system, and those who make the laws respond to that.

So, yeah. The military does amazing things, but it serves its mission first. What do you think happens when an individual, someone without power or money or influence, suddenly manifests an ability that threatens the state-based military’s monopoly on violence?

Well, they’ve got a reg for that.

Process over people. Just add magic and see what happens.

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Shadow Ops: Control Point: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit Cole’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

In the course of human events, the actual individual humans can matter. At the very least Michele Lang seems to think so; in today’s Big Idea about her latest novel Dark Victory, Lang looks at how individual people have made a difference to others in the tale of their own lives, and how that point relates to her historical fantasy novel, complete with vampires, werewolves, and, of course, Nazis.

MICHELE LANG:

The first time I stopped by, I wrote about the Big Idea for the Lady Lazarus trilogy — here it is if you’d like to read more. Now the second book, Dark Victory, is out, and I want to write about the Little Idea in these books, the logline that propels me each day as I write about the Jewish witch Magda Lazarus, her little sister Gisele, and their best friend Eva Farkas.

The lodestone of these books is “Little Women in Hell.”

If you haven’t read Little Women that probably won’t mean much to you, but there’s a world of possibility in there for me. Little Women was one of the books I imprinted on when I was about twelve years old, and it tells the story of four sisters and their adventures growing up in New England during the Civil War. Homey, heartwarming, a little corny, and there are no Nazi werewolves or fallen angels to be found. But, still, it’s a terrific book.

When I hunker down to write my books each day, I try not to think too much about the Big Ideas behind them, because they are rather too big. World War II itself is gigantic, and overwhelming.

Instead I narrow my focus to these characters, who love each other so much they do the impossible to help each other survive. And I marvel at how regular people get through epic catastrophes like World War II one day at a time. Despite the magical creatures roaming through these books, the story is really about these three girls.

The Lady Lazarus books have been called historical urban fantasy, and marketing-wise I think that makes a lot of sense. Vampires, check. Werewolves, check.  Gritty, noir setting, check. Explodey stuff, magical battles, extremely evil bad guys, hells yeah.

But structurally these books are different from urban fantasies by Jim Butcher, Kat Richardson, and Patricia Briggs. The stories of Harry Dresden, Harper Blaine, and Mercy Thompson all rock my socks, and I love them madly.

But my stories arise out of a different place. The Lady Lazarus books are magical memoirs. They are told by a girl who has spellcasting abilities, but who is not aligned with great powers and principalities, at least not at the beginning. These books owe a lot more, structurally and emotionally, to the war memoirs I’ve gobbled up since I was a young, survivor guilt-ridden kid.

What always strikes me when I read wartime memoirs is how small the stories are, the human scale. In these memoirs, sausage matters. The right kind of shoes matters. The weather really, really matters. And more than anything, friends matter. Every single memoir I have read points to love as the key to survival.

And not love of country, nor love of abstract noble ideals either. No, I’m talking about the papa who insists you wear ski boots instead of your pretty shoes when it’s time to go on a forced march. Gerda Klein’s father saved her life that way. There’s a scene in Dark Victory where a member of the resistance talks to Magda and gives her courage through the wall of their prison. That scene is inspired by Jean-Pierre, the doomed leader in Agnes Humbert’s Resistance.

In my own, much more mundane way, I get by with the help of my friends, too. Here’s the merest example. My college days in New York City were sometimes grim, and I remember walking down Broadway with my friend Pat one bitter winter day. I was dazed and raw and wrecked. Let’s just say I’d been mentally and emotionally assaulted, and it hurt.

The light was failing, and Pat was taking me to Tom’s Restaurant to get some food — I hadn’t eaten in a while. The man started following us around 112th street, though it was Pat not me who noted that detail. The first I noticed him was when he grabbed my arm, and said something so disgustingly sordid and foul that I stopped walking in shock.

He closed in, and Pat leaped between us, shouting in the guy’s face. “Get away from her!” she yelled, putting all of her five feet between me and this enormous, stinky guy. “Leave her alone!”

I stood there numb, not really able to do anything more than take a step back. The guy looked between me and Pat, hesitated. I was an easy target, but Pat was a lioness. After another minute the guy gave up and backed away.

