Brad R. Torgersen is a healthcare computer geek by day, a U.S. Army Reserve Chief Warrant Officer on the weekend, and a science fiction and fantasy writer by night. He has contributed stories to multiple professional publications, including Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, Russia’s Esli, Poland’s Nowa Fantastyka, and several anthologies.

Brad’s novelette “Exanastasis” was a winner in the international Writers of the Future contest, and his story “Outbound” later won the AnLab Readers’ Choice Award in its category, for the publishing year 2010. “Outbound” was also included in the Dell Magazines ten-year Analog retrospective anthology, Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales from Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000-2010.

“Ray of Light,” also published in Analog, is currently nominated for both the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Award and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award in its category, for the publishing year 2011. As of Spring 2012, Brad is also nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in Professional Science Fiction and Fantasy, with stories forthcoming in Analog, Phil Athans’s collaborative project Tales from the Fathomless Abyss, Ian Watson’s The Mammoth Book of SF Wars, as well as the Flying Pen Press military SF anthology, Space Battles. Brad lives in northern Utah with his wife and daughter.

First of all, congratulations on the three latest award nominations — the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell. That’s quite the reception!

It’s boggling when you consider the fact I was an unpublished nobody barely two years ago. If someone had come to me in April 2010 and told me I’d be on the three biggest award ballots in science fiction by May 2012, I’d have said they were nuts. Yet, here I am. I can only thank all the readers who have generously supported my writing since I had my double-debut in Writers of the Future 26 and the November 2010 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. I like to think my stories speak for themselves. And win or lose, I hope to continue to produce the kinds of stories my readers have told me they both like and enjoy.

One of the things about your work that strikes me as both fresh and very satisfying is the way you drag your protagonists into the darkest places imaginable, or at least to a point of near-hopelessness — and then, through faith and perseverance, they manage to conquer whatever adverse situation you’ve put in their way. How much of your own personal faith would you say informs this kind of pattern? Or do you see it as a pattern at all?

Oh, it’s definitely a pattern. Semi-deliberate, I suppose. To quote Captain James T. Kirk, I don’t believe in the no-win scenario. Yet all of us face hopelessness and tragedy in our lives. It is an inescapable part of existence. Some writers discover this truth and they come to dwell on it as if hopelessness and despair are the sum of all things. For me, I think hopelessness and despair are the beginning, not the end. And yes, my personal faith — I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — informs my view a great deal.

Life is difficult. Almost all of us will encounter various life crises which will seem insurmountable. The question then becomes: do we give up and let the problems win, or do we reach deep down into ourselves and discover resources and fortitude we never knew we had? It takes courage to have hope, especially in the face of seemingly impossible obstacles. It takes even more courage to translate that hope into actions which can make a real, positive difference. My faith has infused me with this sensibility, so it blends into my stories.

Of course, the story I have in mind is “Ray of Light,” but really, “Outbound” and “The Chaplain’s Assistant” deal with similar struggles. One of the ideas in political philosophy I find compelling is that society often needs the “prophecy” element of religion — that is, a prophet – in order to make social progress and solve problems. Is that a theme you try to convey in your work, or is it something more complex?

Hmmmm, if I understand you correctly, you’re saying we need leaders who can speak to us on not just a practical level, but an emotional and spiritual level as well? I can’t say I’ve deliberately set out to create such people in my stories. Almost always, I begin with commoners. Men and women who are otherwise average and unremarkable. Then I thrust them into remarkable situations, and I see how they react. Often this is an organic process, and with my short fiction at least, I never know where the characters are going to go until they get up off the page and assume a life of their own. At least in my mind, anyway.

