Thursday, May 10, 2012

Jack Campbell Interview, Part the Second


I posted the second half of my interview with Military SF author Jack Campbell yesterday.  I also finished Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier Invincible on Tuesday and liked it very much, near the top of my favorite SF reads so far this year.  Without further ado, here's the link and a bit from the interview:

With the mythic feel you’ve injected into The Lost Fleet do you see yourself ever turning your pen to fantasy or is Military SF where you’ll be spending the forseeable future?

I have done a few fantasy stories. "Highland Reel" was recently accepted for the upcoming anthology Rip Off! edited by Gardner Dozois. "Mightier Than the Sword" was in the anthology Turn the Other Chick, and I've done a variety of short fiction in other magazines, especially Analog. Many of those stories have involved time travel of one sort of another, like my last story in Analog ("Betty Knox and Dictionary Jones in the Mystery of the Missing Teenage Anachronisms").

I also have a series ready to go that I call "steampunk with dragons." The Dragons of Dorcastle is SF, but with a fantasy feel in many ways. That series let me play with horse cavalry, steam locomotives, sailing ships and (yes) dragons. I just need a publisher to snap it up. One of the odd things in that respect is that I believe that readers are interested in seeing different things from a writer they enjoy, but publishers tend to want an author to keep doing the same thing that worked last time. I just need to convince a publisher that I really do know what I'm doing when it comes to writing stories.

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