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The Big Idea: P.H. Low

Posted on July 11, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      2 Comments

There is the myth of being forever young — but what about the forever that comes after that? P.H. Low has given this some thought in These Deathless Shores, and in this Big Idea, is here to speculate about what comes after, and what it means for those who live it.

P.H. LOW:

Our culture is obsessed with childhood. The romantic ideal of it, anyway—as this innocent, pure, magical state that’s a tragedy to lose. You hear it in the wails of book banners (think of the children!); see it in intense skincare routines and workout regimens and TikTok wars where millennials are burned for looking (gasp!) older than twenty.

And it’s everywhere in fiction — at least the books I read growing up, which pitted downtrodden but plucky kids and teens against adults who were, if not dead parents or outright villains, then dull bureaucrats, cruel teachers, or neglectful guardians, too cowardly or stodgy or just disappointing to be heroes — or even fully people. As J. M. Barrie, the original creator of Peter Pan, learned when his older brother David died in a skating accident at age thirteen — when little James dressed in David’s clothes to comfort their depressed mother, despite his own inevitable growing-up, year by year — to die as a child is to stay perfect forever. To become an adult is to stop deserving love.

But what happens when your childhood falls short of the ideal — especially, as Cathy Park Hong writes about in Minor Feelings, if you’re queer and/or BIPOC and/or have a disability,* and your youth is refracted through the lens of an idyll you’re told you should have but never receive? What happens when you age straight from victimhood into villainy?

Do you deserve magic at all? Do you even deserve your own narrative?**

These Deathless Shores, my genderbent Captain Hook origin story,raises the stakes of these questions to the level of lethality. Here, when the Lost Boys grow up, Peter “thins them out” (a real quote from the original); the Boys are thus terrified of crossing that fateful line, lest they get their throats sliced — or worse, are exiled and forced to go to school in the real world.

These Deathless Shores opens on two of these Boys having aged into unfortunate adulthood: Jordan runs drugs and fights in an underground ring to appease a landlord-cum-handler who might turn on her at any time; Baron— nearly crushed by the pressure to get through college, find a job, and make enough to, at the end of sixty years, “at least afford a hospital bed to die on” (dress to depress, as they say) — walks the edge of suicidal ideation.

It was important to me that I could write this book for adults, as well as kids who’ve been forced to take on similar burdens. To evoke that visceral urgency of scrounging for rent and healthcare; of the free fall that gapes behind you if you miss a step. My background is in YA, which also often treats survival and self-sufficiency as a primary concern. But for this book, I found myself shaping my plot and characterization around a fundamental loneliness I experienced more acutely after I hit eighteen: that I can no longer fall asleep in the backseat as someone I trust drives us to our destination; that if there’s nothing in my fridge but a half-loaf of bread, no one will remind me, no one will ask.

I also grappled with how my characters might struggle against the idea of growing up without the significant presence of parents to push against in-scene. Fortunately, at least for my plot, the grown-up world already permeates so many aspects of Peter’s supposedly child-centric idyll: Peter pretending to be a father, for example, or the way girls are (so Innocently! Naively!) treated as mothers — as passive things to be protected, and mindless doers of chores.

Another challenge for me was writing toward resolution — an ending that looked forward instead of just nailing the coffin shut; that pointed toward what things could be instead of only what they are.*** Because the worship of childhood — again, the cherub-faced ideal rather than the messy, screaming, political reality — is so deeply ingrained in the fabric of our stories, both the ones we consume and the ones we tell ourselves. Because when I was six or seven, accidentally unfolding my mother’s shorts in the closet instead of mine, I was already so imbued with the poison that I dreaded the day I would fit into them.

Because amid the slow exhausting scrabble for car insurance and rent money, the question pressed in: do I deserve a story, if the only thing I am is fighting to survive? What ending could I write for Jordan and Baron that felt both satisfying and true, when I’d dropped them in a pit I hadn’t crawled out of myself? To slightly misquote Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories, how can our stories remember without leaving a scar — how can they forget without “destruction, burial, loss” ?