When I look at history, many of the heroes we admire were just ordinary people, prior to whatever events transpired in their lives to bring them to greatness. I look at the Congressional Medal of Honor winners from World War II or Vietnam and it’s plain to me that most of them never determined to be heroes. Life just stuck them into difficult or deadly situations, and they found ways to win. Not always survive, mind you. But still win. In the history of my own church, there are numerous stories and instances of common men and women surviving and thriving, sometimes against terrible odds and under the clouds of immense tragedy and despair. I think all of this informs my writing to one degree or another. Because I admire these real-life instances of ordinary people becoming extraordinary in the face of danger, challenge, and hardship.

The other major strength of your fiction, I think, is the application of theoretical science in original or fresh ways. What kind of research do you do to get that sort of thing right? What nonfiction do you tend to read?

Blame it on Carl Sagan. I first watched his excellent Cosmos series on PBS in the early 1980s when I was perhaps six or seven years old. A lot of the science contained in that program was over my head, but Cosmos really turned me on to science. Especially the space sciences, as well as space technology. I’d already been attracted to science fiction in televised form — the original Battlestar Galactica being a good example. But Cosmos exposed me to theories and ideas which might actually be put into practice, if not now, then perhaps in the future. From there, a great deal of my curiosity about science and engineering blossomed, and though I am purely lay-educated on these disciplines, I have a strong enough grasp to survive Stanley Schmidt’s scrutiny.

I think the key thing that I try to remember when I sit down to do some of my science fiction, is the fact that Larry Niven — whom I have read extensively and whom I admire very much — was very gifted at taking interesting or even esoteric science and physics ideas, and wrapping compelling human stories around them.

That’s the tricky part. And the research is largely an exercise in osmosis. Every time I watch a science series on TV, or read an article, or see something on the internet, my brain is storing details for later use. Even if I don’t realize it. The conceit of “Ray of Light,” which is up for the Hugo and the Nebula, came from an article I read two years ago. Just one article. But it was a fascinating article, and I remembered it when I had to sit down and write a story about the end of the world. The research was not planned.

You’ve often voiced your admiration for Larry Niven, calling him your number one influence as a writer. Who are some of the other authors you read regularly or particularly admire?

Larry Niven is the man who taught me to love short science fiction pieces with rigorous “hard” science in them. I have read the vast majority of his books and most of his stories, and I am fortunate in that this year I am collaborating on a project with him for Arc Manor books. The other authors I read or admire? I always have to name Allan Cole and his (late) writing buddy Chris Bunch. They did a spectacular, sprawling series called the Sten series, which came out from Del Rey Books in the 80s. Sten is now available for download as e-books, and Orbit is doing a magnificent set of hardcopy Sten omnibus editions, the first of which, Battlecry, is already out, and the second of which, Juggernaut, is due out this November. Cole and Bunch are Pulitzer-nominated writers who did a great deal of work in Hollywood, at the same time they wrote excellent war and science fiction.

I could also point to my several mentors who have been actively helping me since I broke into the field: Dave Wolverton (a.k.a. David Farland), Kevin J. Anderson, Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Mike Resnick, just to name a few. I’ve been very blessed to have Resnick especially as my “Writer Dad,” and it’s been a pleasure working on several stories with him, one of which, “Peacekeeper,” is out soon in Ian Watson’s compilation titled, The Mammoth Book of SF Wars. Mike and I have another story out, “Guard Dog,” in Space Battles from Flying Pen Press, and a story called “The Ascent,” in Phil Athans’s The Fathomless Abyss shared-universe project. Mike’s not only the most-nominated man in science fiction history, for Hugo awards, he’s won a bunch of them too, plus virtually every other award in existence. And he’s a hell of a nice guy. I couldn’t ask for a better teacher, who has also become a good friend.

Something we have in common, I gather, is that we both come from a background of reading media tie-ins prior to discovering more traditional science fiction. For me, it’s always been Star Wars – I still pick up the occasional Expanded Universe novel, because they make for an entertaining read. If you could write a novelization or tie-in novel, would you go with Star Trek, or Tron?