Pat saved me that twilight, because I was so low I couldn’t protect myself anymore. She stood by me until I could get back on my feet again.

I’d be nothing without my friends. Actually, I guess that is a pretty Big Idea.

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Dark Victory: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

“The Magic of Fabulous,” a novella set in the Lady Lazarus universe, is available via Kindle for free January 17 and 18 only. Visit the author’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

There’s an observation, made by humorist Robert Benchley, that says that a man may do remarkable things, so long as it’s not the thing he’s supposed to be doing at the time. Daniel O’Malley has put that into practice — from a series of boring meetings has come the idea that animates his novel The Rook. And the idea? Well, let’s just say it’s something like identity theft, only much cooler and with more intriguing implications. O’Malley will explain it to you now.

DANIEL O’MALLEY:

How well could someone fake being you?

Put aside the issues of looking like you, or having your fingerprints, or matching your voice. Those things are taken care of. But how well could they walk into your place of employment, wearing your clothes (and your body), and conduct your business, without anybody suspecting that there was something extremely suspicious going on?

The reason I initially asked myself this question is that, in the course of my education and my career, I’ve had to attend a lot of meetings. And I tend to get bored during meetings. Not every meeting, you understand, but a lot of them. And when I’m bored, I will occasionally pretend that I’ve just been placed into my body, and now must pass for myself. It’s not necessarily the most professional of pastimes, but it keeps me entertained for a little while. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that, in order to take someone’s place as them, to take over their life, you’d really, really need to plan ahead.

Now, personally, I like to plan ahead. I don’t enjoy flying by the seat of my pants. I’m not the kind of person who, on a vacation, will just breeze into a town, and assume that a bed will present itself. This may be the result of my once failing to book accommodation in New York City during a layover, and ending up sleeping in the airport. I was woken up by a security guard who ordered us to move on (‘us’ being me and the homeless gentleman who had apparently curled up next to me while I was asleep), and I spent the rest of the night drowsing fitfully in one of those chairs where you sit when someone is polishing your shoes.

In any case, I like to plan ahead. The idea of planning out everything you’d need to take over someone else’s life seemed like a cool idea to me.

In my novel The Rook, a woman with no memories takes on the identity of her former self, a woman named Myfanwy Thomas. Myfanwy Thomas (the former) knew that she would be losing all her memories. She also liked to plan ahead. She has left behind letters and files and dossiers, prepping her successor for the mission of, well, being Myfanwy Thomas. Also for the mission of figuring out who has betrayed her and stolen her memories.

This was the big idea, out of which everything else spiraled. It kept prompting questions. How could Myfanwy Thomas know that her memories were going be stolen? For that matter, how can you steal someone’s memories, anyway? And how many suspects can there be wandering around for whom memory theft is a viable modus operandi? And who the hell are these people? And why don’t we (the normal people) hear about them? And what do they do all day?

Seriously, I had no idea what the answers were going to be when I started writing this book. The first question in particular, gave me some real problems, even though it ended up defining what sort of book it was going to be.

So, Myfanwy Thomas (the one with amnesia) has to come into work, pretending to be her former self.  Naturally, work ain’t a normal place of business. When you’re Myfanwy Thomas, you’re a high-ranking commander in the Checquy, a secret Government organization that fights (and is staffed by) the supernatural. If you’re masquerading as her, you’ve got a lot of high-level responsibilities. Plus, you also have those first-day-at-work nerves, compounded by the fact that you’re faking pretty much everything. Which is a feeling that everyone has probably experienced at one point or another. I was able to tap into some pretty gut-churning memories when writing those parts.

And it isn’t just the big things, like dispatching troops, or briefing the Prime Minister. It’s trying to keep track of the multitude of little things that make us who we are. How you like your coffee. How you interact with specific people. How you sign your name. How you activate your supernatural ability to control others. Can you stay in character all the time? And for how long? And really, what proportion of who you are is defined by what you remember, by your experiences? And how long can you angst about all that while Belgian alchemists are invading the nation?

In the course of answering all these questions (and many others, which insisted on presenting themselves), I wrote The Rook.