I don’t think These Deathless Shores provides a perfect answer — in fact, I hope it doesn’t, because an ending too neatly wrapped in a bow would feel untrue — but there might be a seed of one in the relationships that form over the course of the story. Jordan and Baron, Chay and Tier — romantic and platonic bonds, chosen slapdash out of convenience or forged over long, hard years. It’s in the ways they come to see and save each other; to say, in the end, that even if you’ve grown old — even if childhood is a locked door you can never reopen — maybe there’s still a story you can belong to; maybe there’s a chance you still deserve to be loved.

*My addition.

**Given the recent discourse on the aging up of YA, I would like to add that it’s urgent and necessary to have novels centering children and teens, stories that help them name the ways adults have failed them, and the shapes of their own desires. But for that to be the only narrative—for eighteen to be framed as the end—seems like its own kind of tragedy.

***Shoutout to Hadestown — love us some myth-rooted capitalism commentary.

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The Big Idea: Sarah Beth Durst

Posted on July 9, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      9 Comments

It’s time to save the universe! Or is it? In this Big Idea for The Spellshop, author Sarah Beth Durst makes the argument that sometimes you don’t have to save the whole universe to have a terrific story, and to have that story make a difference for its characters.

SARAH BETH DURST:

You remember the scene in the Studio Ghibli movie Spirited Away where Chihiro rides the train? It’s a peaceful several-minute-long interlude: the girl and the spirit sit silently side by side as the train moves through the ocean while gentle music plays. I love that scene. It’s a deep-breath moment.

My Big Idea was to write a book that feels like a deep breath.

I started with a librarian. She’s perfectly content to live the rest of her life secluded in the stacks of the Great Library of Alyssium, curating spellbooks for the elite sorcerers of the Crescent Islands Empire. But then there’s a revolution, and the library begins to burn. She rescues as many books as she can and flees, along with her library assistant (her best and only friend), a sentient spider plant named Caz.

They sail to Kiela’s childhood home, a remote and beautiful island, where they open a rather illegal spellshop that also sells raspberry jam.

My book, The Spellshop, is cozy fantasy. A deep breath. An escape. A sanctuary. A paean to the glory of jam and cheese and quirky friendships and love.

If you haven’t run across the term “cozy fantasy” before, it’s a type of comfort read, a descendant of optimistic fantasy. Think Lord of the Rings but you don’t leave the Shire. It’s low-stakes — in cozy fantasy, there’s no saving the world. Instead, you save a heart.

And it’s both incredibly fun to write and surprisingly difficult from a sheer technical standpoint. As writers, we’re taught (or teach ourselves through a whole lot of trial and error) how to raise the stakes — how to rachet up the tension with each scene, each plot twist, each bit of dialogue. We strive to keep a reader breathlessly turning pages, to make our story un-put-down-able. We learn how to quicken the pace, heighten the emotions, and deliver the shocks.

But to write a book that feels like a warm hug… you need to unravel all of that.

You need to pick up each moment by the scruff of the neck and hold it until it calms the f- down.

I honestly don’t think I could have written a book like this if I hadn’t written epic fantasy first. My epic fantasy novels have bloodthirsty nature spirits, leviathan-size sea monsters, bone armies… I’d last about five minutes in any of my epic fantasy worlds. The Queen of Blood, as the title implies, has a very high body count. Race the Sands… monster racing. The Bone Maker… yeah, that one starts with stealing a dead child’s bones in an attempt at necromancy — and that’s the hero. I raised the stakes as high as I could raise them.

And this let me see how it was all woven together — to look at the threads on the reverse side and pick them apart.

A moment is too tense? Go ride a merhorse.

A bit of dialogue ramps up? Toss in a non sequitur. Add humor. Add banter. Or add an anecdote — throw a wrench into the gears.

A scene moves too fast? Focus on the details, especially sensory details. Feel the breeze, smell the salt air, taste the sweet tang of the raspberry jam. Lengthen the sentences. Embrace adverbs. Revel in the here and now.

Why do this? The last few years — well, they’ve been rough on pretty much everyone… I wanted to write a book that would be not only an escape but also (hopefully) at least a little bit healing, that would allow readers a chance to take the deep breath they need.

The Spellshop is about kindness, empathy, and connecting with other people. It’s also about a rogue librarian, stolen spellbooks, quirky neighbors, merhorse herding, an apple-blossom bird, a kind and handsome neighbor, raspberry jam, and a talking spider plant. I hope you enjoy it!