I’d have to say Star Trek above all. Even though one of the first actual novels I ever read was Brian Daley’s book Han Solo’s Revenge, which may or may not still be regarded as canon in the Expanded Universe that Lucas has created since the ’80s. Something about the future history of Star Trek still fascinates me, and when I was a teenager I devoured dozens of the Pocketbooks Star Trek novels, in addition to watching and re-watching the television series as well as the movies.

At one point my writerly aspiration was strictly to find a way to write the “in-between” years, featuring Captain Sulu and the U.S.S. Excelsior, as well as Chekov and his (presumed) starship command. It obviously never happened, but because I loved and adored these media fiction tie-ins so much during my genesis (no pun intended) I have a soft spot in my heart for them to this day. Tron? Tron would also be a dream project, though given the revelations of the second movie, I am not quite sure where I’d go with it. I am more curious now to see where Disney goes with it.

Speaking of storytelling outside of original fiction . . . do you have any other films or television series that you consider a major influence on your work?

The original Battlestar Galactica, definitely. As well as the kitbashed anime series that was known in the United States as Robotech. From the big screen there is, of course, Tron, and the Indiana Jones movies, and some of Ridley Scott’s work, such as Blade Runner. James Cameron’s done some classics, such as the first two Terminator films and Aliens. Really, I am not much for “small” movies. When I look at cinema, I want story as well as spectacle. I thought the three Lord of the Rings movies were some of the absolute best Big Picture storytelling done in the last twenty years, bar none. I also liked the movie version of 300, which was adapted from the Frank Miller graphic novel.

In all of these things, I am looking for the same elements I like in my favorite books: sweep, panorama, big stakes, tremendous heroes, and a certain degree of ethical and moral assertion. I greatly dislike the deliberately ambiguous ending, or the deliberately ambiguous protagonist. These are trendy, and will probably remain trendy. But our motion pictures are our modern version of campfire stories. They are twentieth and twenty-first century legends. They should have a lot of legendary qualities to them. Star Wars – the first three movies — succeeds admirably in this way.

Do you have a favorite band or musician?

Oh gosh, that’s a tangent ninety degrees to movies. I am not sure I can name just one. I am hugely fond of electronic music in most forms, though I enjoy many other types of music too. About the only music I can’t say I like much is country western, or rap. Beyond that, it’s all good.

I will say there are certain specific musicians and artists I believe were very key to my personal development; my “soundtrack of life,” if you will: Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, The Art of Noise, Vangelis, Harold Budd & Brian Eno, and so forth. Among recent finds — thank goodness for MP3 direct download from Amazon.com! — I really like the groups Helios and Hammock. As well as Royksopp, out of Norway. In most of these instances, it’s instrumental music. Almost all of it electronic or semi-electronic in nature. I also like composer James Horner’s movie work.

How has your military career had an impact on your writing? Do you see yourself bringing more military science fiction elements into your work?

I think my ten-year (so far) career in the Army Reserve has obviously given me an insider’s view, when I sit down to write a piece of military-oriented science fiction. More deeply, however, I think my military experience has taught me a lot about what it takes as a person to not quit, to not give up, and to outlast difficult situations. Here again I will point back to something I said earlier: Difficulty is the beginning, not the end. I am not sure I understood this before I joined up, but I definitely became intimately familiar with this after I enlisted.

There are things I’ve done in my military life which still make the civilian, full-time side of me sit up and say, “Man, we are so crazy for doing that!” And yes, I see myself working to bring a lot more of this to my fiction. Especially with books, where I can tell a much bigger kind of story and incorporate more characters with larger backgrounds, and more to gain and/or lose.

You’ve hinted that we may see a Brad R. Torgersen novel on shelves in the imminent future. Anything you can disclose on that front yet? If not, what sort of books do you hope to publish?

Yes, at this point it seems inevitable. Though I won’t disclose specifics, simply because so much is in flux right now. I don’t want to bait and switch. Like I said with the last question, books are a bigger canvas than short fiction. You can do more with them, and there is a wider — and more lucrative — audience. But I’ve discovered that some of the key skills I developed for successfully selling short fiction, don’t necessarily work when I am doing book-length work.

