Gavin Smith - Four Way Interview

Gavin G. Smith is the Dundee-born author of the hard edged, action-packed SF novels Veteran, War in Heaven, Age of Scorpio, A Quantum Mythology and The Beauty of Destruction, as well as the short story collection Crysis: Escalation. He has collaborated with Stephen Deas as the composite personality Gavin Deas and co-written Elite: Wanted, and the shared world series Empires: Infiltration and Empires: Extraction. His latest title is The Bastard Legion.

Why science fiction?

Good question. I grew up with 2000AD and then all the first wave cyberpunk writers, and then a little later the new space opera writers like Iain M. Banks and Peter F. Hamilton. So a love of the genre is an obvious answer. I do think that the speculative genres offer us an excellent tool to take tricky problems facing humanity an comment, warn or even cathartically deal with them. It’s also nice to escape to other places.

Why this book?

After finishing writing the Age of Scorpio trilogy I felt like I’d been trying to fly before I could run. As much as I loved it I suspect it’s a little self indulgent. I felt like I needed to hone my writing a bit more, and I wanted to write something that was simpler and hopefully fun (though people still seem to think it’s very dark). In music terms I’d done my prog album and now I wanted to write some stripped down rock’n’roll.

What's next?

Good question. I’ve written a couple of novellas written, possibly in another genre… I’m still plugging away at the script writing, I’m hoping to have a short script of mine filmed in late Feb and I have a feature length script that I have some rewrites on but is garnering some interest. In terms of novels I’m giving some thought to a day-after-tomorrow cyber-thriller.

What's exciting you at the moment?

All sorts of things, I’m a media junkie. I’m trying to work out what a 21st C bible as a computer game would look like, in fact I’m finding the whole culture around gaming very interesting at the moment. The resurgence of cyberpunk sort of makes sense particularly with the efforts some people are going to to make the world (more) dystopian but it still took me by surprise.

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