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The Big Idea: K.X. Song

Posted on July 8, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      Leave a Comment

For The Night Ends With Fire, author K.X. Song turns her eye to a strong human emotion and follows where having it leads, and what having it does to those who experience it. Which emotion is it? Read on to discover.

K.X. SONG:

It all started with a journal entry, penned several years before the idea for The Night Ends With Fire came to me: “To want something so badly, even the wanting becomes beautiful. (Inherent.) To be alive is to desire.”

From a young age, I was obsessed with wanting. I wanted to be somewhere I was not. I wanted to be someone I was not. I wanted less of one bad thing and more of another good thing. I was not unique in this regard, of course, but perhaps more than others, I condemned this aspect of myself. Either because of my conservative upbringing, my Chinese roots, or simply because I was a young woman growing up in the 21st century, I saw my desire as evidence of my immorality and tried my hardest to be content with what I already had.

It was a huge change, then, to reframe this core belief of mine—to decide that the act of wanting was not proof of my ingratitude but rather a beautiful and necessary part of myself that had contributed to my various successes in life. In many ways, it was the fervor of my wanting to be a storyteller that led me to publish my first novel at a young age. It was the intensity with which I wanted to run that led me to complete my first marathon. This quality of wanting could lead to unhappiness if coaxed too far, but it could also lead to tremendous happiness.

Several years later, amidst the global pandemic and the grim news cycle, I was craving escape from reality. At the time I was finishing up edits for my first novel, a YA contemporary set during the 2019 Hong Kong protests. While the story was deeply important to me because of its personal significance, it was also draining to work on–perhaps for the same reason. One night, as I was falling asleep, an idea for an escapist fantasy novel came to me in a half-dream. Groggily, I grabbed my phone off my nightstand and wrote a few words. “Girl hungry for power” was one of them. “Dragon who feeds off greed” was another.

I was fascinated by the core question of ambition: Was it a strength or a weakness? Could you possess too little or too much? And how did society treat you differently if you were an ambitious woman rather than an ambitious man? As I said, it is hard to know why I found my ambition (back then, I simply called it “wanting”) so depraved. To be clear, I’m not sure if it was because of my gender or other factors. But in The Night Ends with Fire, which is based on the Three Kingdoms period in ancient China, I created a world in which women are treated as secondary citizens to men. In this fantasy world, there is a quote from a made-up ancient text, inspired by the real Chinese language: “The Tian word for slave is made of two characters: girl and hand. For the girl is the slave, and the hand is the means with which she serves.”

It is beliefs like these that have been deeply ingrained in my protagonist, Meilin, so that she believes she should not want anything more than to serve her masters—her father, her husband, and one day, her son. The fact that she wants more than this is a sign of her corruption. And yet, she does want more. She burns with want. And it is this want that draws the sea dragon spirit to her; that lures her to join the army and change the fate of the Three Kingdoms.

In terms of the magic system, I knew I wanted to base the mythological creatures on the Four Auspicious Beasts in Chinese mythology: the Azure Dragon, the Vermillion Phoenix, the Ivory Tiger, and the Black Tortoise. These four creatures represent the four directions, the four seasons, and the four elements. I knew they would be background characters that would influence the humans on center stage. However, one of my pet peeves in reading fantasy is when mythological beasts or gods benevolently offer their power to humans without any strings attached or hidden motives. In our real world, when does this ever happen? (Do leaders with immense power simply donate large sums of money to certain individuals without any conditions or obligations?) So, I wanted to subvert this trope and give agency to my mythological creatures—to give them their own goals and motives, which may or may not align with our protagonist’s.

Another pet peeve of mine in fantasy worlds is when characters can draw upon their magical abilities without any consequences or limitations. For example, if I were to sit for hours for a mentally challenging exam or run twenty-six miles in a race, I would feel the effects of this effort in the days following. In a similar manner, I wanted magic use to wear on my characters; the greater the magic use, the longer lasting the consequences.

Inspired by my core question of ambition, I decided to make my mythological creatures feed off human emotion—otherwise, why would they need people at all? The Azure Dragon, who becomes bonded to Meilin, feeds off her greed. Meilin calls on her innate greed to harness her magic, and as she increasingly relies on her magical powers, her greed and ambition grow accordingly. Thus, as she changes the direction of the war, so too does the war change her.  