So I have had to go back to the drawing board a lot and invent new skills for myself, often with the help of teachers. I mentioned Dave Wolverton earlier. He does some phenomenal workshops on novels and writing outlines for them. He definitely has his finger on the pulse of what can take a good idea or character, and turn them into a book that’s not just good, but which also has the potential to be a bestseller. Many of his students are current superstars. Stephenie Meyer. Brandon Sanderson. Just to name two. I am hoping to bring a little bit of that to my books, though again I won’t give details because a lot is in flux.

I recall you mentioning something about one of your goals as a novelist being to build the kind of audience rapport that Orson Scott Card managed with his universally acclaimed novel Ender’s Game. Is that still something you’re aiming for?

Absolutely. Some writers aim for narrow audiences with niche or critical appeal. I think this is a recipe for a silent career. I’d rather go the opposite direction. The so-called “Enderverse” is one of the most widely-read science fiction epics of all time. It’s second probably only to Dune, in terms of its audience appeal across generations, and now that it’s going to be on the big screen, with presumably a big budget and some big stars, I expect the Ender’s Game saga to explode all over again.

This is the kind of thing I sort of think all writers should aim for: timeless appeal to generations of people. Not all of us will have it. Probably most of us won’t trip across that specific series of ideas, or characters, or that combination of factors which take a good novel or a very-good novel, or novel series, and elevate them to the status of timeless, commercially-successful, and widely-read classics.

Tolkien did it with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Herbert (and his son, with Kevin J. Anderson) have done it with the Dune books. Orson Scott Card did it with Ender’s Game. Rowling clearly did it with Harry Potter. I fully expect the Potter books and movies to be going strong in twenty years. Maybe even fifty years? That’s the sort of longevity that keeps an author alive in the minds of the public long after he or she is dead. That’s impact!

Any inkling as to what makes that book at once so fun and so resonant?

It’s the story of an underdog who goes on to be the big hero, and it’s set in a near-magical future where the hero gets to journey far from home and engage in fantastic battles, both real and virtual. These are exciting to most people during that crucial period between eight and perhaps twenty-five years of age, when our tastes in music and books and motion pictures and television solidify. Everyone knows about how hard it is growing up. Many of us know what it’s like to be bullied, or even to be the bully. Each of us longs for the chance to shine, to show our quality, as the fictional Faramir once remarked.

Andrew “Ender” Wiggin is the runt who, through his skill and brains, overcomes multiple social and practical obstacles, and ultimately leads humanity to an impossible victory over the Bugger threat. And because the setting is very much current with emerging entertainment technologies which are 3-D and virtual in nature, the Battle School seems as plausible today as it did when Ender’s Game first came out. I could go on, but I think I have covered the main gist of it. I think the Harry Potter books do a lot of the same things, only they were told with magic, not technology. Assuming the motion picture version of Ender’s Game does well, I expect the Enderverse to thrive on the big screen just as much as Potter, or The Hunger Games.

Well, I certainly hope that we get to see a novel from you soon, and as always I look forward to your next appearance in Analog. Thanks again for dropping by to answer some questions, Brad. Best of luck at the Hugo Awards ceremony. I’ll be there in Chicago rooting for you!

Thanks a lot, I appreciate the opportunity to write about this stuff. As for Analog, I know of at least two stories coming in the not-too-distant future. “Strobe Effect” was written with my friend and fellow Analog MAFIA member, Alastair Mayer. And there is the solo stand-alone story, “The Exchange Officers,” which is a military science fiction piece; which makes it a rarity, as Stan Schmidt sets rather high standards for anything military in flavor that comes across his desk.