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The Rook: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt (pdf link). See the book trailer. Read the author’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Fairy tales have been around for centuries — and will be around for centuries because their core stories are adaptable to changing times and circumstances. If you doubt this, take a gander at Cinder, author Marissa Meyer’s new take on the Cinderella story. What changes does she make and what do they mean for the story of the girl with the slipper? Meyer explains how moving Cinderella out of the past and into the future has given the story new life in the present.

MARISSA MEYER:

My Big Idea for Cinder might just be the smallest idea in the book.

“Cinderella… as a cyborg.”

Four little words that still epitomize the novel, describing its general concept just as succinctly as they did three years ago, when I first heard them. They came as I was falling asleep, floating in that delirious state between waking and dreaming, when practically anything can seem like a novel-worthy idea. Cinderella… as a cyborg.

It clicked, immediately. The character filled up my head as I lay there in the dark—a girl oppressed by society and her step-family. A girl slaving away on robots and hovercars, using her built-in skills to earn her keep. A girl with one mechanical hand and one mechanical foot, her identity forever trapped between human and machine.

Her story began unfolding so fast I had to get out of bed and jot it down before I lost it, and though I found my notes mostly jumbled and nonsensical the next morning, the Big Idea lingered. And grew.

Though that night may have knocked the dominoes over, I’d been setting them up for months, since the first Slightly Smaller Idea had come to me: I’m going to write a series of futuristic fairy tales. I’d been brainstorming since, making lists of my favorite fairy tales and beloved space-opera tropes. Things like evil regimes and high-tech weaponry, androids equipped artificial intelligence, and sexy spaceship captain. I kind of have a thing for spaceship captains. I’d been toying with visions of Rapunzel trapped in a satellite rather than a tower, or Snow White in a suspended animation tank instead of a glass coffin.

Little ideas—little dominoes in a neat little line—until Cinder came stomping through and kicked them all over.

It seemed almost inevitable at the time.

Cinderella, as a cyborg. Obviously.

But those four easy words that dropped into my brain that night, in such a tidy little package, don’t begin to touch on all the ideas that shoved their way into the story afterwards.

They make no mention of the deadly plague sweeping my futuristic Earth, creeping ever closer toward the major cities. Or the cyborg draft that’s been instated to find an antidote—whatever the cost.

They say nothing about a beloved sister or a spunky android or a wise doctor who’s slowly losing his mind.

They do not even hint at an entire race of evolved humans with mysterious powers of mind-control, residing on the moon and waiting for the right moment to strike.

It’s impossible to look at those words and see how they’ve been transformed into a story that’s taken up so much space in my head, it required not one book to write it, but four. Each inspired by a different classic fairy tale and introducing new heroes and heroines to a cast that includes misfits and royalty, soldiers and thieves, computer hackers and genetically-modified mutants.

And, always, a cyborg Cinderella.

It is a Big Idea. One that’s easy to pitch and fun to say and translates well to a cover with a mechanical foot inside a glass slipper. But it pales in comparison to all those other ideas that have fused together to make up Cinder, a novel that has refused to stay confined within four simple words.

Thankfully, my publisher has given me four whole books to do the story justice. Challenge accepted. Let the Lunar Chronicles begin.

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Cinder: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. See the book trailer. Visit the author’s LiveJournal. Follow her on Twitter.

The American Midwest is many things, including the breadbasket of the nation — but is it a fertile field for fantasy tales? Author Sarah Prineas asked herself this question prior to writing her new young adult fantasy novel, Winterling. Her answer awaits you below.

SARAH PRINEAS:

When starting my new book, Winterling, I wanted to achieve two big things.  One was that, after writing three books in the Magic Thiefseries, which had a male first-person narrator, I would write a girl-power book.  I got that part of it done just fine.  As the reviewer for Kirkus noted, “Unusually, almost every character … is female, portrayed in all ages and roles—authority, hero, villain, mentor, warrior, healer, servant and goddess.”