I never try to be didactic in my novels. There are no easy answers to these questions surrounding the merit of ambition, the immorality of greed. But through Meilin’s journey in The Night Ends with Fire, I aimed to ask what drives us in times of crisis. What is the true cost of ambition, and what price do we pay when we finally obtain the power we so desperately sought? Regardless of how pure our intentions, does that power ultimately change us? And in the aftermath of war, as we examine history in its black and white terms, what truly separates heroes from villains?

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The Big Idea: Benjamin Liar

Posted on July 5, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      1 Comment

In this Big Idea for his debut novel The Failures, author Benjamin Liar wishes for a particular machine beloved by science fiction — just not necessarily for the reasons you might expect.

BENJAMIN LIAR:

Anybody got a time machine?

Not that there’s anything even remotely like time travel in The Failures; it’s just that with a time machine, I could get back to my eighteen-year-old self, peek inside his malnourished brain, and take a guess as to what the initial Big Idea for this book was.

Thirty years and what feels like a million drafts later, I couldn’t even hazard a guess. This was the nineties, so it probably had something to do with cramming Dinotopia into Wheel of Time and then dunking it in some Neuromancer. Was there a big idea there? A singular, compelling vision that’s carried me through all these years? A thematic flash of light so brilliant that it illuminated all paths?

I doubt it. I think I still liked hair metal back then. I was not to be trusted with delicate things like ‘theme’.

Even from my lofty height up here in the future, full of all this wise, bearded wisdom and able to casually leaf through my finished novel as if I’d intended the whole thing from the start, it’s hard to say what the central big idea is. Something pompous like ‘the perils of entrenched power systems’ would be true, but ‘hey, friends are important’ is equally true. For now, I’ll lean on the cover art: Look, gears!

Machinery has fascinated me for a long time; both physical and spiritual. I like the making of things; one of the ‘magic’ systems in The Failures is of a very mechanist sort, articulated by the crafting of devices. But I also grew up very religious (and am now very not) and the machines we build out of social constructs—be it families, churches, politics, or book clubs—are endlessly captivating to me. As is the effort, lies, betrayal, love and sacrifice it takes to keep those machines running.

The Failures is, to some degree, about people caught up in those sorts of machines. Sophie Vesachai was a child hero, but is now trapped in the structure of her own myth. Two brothers, James and Chris, get caught up in a spectacularly convoluted system of plots and betrayals, thanks to an unlucky discovery. A group of would-be power players scheme to build a machine made of people to achieve their inscrutable ends—but machines made of people never run very well. The Deader might be a machine himself; how far down can you reduce a thinking creature before they become nothing more than gears and cogs, safe and predictable in their thoughts and actions?

And then there’s Gun and Jackie; two indestructible jerks from our world, the proverbial grit in the gears. Show them the true nature of the world, and they’re liable to just kick the machine apart.

Indeed, the world of The Failures might just be a mechanism itself. Scratch anywhere through the story’s skin and you’ll find gears, metal sinews, cogs; machines within machines. And all of them are, in their own way, accidental.

When I began fleshing out this story, and this world, I didn’t have any big idea with the word ‘machine’ in it. All I was trying to do was to whisk my ideal reader away on a fun, fraught, complicated, dark adventure, to take you on a twisty little rollercoaster, and I hope I accomplished that part. There were some hardy, tenacious little thematic weeds that grew up in the cracks, though, and if you take away any thoughtful frowns on the subjects of social machinery, entrenched power systems, or the value of friendship, that’s just a bonus.

Still, I can’t help but feel that I cheated on the assignment. You came here for a Big Idea and I hand-waved some theme and mimed some allegory.

I’ll say this: my Big Idea wasn’t something that walked on stage, fully formed. It took many years of cutting, crafting, breaking off parts and sticking them different places. Kicking the machine apart and starting again. Being surprised by connections and linkages I’d never planned. I can feel the edges of it, a vague and shadowy shape, a machine made for some uncertain purpose, but the Big Idea still isn’t clear to me. Perhaps I’ll only see the whole thing when I get to the end of the tale—and then I’ll race on down to the Time Machine Dealership, dial a course for the nineties, and go whisper it in the ear of a scared, eager, naïve little eighteen year old.

And while I’m there, I’ll chill to some absolutely sick hair metal guitar solos.