Dave Hutchinson was born in Sheffield in 1960. After reading American Studies at the University of Nottingham, he became a journalist and is now currently unemployed. He’s the author of five collections of short stories and one novel, and his novella “The Push” was shortlisted for the 2010 BSFA award for short fiction. He has also edited two anthologies and co-edited a third. He lives in north London with his wife and several cats.

Dave, thanks for agreeing to drop by for an interview. The last time I saw “The Incredible Exploding Man,” it was a rough but ingenious first draft freshly written for Jeremy C. Shipp’s Yard Gnome Army Fiction Writing Boot Camp. It was recently published in the acclaimed SF anthology Solaris Rising, edited by Ian Whates, alongside some of the biggest names in the field. Now I’m looking forward to getting Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology and reading it yet again, among a selection of the finest science fiction stories published throughout 2011.

What are your feelings in the wake of this tremendous success?

Not only that, but it’s now on the longlist for the BSFA’s short fiction award. It’s an odd feeling. I did Jeremy’s course — which I can heartily recommend to everyone — because I had a lot of time on my hands, I wasn’t writing anything, and I’d never done a writing course before. I’m completely self-taught — which in my case is just a euphemism for “hasn’t the faintest idea what he’s doing” — and I thought it might help point out the errors in my own writing. Somehow it didn’t occur to me that it would also involve writing a fresh piece of fiction, and when Jeremy dropped that bombshell on us I sort of panicked. You saw the extremely lumpy first draft and you know how bad it was; the fact that it went on to be sold, and then picked for Year’s Best, and then get longlisted, is entirely down to the comments of you and our fellow Boot Campers. It would almost certainly be a different story without all that input. So, how do I feel about it? Very pleased, obviously; I’ve had more people come up to me and say they’ve enjoyed this one story than I think all my other stuff put together. It just seems to have tickled a nerve somewhere.

The story features some pretty freaky science, showcased in the form of a pretty original militarized-superhero tale. Care to explain the basics of the scientific concept that inspired the work?

Hah! You know, even though it’s so recent I have no idea where the story came from. It sort of bolted itself together in my head spontaneously out of all kinds of junk that was floating around. Mostly I made it all up. There’s some stuff in there about string theory and a kind of quasi-dimension called Calabi-Yau Space, but I’ve only the vaguest understanding of that stuff; any half-bright physics graduate would shoot holes through the science.

After the other students and I gave you feedback on the story, how did you go about revising it? What pieces of advice from first readers were most helpful in the second draft?

Basically I realized I’d approached the whole thing wrong. The first draft was in the present tense and I think someone pointed out that it would work better if the central character was the narrator. So I took it to bits and did it again. The opening scene in the White House Situation Room — which incidentally I was quite pleased with — didn’t really impress anyone, so that went. After that was gone I needed a new opening, and once I had that the structure of the second draft settled down. I gave the narrator a sidekick, wrote some back story for the sidekick, and by the time I’d done all that it started to look like a proper story. Very hard work, though.

Was Solaris Rising the first place you sent the story? What was your reaction when you got the news that it would be published alongside works by the likes of Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, et cetera?

Yes. I got an email from the editor saying he had some room and did I have anything to send him. I had something finished, but it was about three times too long, so rather than let the opportunity drop I sent him the second draft of “Exploding Man” as soon as I finished it, and he bought it. It got a little tweaked afterward — the original was set at Fermilab and I suddenly realized that anyone who actually knew anything about Fermilab would tear the descriptions to bits, so I made up a fictional high-energy physics lab in a fictional town in Iowa instead. As for the book? Well, you dream about having a story in an anthology with writers like that. It really is very mighty company to be in.

It’s been about six months since I read the piece, but the overall impression is still very much with me — it’s sort of a frightening story, but the requisite sense-of-wonder that empowers so much of the best science fiction is alive in full force in “The Incredible Exploding Man.” Care to give your own summary of what the plot entails, without giving too much away?