The other thing I wanted to do was shift from secondary world fantasy to portal fantasy, and to begin the story in Iowa, which is where I live.  The Big Idea here is that the landscape of Iowa, as you can see, is beautiful:

But it is a highly industrialized landscape, too.  Farming here is done on a massive scale—there are way more hogs in Iowa than people; the state is the world’s second biggest producer (after Brazil) of soybeans, and the US’s biggest producer of corn.

While doing research for Winterling I learned a lot about the natural history of Iowa, relying most on a terrific book from the University of Iowa Press by Connie Mutel called The Emerald Horizon: The History of Nature in Iowa.  What I learned is that a hundred fifty years ago, Iowa was made up of oak savannah and vast prairies like this:

The effect settlers had on this land was profound, and the transformation from wilderness to farmland happened very quickly.  In a short time the land was tamed—it was made “useful” and “productive.”

There’s not a whole lot of scope for fantasy in a place like this.

In Winterling, the Iowa landscape is an important character.  It’s used for industrial agriculture; the land is groomed, tainted with herbicide, insecticide, chemical fertilizers.  But still, folds of wildness are hidden away here and there, in patches of oak woodland, and in ravines tucked between soybean fields—and I was able to find some magic left in those places.  In Winterling, hidden in one of these wild patches is a “Way” leading to another world that is magical and dangerous, a place where my protagonist goes to set right a terrible evil.  What she does changes that world, and our own.

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Winterling: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. See the book trailer. Visit the author’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

Author Stephen Blackmoore was on a mission with his novel City of the Lost: To tell a gritty, hard-boiled thriller of a story in a way that wasn’t like a 70s detective TV show. And you ask, well, okay, but what does a 70s crime detective show have to do with anything to begin with? As it turns out, and as this Big Idea will show, quite a lot.

STEPHEN BLACKMOORE:

Back in the early 70′s, when television was king, there was a show called Mannix, about an L.A. private eye who would get beaten, clubbed, beaten, shot, beaten, shot some more and occasionally beaten.

This never killed him, of course. Be an awful short series if it did. Nor did it give him a concussion, shock, broken bones, internal hemorrhaging, ruptured organs, nerve damage. You get the idea.

In fact, you’d pretty much see him at the end of every episode with one arm around a girl and the other in a sling.

Even when he got shot with an elephant gun.

Have you ever seen an elephant gun? I haven’t. The closest I’ve come is a .375 Weatherby that’s designed to take down things like water buffalo. I heard a story about a cop who got hit in the chest with something similar while wearing a bulletproof vest. The vest held, surprisingly enough, but the round punched it halfway through his body. At the autopsy they found that the shock waves from the impact had blown out all the blood vessels in his brain.

But not Mannix. No sirree, at the end of the episode he’s standing there with that shit-eating grin on his face and a blonde in his arms.

I like crime fiction, noir in particular. The kinds of stories where even if somebody wins, everybody loses. I’m not a big fan of happy endings or being kind to characters. I shoot them, stab them, break their noses. But there’s a limit to the kind of punishment I can put somebody through without seriously stretching plausibility. Nobody buys Mannix, if they ever did. They know you can’t shoot somebody through the head and have him shrug it off.

But I really wanted to write a story where I could do that.

In City of the Lost Joe Sunday is a professional leg-breaker. He’s the guy you don’t want to see when you owe somebody money. He knows those places in the desert where nobody’s going to find you but the coyotes and that the best way to get somebody to talk is with a pair of bolt-cutters and a Zippo. If you see him coming don’t bother running because you’re just going to die tired.

Then he gets murdered and brought back from the dead. Not on purpose. He’s just the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nobody in their right mind would want to raise him from the dead. He’s already a monster. That’s like sticking your rabid pit bull into the Pet Sematary.

It’s funny how once you embrace the impossible a whole slew of gonzo shit becomes plausible. Add zombies and magic and you can get away with a lot. Like thugs you keep coming even after you pump them full of bullets.

The great thing about writing Sunday wasn’t just that I could shoot him, break his bones, run him over, throw him off a building and damn near chew his head off, but that he’s the type of guy who might actually find himself in those kinds of situations. He’s a lowlife. People are trying to kill him all the time. When that doesn’t stick, they just try harder.