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The Big Idea: Tiffani Angus & Val Nolan

Posted on July 2, 2024    Posted by Athena Scalzi      5 Comments

There’s so much to speculative fiction that you could write a book about it. And that’s exactly what authors Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan did! In fact, they did it twice. Today they’re here to tell you about their newest book, Spec Fic for Newbies: A Beginners Guide to Writing More Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Volume 2, which is not so much a sequel to Volume 1 as it is a continuation.

TIFFANI ANGUS & VAL NOLAN:

We’re just gonna put it out there: We freakin’ love teaching. Our ideal jobs would be a spot at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters or on the faculty of Starfleet Academy (come on, you know they absolutely have a legit Literature and Creative Writing Department!). Specifically, we love teaching Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and all the uncategorizable crannies of weirdness and wonder that surround them. These subjects draw in the best students; they draw the best students out of themselves. Walking into a classroom and getting to discuss how these stories are made with novice writers who genuinely love genre fiction and seek to wield its power? Well, if that’s not the greatest job in the world then we don’t know what is (seriously, sometimes there are pizza parties; and, yes, with veggie and GF options!).

Spec Fic for Newbies (which we discussed on this honorable blog last year!) was our effort to share the excitement of those classes with everybody who sought it. Our Big Idea in Volume 1 was to break down the genres we love into their constituent parts and explore just how they worked. We wanted to do this as a book in order to blow the doors off the university classroom and give anyone who wanted it access to robots and vampires and sundry blood-splattered horrors on demand. So, we dismantled our lesson plans and refashioned them into short and accessible introductions to thirty subgenres/major tropes and how one might go about starting to write them.

But you know what? Thirty wasn’t enough.

The magical gourd of our enthusiasm (eew?) has even more to share.

And so we have spent the last year writing Spec Fic for Newbies: A Beginners Guide to Writing More Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Volume 2. We got to return to the haunted well and haul out a whole new bucket of subjects to discuss (which, as the kind of teachers who seriously dig the Dungeon Master vibe of curriculum design, was more of a treat than anything else!). Some are core subgenres and tropes such as Space Opera, or Dragons, or Ghost Stories. Others are topical matters fueling some of the most striking fiction being written today such as Biopunk and Ecohorror. Honestly, a few were because we wanted to nerd out about specific topics such as Submarine Stories (Val will forever be a SeaQuest DSV fan!) or Enchanted Clothing (Tiffani always wants to know how the costumes are made!). In all cases they are subjects that students have asked about or raised in the classroom.

Yet it’s not all fun and games (okay, it’s, like, 30% fun and games). One of the genuinely Big Ideas that teaching has taught us—and one of the things we in turn have brought into Spec Fic for Newbies—is how crucial SFF/H literacy is in the modern world. Teaching people to write these stories involves, as much as anything, teaching them how to read and interpret the way these subgenres and tropes have developed over time and how influential they have been (and still are!).

Because stories aren’t just stories, they’re the means by which we shape the world around us. Someone makes something up, it becomes embedded in culture, and, suddenly, everyone just seems to accept it (indeed, some people seem to straight-up believe it as fact!). That’s half of everything from politics to religion to economics to big tech! But learning to become a better SFF/H writer is all about learning to question these accepted norms. Consider the grifters shilling so-called “Artificial Intelligence” right now: you’re less likely to get taken in by their relentless sales pitch if you’ve familiar with the Mechanical Turk (admittedly real-life history) or The Wizard of Oz or basically any variety of Star Trek.

But we covered AI in Volume 1! In Volume 2 we look at some other subgenres that speak directly to the present troubles of the world. Consider Pandemic Fiction. In some ways, the greatest educational tools we had to help people understand the COVID-19 pandemic were novels including Colson Whitehead’s Zone One or Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, because as much as they sketched out imaginary pandemics (and so weren’t scientifically useful), what they excelled at was in modeling how people responded (positively and negatively) to such crises. Fiction offers, on the one hand, spaces where such ideas can be tested and, on the other hand, a ready and easily accessible vocabulary to help frame the problems.