Hm. How to avoid spoilers…? It’s really about an ordinary bloke suddenly being pitched into an extraordinary situation following an accident at a particle accelerator, and the choices he has to make after that.

Your writing is obviously very competent, which means you’ve no doubt been at this a while, honing and refining your craft, but also presumably reading widely in the genre. Who are your biggest literary influences, both within the science fiction section of the bookstore and beyond it?

Within science fiction, Larry Niven and Keith Roberts. I thought quite a lot of Niven’s earlier work had a kind of breezy So-Cal quality to it that I liked very much. Roberts, I thought, was one of our finest science fiction writers — his best stuff has an intense connection with the English landscape, particularly the landscape of Dorset. I would also love to write half as well as Eric Brown, Chris Priest, Charlie Stross, and Peter Hamilton, very considerable writers each in their own way. Outside science fiction, Raymond Chandler and Len Deighton. I just love their way with dialogue.

How long have you been writing, and to what author would you say you most owe the urge to scribble?

I’ve been writing properly since I was sixteen, so about 35 years. I’m not sure there’s one writer who prompted me to start; I read a lot of Heinlein and Asimov and Bester and Niven and E. E. Smith and many other writers when I was a kid, and I guess at some point it all reached a kind of critical mass and I decided to have a go myself.

What other influences have had an impact on your writing, literary or otherwise? Any particular band or artist whose music you enjoy listening to while writing?

I’m deeply fond of the English classical composer Ralph Vaughan Williams; his stuff has the same kind of connection to English landscape that Keith Roberts’s fiction has, and that’s kind of influenced some of the stuff I’ve done. I used to listen to talk radio a lot while I was working; for some reason it annoyed me so much it helped me concentrate on what I was doing. These days I’ll just put my Walkman on shuffle. I’m a big fan of Rush, which I suppose dates me a bit, but I’ll listen to pretty much anything for background.

I love Rush! They’re one of those rare classic-rock bands that only seems to get better and better over the course of their career.

What’s your opinion on the sudden surge of Hollywood-level interest in science fiction? Since the success of Avatar, we’ve seen a sequel to Disney’s Tron, a reboot/prequel to the brilliant classic Planet of the Apes, and Ridley Scott is in talks to direct a second installment in the Blade Runner universe following the release of his latest SF film, Prometheus; hell, science fiction seems to be just about everywhere in the mainstream. Would you say this is a good thing, and what project, rumored or confirmed, has your inner schoolboy-geek giddy with anticipation? (I know I’m most looking forward to the recently announced live-action TV series, Star Wars: Underworld, which producer Rick McCallum is describing as a blend of the Star Wars universe and The Godfather!)

It’s funny; to me there seems to have been a steady stream of big-budget science fiction films for years, going all the way back to Star Wars. It’s just that there are more of them these days. Which is good; I always think that films are a useful gateway drug for potential science fiction readers. What has heartened me enormously is the sheer quality of writing on genre television shows these days. Series like Battlestar Galactica and Carnivale had some of the best writing I’ve seen for a very long time.

Dave, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to drop by and have this talk. I look forward to getting my hands on Dozois’s Year’s Best for 2011, and I wish you continued success in this crazy but thrilling vocation!

Alex, it’s been a genuine pleasure. Thanks for the questions!

“The Incredible Exploding Man” can be found in Solaris Rising, ed. Ian Whates, and will be reprinted in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection, available July 3, 2012, and also featuring fiction by Catherynne M. Valente, Robert Reed, Stephen Baxter, Lavie Tidhar, Jay Lake, Peter S. Beagle, Michael Swanwick, and Tobias S. Buckell, among others.

Follow Dave on Twitter, where he tweets as @HutchinsonDave.

Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He has written six novels, including the New York Times Bestseller Halo: The Cole Protocol and Arctic Rising, due out from Tor Books in February. He currently lives in Ohio with his wife and twin daughters.