As big ideas go it’s really not that big. I wanted to write a book that was pulpy, violent, and over the top where I could make my protagonist’s life really goddamn miserable. Over and over and over again.

That or get out some pent up aggression. I’m still on the fence with that one.

Either way I had fun writing it. Hopefully people will have fun reading it.

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City of the Lost: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Adam Christopher’s debut novel Empire State isn’t just a novel — it’s the start of an interesting initiative by his publisher Angry Robot to let readers into the parallel New York Christopher has created. Christopher’s own journey to the Empire State was a long and twisting one itself, spanning continents and book genres in equal measure. He’s here now to talk about his travels: where he’s been, and where his creation will go next.

ADAM CHRISTOPHER:

As much as I hate to admit it, I’m a late developer. I didn’t read my first comic book until I was 25. I didn’t read my first piece of classic detective fiction until I was 30.

There, I’ve said it.

Well… that’s not strictly true – when I was about seven I had three comics: an issue of Batman, an issue of Iron Man, and one of those big Marvel A-Z compendium things. I was utterly fascinated by that, and read it from cover to cover and back again while telling my mum I was going to write a comic one day. But me and comics grew apart, and weren’t to meet again for about sixteen years when in 2003, I decided to pick up an issue of the British weekly SF anthology comic 2000AD. I remembered a friend at high school reading them under his desk at the back of class a decade before, and I remembered him showing me a one-shot story about Marconi inventing the radio to talk to his dead brother. That startling story had stuck in my mind, and when I stumbled across the latest issue on the shelf, I knew I had to take a look.

I was hooked. Instantly, shazam! I swear that a bolt of magical lightning struck right there in the bookstore as soon as I turned the first page, but unfortunately I still can’t juggle Buicks so that might just have been in my head. But it was a life changing moment. From 2000AD I discovered American superhero comics, and I knew there is where I belonged, that’d I’d come home. Although a latecomer, comics are now a passion for me as strong as genre fiction.

Empire State is my debut novel. It’s a science fiction detective story, a noir with superheroes set in Prohibition-era New York and another place, a foggy, wet and thoroughly miserable alternate version of Manhattan called the Empire State. It’s a book about identities, loyalties, justice, and trust. Its hero is a down-and-out detective in the Empire State, who gets called to investigate a missing person but ends up detecting a parallel universe – ours. There are rocket-powered crime-fighters, there are giant airships made of iron, and there is a conspiracy that crosses dimensions.

The first seed of Empire State was sown on a flight from Manchester, England, to San Francisco sometime in 2009. Y’know how it is on long-haul flights – it’s boring, uncomfortable; you get dehydrated and sleep-deprived. It was on that trip that I read my first Raymond Chandler novel, The Big Sleep…

Shazam, again. Magic lightning at 36,000 feet. The Big Sleep blew me away – sure, Chandler was a pulp writer, sure contemporaries called him a hack, pointing to his embarrassing past writing for mystery magazine Black Mask. But boy, could he write. So as we cruised onwards to California and I drifted off after perhaps one too many free champagnes, I remember lamenting the fact that while Chandler was a heck of a guy, it was a shame he never wrote science fiction. Raymond Chandler with robots, I thought. Wouldn’t that have been swell?

Somewhere over the Atlantic, the Empire State was born.

At that point, I’d written two novels already – a horror steampunk thing that is (perhaps wisely) still in the trunk and an all-out widescreen superhero epic called Seven Wonders, which Angry Robot is, oddly enough, publishing later in 2012 after Empire State. I was ready to start the next project and try something a little broader, a little weirder. Something which included a little of everything I liked – comic book superheroes, a bit of steampunk, a lot of weird science fiction. And, thanks to the adventures of Philip Marlowe, I knew I wanted to write a pulp detective.

It wouldn’t work, I thought, couldn’t work. I was ready to shelve it and move on, but a chance encounter with a mistyped Amazon search query gave me my hero: Rad Bradbury, later to become the slightly less distracting Rad Bradley.

With that slip of the keyboard, Rad appeared fully formed in my mind – here was a pulp detective, an ex-boxer who is older now and a little gone to seed, and he knows it but that doesn’t stop him doing his darndest to make things right. Rad likes his drink and hates Prohibition, but he believes there is something good in his dark and dull home city, the Empire State. A hardboiled fighter of injustice not afraid to use his fists when needed. A straight-talker who doesn’t like being messed around.