Consider Climate Fiction: Something like climate collapse is too big, too vast for many people to instinctively grasp its many (sometimes contradictory) implications (philosopher Timothy Morton calls it a “Hyperobject”, which is one of a few downright science-fictional—and super-useful—notions of literary criticism we try to point people towards). But when you break it down into stories of individuals faced with extraordinary challenges, you can then convey the dangers in emotionally comprehensible fashion. That’s how you can help readers or viewers to understand the ways this vast disruption will interact with their own particular slices of spacetime. That’s how you take complicated scientific ideas and make them accessible to wide audiences. And that’s not nothing.

Thus, teaching people the histories of these genres and how they typically manifest is equipping them with a toolkit not just to write great fiction themselves (though we hope they do!) but, also, to better survive in a world that is increasingly beset by issues and problems and villains that seem to have slithered straight from the pages and screens of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. These genres are important (arguably far more so than literary realism). They are machines for killing fascism. They are shields to defend your trans family and friends. They are a way of fighting for the future of every living thing on our planet. Teaching about them and how to use them means something to us, because it’s not just helping people to write any story, it’s about helping them to write their story, the one that reflects their world and their challenges and their anxieties and, crucially, their hopes.

At its heart, then, Spec Fic for Newbies Volume 2 is another part of our effort to do just that. It’s designed to be welcoming (and entertaining!) to both students in formal education (maybe writing students who don’t have an instructor with SFF/H sympathies?) and, indeed, to novice writers at any level. It follows the same format as Volume 1 (a BSFA Finalist also included on the Locus Recommended Reading List!). You can seamlessly move from any section of this book to that book and back again. They’re both part of a continuum. We’ve just expanded it a bit!

We hope you love it!

We hope you find it useful.

We’re sorry we couldn’t include the pizza party.

—-

Spec Fic for Newbies: A Beginners Guide to Writing More Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Volume 2: Amazon UK Preorder|Blackwell’s UK Preorder|Waterstone’s UK Preorder|Luna Press Publishing

Author socials: Tiffani’s Site|Val’s Site|Tiffani’s Bluesky|Val’s Bluesky

The Big Idea: Allen Steele

Posted on June 27, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      6 Comments

Come with us now to another time – a different time! A future that comes to us from the past! A time inspired by the pulp science fiction of another era! The Hugo Award-winning author Allen Steele is your guide to this pulpy future past, as he tells you about the world of Captain Future, a hero from a bygone age, and why he’s resurrected this avatar of a long-gone future to live again in new adventures, including the latest, Lost Apollo.

ALLEN STEELE:

Now that I find myself — unexpectedly and much to my own surprise — publishing my sixth Captain Future adventure, I’m also discovering that I’m at risk of repeating myself when it comes to discussing how and why I came to revive this classic character in the first place.

It would be easy to reiterate the story how I discovered a science fiction pulp hero of the 1940’s as a teenager in the 70’s, later satirized him in 90’s in my novella “The Death of Captain Future”, and finally decided to resurrect and reinvent the character himself in 2017 in a novel, Avengers of the Moon, followed by series of long novellas (short novels, really) published by Amazing Selects as Edmond Hamilton’s Captain Future, a semi-regular series of illustrated ebooks and trade paperbacks emulating the pulps of a bygone era .

But this is all stuff I’ve written about before, and if you’re a fan of the series then you probably know these things already. I’ve previously discussed the origins of the revision in the afterword to Avengers of the Moon that was later followed by another essay published in the first issue of EHCF (along with the novella “Captain Future in Love”) and yet another tracing the history of the original Edmond Hamilton version that’s on the EHCF website, https://captfuture.com). If you want the full backstory about the genesis of Hamilton’s character and my efforts to bring back him and his crew more than sixty years after their final Hamilton-canon appearance in the May 1951 issue of Startling Stories, then I recommend that you find and read those essays. Your time will be well spent if this is news to you and won’t be wasted if you’ve heard it all before.

Instead, I’m going to talk about the new novel, Lost Apollo.

After I finished the previous novel, The Horror at Jupiter (EHCF 4), I thought I was done with Captain Future. I’d achieved my primary goal, writing an epic space adventure that would bring back a favorite pulp hero of my youth and send him on a long story arc which would pit him against his arch enemy and send them both across the solar system and beyond. I’d also managed to complete the trilogy, albeit in a different form than originally intended, that I’d begun with Avengers of the Moon. Shortly before the novel was published by Tor, my editor David Hartwell suddenly died. He was replaced by an inexperienced assistant editor who didn’t get what I was doing and didn’t like Captain Future either, so despite the fact that Avengers had solid sales and earned outstanding reviews, she abruptly cancelled the rest of the trilogy, forcing me to find another publisher for the remaining two books, which were eventually published over the next three years as four episodic installments. Well then, so be it; I’d accomplished my mission, and now it was time to move on.