The Xenowealth novels are awesome examples of your work, and I know a lot of fans are really excited that you’re going to be picking up where you left off with Sly Mongoose. Care to tell us how much time has passed between Sly Mongoose and the new project, The Apocalypse Ocean?

Roughly fifteen years. Just enough time for everyone to relax, and for some of our characters to have some bitter memories about the conflicts that were winding down and being sorted out at the close of Sly Mongoose.

As a fan of your universe, and especially of intriguing characters like Nashara, I thought the short story “Placa del Fuego” was a great taste of what the Xenowealth still had to offer readers. Part of me even feared that I was getting a peek at what might have been, rather than what is coming. Will that story be contained in the new book to some degree, or is that the end of Tiago’s story?

“Placa del Fuego” is a great taste of what is coming! It was originally the opening chapters of the book, formed into a short story for Clarkesworld after my editor at Tor and I decided to go in a whole new direction. I really want to use Tiago and Kay as important parts of The Apocalypse Ocean, and their points of view will feature heavily in the book. I’ve actually got parts of Kay’s chapters written already that come right after “Placa del Fuego” takes place, where she flashes back to her own life, and how she came to power at Placa del Fuego. Kay’s got these alien-bred abilities to manipulate people and read micro-expressions, and she’s had such a brutal life, she wants retribution for all that. And she has the tools to make everyone around her miserable.

While there were plenty of incredible ideas in Ragamuffin and Mongoose, one of the most interesting things I’ve seen you do in a story was the alien creature called the Doacq, the mouth of which is actually a wormhole. Was there any particular tidbit of scientific speculation that led you to dream up such a character, or did it come as something that was just artistically inspiring?

I’ve always loved the science of wormholes (what science there is; they’re  somewhat more on the fantastic side of it all). The Doacq is a bit on the way-out-there side of things: an alien creature with a wormhole for a mouth. I imagine one would die of radiation from that. But the Doacq is an artificial biological construct, so I’m looking forward to revealing a lot more about it as the book goes along. The idea is mostly a horror image for me, a creature with an impossibly large mouth that can swallow you off to…somewhere, haunting the streets for purposes unknown…

You’ve written a lot of really fun blog posts about your writing process, especially back when you were working on Sly Mongoose and The Cole Protocol. Has drafting a novel changed much since you started to work on Arctic Rising?

Not really, to be honest. I’m still a huge fan of the software Scrivener for organizing myself and making a complex book understandable. I still prefer to write at night. From January to last month I’d actually been working at a morning shift writing and editing some copy for a company. It was a good contract, but the morning hours really hit the fiction productivity hard, I realized. The contract changed right as I was considering quitting to a different time, and I’m now back to writing late at night, and that means more fiction. That led me to feel that I could promise doing something like Apocalypse Ocean and not be over-reaching.

What are you looking forward to the most in returning to the Xenowealth books? Any particular character, or just the scope of your unique universe?

I find Pepper so much fun to write, but I’m honestly looking forward to bringing Nashara back into the mix. She’s really the only personality that’s going to work to balance Kay out.

You’re prefunding the fourth installment of the series through Kickstarter. Do you mind telling us about your motivation to go that route? How does it feel to see the amount of support you’ve been getting in such a short amount of time?

Well, there’s always a dilemma about what to do with a book that’s part of a series. I could shop it around and try to get someone to pick it up. After all, Sly Mongoose is about to come out in paperback around April. The previous books did really well in pre-orders, but hit that awkward bookstore spiral where they kept ordering fewer copies. So overall, people ordering directly compensated, and the core readership of those books grew, but I was getting fewer bookstore sales. Growth stayed flat, or just slightly up in sales for Sly Mongoose.

So I knew finding another publisher for it would be a long haul. Worth it, but a long shot as well, mainly due to the declining bookstore sales.

Then there’s the fact that I like to experiment. I have a short story collection up for sale with Wyrm Publishing, and then I did the eBook myself. I’ve written about how I experimented with the price and sales data. I also published a book about writing with some of my failed stories called Nascence. Again, I was experimenting with eBook sales.