The perfect star for my science fiction detective novel.

And then it all made sense. From Rad came a whole bunch of new connections I’d never seen –  how pulp detectives truly belonged to the 1930s, exactly the same era in which the superheroes of the Golden Age of comics first took flight. Throw in Manhattan trapped in the weirdness of Prohibition, with bootleggers and gangsters, fast cars and Tommy guns, and then take the whole shebang and exaggerate, extend, twist, until I got a decayed, corrupted parallel universe reflection of New York City. The Empire State.

I had my Big Idea. “Raymond Chandler meets the Rocketeer in Gotham City” might be a bit of a mouthful for an elevator pitch, but it sure did fit. I began to write…

A year later and I sold the finished book to Angry Robot, who turned out to have their own Big Idea. Empire State would be the first novel to be used for Worldbuilder, a creative commons-licensed “expanded universe” project managed by the mighty Mur Lafferty. With Worldbuilder, readers can contribute their own creations based around and set in the world of Empire State – fiction, art, photography, comics, music, radio drama, you name it – the best of which will be selected for inclusion in a series of quarterly anthologies. We’ve also got some professional friends involved: Hugo-award winning writer and puppeteer Mary Robinette Kowal is doing a toy theatre/puppet show; acclaimed writer James Patrick Kelly is doing a short story; there’s a tabletop RPG being constructed, while a photographer has unearthed stills from the long-lost 1946 film noir adaption of the book. And that’s just the beginning.

It’s going to be wild. From an accidental birth, Rad Bradley is going to have adventures beyond the reach of my keyboard.

I can’t wait.

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Empire State: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|IndieBound|Powell’s

Read a sample chapter here. Follow the author on Twitter.

Here’s a Big Idea piece full of the magic of living in the electronic age: authors Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge saw an opportunity with the advent of DIY eBook publishing to resurrect their Exordium space opera series (of which Ruler of  Naught is the second book) — but more than that, they saw an opportunity to revisit the work and make it current, in more ways than one. Now, the details about making an old story ready for a new age.

SHERWOOD SMITH and DAVE TROWBRIDGE:

Ruler of Naught is Book Two of our space opera Exordium, which began life as a mini-series screenplay over twenty years ago, morphed into a mass-market paperback, and is returning again as an e-book series.

E-books are not only giving new writers an alternative to traditional book publishing, but letting oldsters like us resurrect yellowing paperbacks from used-book crypts. That’s a fun process (mostly), but from Exordium’s beginning we’ve struggled with the skiamorphs (shadow shapes—like wood grain on plastic) that are left not only when you move between media, but when your twenty-year-old vision of a technology’s cultural impact collides with present-day reality.

This is appropriate, because our Big Idea is all about skiamorphs: a future world replete with echoes of a distant, earthly past that let us take all the things we loved in books, art, film, and TV and use them to create the kind of science fiction movie we would want to watch.

Had just watched. We were a couple of twenty-somethings in 1977 when Star Wars came out. Younger readers probably can’t imagine the impact of that film on a generation accustomed to SF movies that were either glorified monster fights or preachy future-shock stories filled with plastic furniture and tight jumpsuits that would take an hour to get out of if you had to pee.

On our way out of the 2:30 a.m. showing, we looked at each other and said, “We can do that, but  . . . tech that makes sense!”

“More than one active woman!”

“Ruritania in space!”

“More than one active woman!”

Together: “Pie fights! Fart jokes!”

Thus was born Exordium. At the time Sherwood worked as a flunky in Hollywood, so the first version was a six hour miniseries. On the strength of it we got a good Hollywood agent, and there was a bid war shaping up between NBC and the then-new HBO when . . . boom! The mega-strike of 1980. When that was over, the studios were so depleted that min-series projects were put on hold—for the most part a euphemism for “killed.”