The audience occasionally get the last word when it comes to things like this, though, and it wasn’t long after The Horror at Jupiter came out that I began to get feedback from my readers. There had been only a couple of reviews — most SF critics ignored my Captain Future novels just as they’d ignored Edmond Hamilton’s original series — but nonetheless I received supportive fan mail from readers, and the royalty statements showed that the books were selling solidly, and this proved that the project had definitely been worth completing with a smaller publisher.

But besides that, I’d really enjoyed writing these stories. They weren’t radical, cutting-edge SF that pushed the envelope, but there’s a place in the world for traditional space opera, and plainly there are readers who want that button pushed. Curt Newton and the Futuremen are a fun bunch of guys to write about and I was sorry to be done with them. So why not continue?

By then, I’d had a brainstorm for a new story arc that would depart from what I’d done before. I told Amazing’s publisher Steve Davidson and editor Kermit Woodall that I’d come up with another Captain Future storyline and asked them if I could write another novel (well, maybe two). They were a little uncertain, so I waited awhile for sales to continue to build and then asked again, and once they finally gave me the green light, I finished another project and went to work on the next adventure.

I’ve been a space buff all my life, starting with the original Project Mercury flights in the 60’s and continuing through the Gemini and Apollo programs. I was in middle school when NASA’s last manned lunar mission, Apollo 17, returned to Earth, and I was frustrated and angry when I heard the news that the next three Apollo missions had been cancelled for shortsighted political reasons. Yet it wasn’t until just a few years ago that I learned that the original final mission, Apollo 20, was tentatively planned to land in Tycho Crater … which, as all Captain Future fans know, is where the Futuremen have their hidden moon base.

SF writers frequently play the “what if” Q&A game, and in this case the question was, “What if Apollo 20 had landed in Tycho and found Captain Future?” Of course, this meant I’d have to contrive a reason for an Apollo mission from the 20^th century to land on the Moon in the 24^th century … besides the fact, of course, that there had never actually been an Apollo 20 mission in the first place.

I was still mulling this over when I learned something else that I hadn’t known before. I knew that the original NASA astronaut corps of the 60’s included several Black military pilots who’d been in training but had never got tapped for any of the early Mercury or Gemini missions because of racial internal politics too complex (and odious) to get into here. What I didn’t know, though, was that one of the cancelled Apollo flights might’ve included a Black astronaut … which meant that, if history had been different, a person of color could’ve walked on the Moon in the 70’s, something that we’ll see a few years from now when Artemis 1 reaches the Moon but should’ve happened much earlier.

Since I was already working with alternate history, I decided to put a Black astronaut aboard my fictional Apollo 20 flight and even make him the mission commander (I also named him after a couple of teenage friends of mine from Nashville, my hometown). Then I continued to play the What If game by doing what Theodore Sturgeon said ought to be done, and followed the first question by asking the next logical question: what would happen if the astronaut whom NASA intended to be the first Black man to walk on the Moon suddenly found that his singular role in history was going to be denied to him?

Lost Apollo turned out to be a deeper novel than I originally thought it would be. It has plenty of good ol’ New Pulp action and adventure, with everything from a drag race on the Moon to a big space battle (look out for a cameo by the country-punk band The Chicks making a walk-on as a fighter squadron). But there’s also some things here that go beyond space opera.

A quick pitch, then I’m done. The new issue of EHCF also includes, along with interior illustrations by M.D. Jackson, a spectacular cover by my all-time favorite comics artist, Michael W. Kaluta. It’s one of the best covers I’ve ever had for a book, and I’m really proud of it. And there’s also a long-lost interview with Captain Future’s original author, Edmond Hamilton, and his wife and fellow space-op pioneer Leigh Brackett, that was conducted by Darrell Schweitzer in 1978 for Amazing.

Hope you pick it up, and that you enjoy it.

Lost Apollo: Amazon

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