So to me, I decided to use this as a way to test Kickstarter. I’ve seen a number of fascinating projects by people happen via Kickstarter. And Tim Pratt and Mur Lafferty’s successful projects convinced me that it might be a great way to continue the series faster than normal.

In general, I’ve been fascinated by Kickstarter since I contributed to Stacy Whitman’s project to create a new publishing company for multiracial science fiction and fantasy young adult novels. To me, the use of Kickstarter for creative projects was more of a real revolution than eBooks. To me eBooks are an evolution — we are changing some of the middlemen and royalty structures — but ultimately it’s very recognizable. But getting people to prefund a project solves a very real dilemma authors have about how successful the project is before you start it. Knowing that you have a hit in hand before going forward, to be capitalized for your project from the get go, is going to be incredibly empowering.

One thing that seems very exciting is how much more creative control this project is going to allow you. Can you tell us a bit about the design aspects, the editing process, your plans for marketing and so forth?

Pablo Defendini has been a friend of mine forever. He’s a fantastic graphic design guy I met back when he was doing all sorts of cool stuff at Tor. I’ve dug his graphic design ever since I saw a test poster he did for Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. He did the existing art you see at Kickstarter for The Apocalypse Ocean, and if we’re successful, at certain higher backing levels, we’re going to do even more, like create a custom map of the Xenowealth, and do some interior illustrations for the book! This is the sort of stuff I don’t find myself being able to do on a normal novel project, and that is so cool!

I recall reading somewhere that you’re under contract to write at least one more novel for Tor following the release of Arctic Rising. Do you have any idea what you’re going to do next?

I’m working on a novel called Infringement, based on a short story called “A Jar of Goodwill,” also published in Clarkesworld. It’s going to be a compact, near-future space opera about the nature of intelligence, humanity, and conquest.

Since most of us reading this are writers, is there any advice you’d like to offer emerging authors of science fiction?

Read lots of stuff outside the genre; don’t get too caught up in everything. Focus on the writing. Write as much as you can without breaking anything.

Given the current state of the industry — with everything from crowdsourcing to electronic publishing to print-on-demand and online magazines — do you think there’s any “best” or “safe” route to take, or is a career in writing fiction something that can only happen through happy accidents and persistence?

It’s a lot of persistence. No matter what route you take, there’s going to be that need for persistence. All overnight successes are over a decade in the making, or more. I’d say, pay attention to the authors who have the literary life you want, and see how they did it and what it took and is taking to be like them. Don’t buy hype from people telling you how to do anything. Go look at a career you like and see about what that platform is under it.

And in the course of learning about it, you’ll probably forge your own route.

I did the classic thing: I sold short stories to break in and get my name out there, but also to learn a lot of the fundamentals of writing. I sold to various professional magazines (online and print) and anthologies. That, and the fact I kept a frequent blog for many years, got me the notice of voters and an award nomination. That got me the notice of an agent. After writing and polishing a novel many times, we got many rejections, but finally sold that novel. That’s my approach from 1996-2006. It’s the old school way, and it worked nicely for me with a little bit of boost from the blogging.

I still work with Tor/Macmillan for my books, I’ve just added new channels to where my stuff goes. I’m always keeping an eye on how lots of people make a living at fiction! I tend to be platform-agnostic. As long as I get to keep writing fiction, I’m happy.

Any writers or books besides your own you’d like to recommend, especially to science fiction fans?

The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge is out soon, and I’m reading an early review copy of it.

Of all the fun technology you get to play around with in your work, which would you love to use in your own everyday life the most, if you could?

Back in the day, when I was writing Ragamuffin, I was obsessed with augmented reality devices and technologies. Now they’re here, but I live in an area where the data hasn’t spread really. I can’t wait to get out to NYC and use the Layar app on my iPhone soon!