So we decided to turn it into books—and that meant breaking the chains of “can’t do that on TV,” developing the sketchy cultures, and completely rethinking the necessarily limited space battles, which had been confined to bridge scenes with rudimentary 1980s style FX. Dave dived into military history to figure out more about how the ships and tech he’d come up with would fight. Sherwood delved into cultural history to develop the manners, politesse, and political maneuvering we wanted.

Dave also got into high-tech PR and started thinking harder about how the technologies of the future would change humanity. Our world acquired an interstellar ship-switched data network. Our characters acquired “boswells.” Today we call them smartphones, which don’t yet have neural induction for subvocalized privacy. Boswells were (and are) great plot devices, with an intricate etiquette of usage.

But we totally missed social media. That wasn’t a problem, of course, when we sold the series to Tor in 1990, where, despite an awesome editor and great covers, it mostly vanished into the black hole of the mass market crash. But now we’re bringing them back as e-books. Twenty years into the future we didn’t see, which features a publishing industry that didn’t see it either.

The usual way to convert a genre novel from the days of yore into an e-book is to scan it, do a fast triage for OCR weirdness (there will be lots), whop together a new cover using Photoshop and images culled from various sources, stick it up on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc., and then publicize the hell out of it on Facebook or Twitter or, umm, Scalzi’s Big Idea.

The DIY route is getting cheaper and faster all the time, and plenty of authors are following it, some quite successfully. But even so, what do you do with science fiction that purports to take place in the future, but contains elements that look, well, quaint? You either grit your teeth and reissue the book as a period piece, or you rewrite it. And if you choose the latter, what’s inside the can may be more Elder God than annelid.

In Exordium, we had to wrestle again with the original screenplay, much of which still shadowed the story, especially in the first book. The language that would pass Programs & Practices in 1980 required made-up cusswords; the default for soldiers and action characters was male; by the nineties Dave had developed the idea of the boswells but in Exordium, everyone seemed to be running to computer stations for communication.

We kept the cuss words. Many readers don’t like neologisms, especially for profanity, but the Exordium idiolect had become too much a part of the world. Everything else needed a serious revamp, including the complex battle scenes, which had to be purged of the last traces of non-relativistic widescreen physics. (It helped that some very competent military gamers had developed an Exordium tactical board game based on the paperbacks.)

Rewriting wasn’t all work. One of the joys of revisiting a world in this way is discovering the zings, connections, and hidden history you missed the first time around. Rewriting becomes like looking into a Mandelbrot kaleidoscope.

There was one other skiamorph we faced, DIY itself, which is a pre-Internet, pre-open-source shadow of traditional publishing’s vertical integration. Authors don’t have to do it all themselves, and all sorts of different publishing models are emerging.

We went with Book View Café, which began in 2009 when a bunch of pro authors with substantial backlists got together to resurrect them. They started by offering free reads. Now BVC is an invitational cooperative of established authors that provides all publishing services in-house with volunteer labor. For instance, the first Exordium was proofread by Judith Tarr and formatted by Vonda McIntyre, to mention but two steps in the process.

Think of it as a kind of “Occupy Publishing” and you’re not too far off. Its consensus model of governance works because all its members agree on the fundamental principle that has come to be known as Yog’s Law: “Money always flows to the author.”

Knowing that we didn’t have to bear the whole burden of e-publishing Exordium, we were able to throw ourselves whole-heartedly into the rewrite of a retro space opera that Yog himself said reads “as if Doc Smith had come of age during the Summer of Love.” A playboy prince with unexpected depths, a gang of space pirates and their beautiful but deadly captain, ancient weapons from a war lost by the long-vanished masters of the galaxy, coruscating beams of lambent light, intricate space battles where light speed delay is both trap and tool, twisted aristocratic politics more deadly than a battlefield, a bizarre race of sophonts that venerates the Three Stooges, a male chastity device mistaken for the key to ultimate power…

And yes, a high tech pie fight.

(You can get started on Exordium with Book One, The Phoenix in Flight, for $0.99 for the next month—using flexible pricing for e-book promotion is another advantage of the medium…but that’s another essay.)

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Ruler of Naught: Book View Cafe|Amazon

Read an excerpt from the novel. Visit Sherwood Smith’s LiveJournal. Visit Dave Trowbridge’s Twitter.