Ask the Author: T.C. Rypel
Answered Questions (4)
T.C. Rypel
Hi, J.W. and thanks for your interest. I wasn't aware that they had been removed from Audible and will have to look into why. Thanks for the heads-up!
T.C. Rypel
Hi again, Dean.
A Gonji movie, or mini-series, has been a dream talking-point by many people over the years. I have a lot of visual-effects friends in Hollywood, in particular, who have expressed a desire to work on such a project. Alas, none of them has the clout to win over the deep-pockets producer that would be needed.
I have one VFX pal of many years' standing, in fact, who works on GAME OF THRONES for HBO and has been known to leave copies of Gonji books lying around the Belfast set of that popular show! His own indie production company has bought the screen rights to an old horror story of mine (as yet unproduced). He'd love to do Gonji. But that dream remains out of reach.
As for an ideal actor to play Gonji... I don't have a definitive known actor I'd favor. DARK VENTURES cover artist Larry Blamire and I discussed this in depth during his creation of the DARK VENTURES cover painting. Gonji Japanese/Norwegian, so we looked at some pix of the rare folks of that particular mixed extraction. Larry's DV cover character comes as close as I've seen to my own vague notion. We threw out various names out of movie history for reference. The nearest approximation we could agree on in terms of Gonji's rather exotic blend was, ironically, also a "Dean": 1960s actor Dean Fredericks, when he wasn't going blond in films like THE PHANTOM PLANET.
A Gonji movie, or mini-series, has been a dream talking-point by many people over the years. I have a lot of visual-effects friends in Hollywood, in particular, who have expressed a desire to work on such a project. Alas, none of them has the clout to win over the deep-pockets producer that would be needed.
I have one VFX pal of many years' standing, in fact, who works on GAME OF THRONES for HBO and has been known to leave copies of Gonji books lying around the Belfast set of that popular show! His own indie production company has bought the screen rights to an old horror story of mine (as yet unproduced). He'd love to do Gonji. But that dream remains out of reach.
As for an ideal actor to play Gonji... I don't have a definitive known actor I'd favor. DARK VENTURES cover artist Larry Blamire and I discussed this in depth during his creation of the DARK VENTURES cover painting. Gonji Japanese/Norwegian, so we looked at some pix of the rare folks of that particular mixed extraction. Larry's DV cover character comes as close as I've seen to my own vague notion. We threw out various names out of movie history for reference. The nearest approximation we could agree on in terms of Gonji's rather exotic blend was, ironically, also a "Dean": 1960s actor Dean Fredericks, when he wasn't going blond in films like THE PHANTOM PLANET.
T.C. Rypel
Hi, Dean. Thanks for the interest!
As you no doubt are aware, the five extant novels of the Gonji series, originally released by Zebra Books in the 1980s, are all available in handsome re-issued editions (and Kindle and audio books) from Wildside Press. I've tweaked and expanded all of them. So those are the authorized editions.
The latest book, DARK VENTURES, features the only two shorter Gonji stories, a definitive series creation/publication history, and a teaser excerpt from the coming Gonji origin epic, BORN OF FLAME AND STEEL.
The listing of the books here at Goodreads is kind of chaotic, and I'm not sure how to straighten it out. Here are the Wildside titles, available at Amazon, in the order I'd recommend reading them:
DARK VENTURES
RED BLADE FROM THE EAST
THE SOUL WITHIN THE STEEL
DEATHWIND OF VEDUN
FORTRESS OF LOST WORLDS
A HUNGERING OF WOLVES
You can check out my Amazon Author page, which lists them a little more coherently. Friend me (as "Ted Rypel") on FB. There's also a "Gonji Fictional Character" FB page, with pix and info. And you can read a sample chapter from the DARK VENTURES anchor story at BookDaily.
No current plans for a hardcover release. But that would be grand!
As you no doubt are aware, the five extant novels of the Gonji series, originally released by Zebra Books in the 1980s, are all available in handsome re-issued editions (and Kindle and audio books) from Wildside Press. I've tweaked and expanded all of them. So those are the authorized editions.
The latest book, DARK VENTURES, features the only two shorter Gonji stories, a definitive series creation/publication history, and a teaser excerpt from the coming Gonji origin epic, BORN OF FLAME AND STEEL.
The listing of the books here at Goodreads is kind of chaotic, and I'm not sure how to straighten it out. Here are the Wildside titles, available at Amazon, in the order I'd recommend reading them:
DARK VENTURES
RED BLADE FROM THE EAST
THE SOUL WITHIN THE STEEL
DEATHWIND OF VEDUN
FORTRESS OF LOST WORLDS
A HUNGERING OF WOLVES
You can check out my Amazon Author page, which lists them a little more coherently. Friend me (as "Ted Rypel") on FB. There's also a "Gonji Fictional Character" FB page, with pix and info. And you can read a sample chapter from the DARK VENTURES anchor story at BookDaily.
No current plans for a hardcover release. But that would be grand!
T.C. Rypel
The Gonji origin epic, BORN OF FLAME AND STEEL. This will actually be the seventh book in the series but the first set in Gonji's homeland of 16th-century Japan. Albeit, of course, this is an alt-history, heroic-fantasy version of Japan. The time seemed right to answer a lot of questions about the land Gonji had been exiled from, what his youth had been like until his flight to seek his Destiny in the West.
The first five novels in the Gonji series (now in re-issue from Wildside Press) began in the middle of Gonji's life of adventures, which grew to encompass a background concerning sinister off-world tyranny that had quietly manipulated our Earth's history for millennia. The recently released sixth book, DARK VENTURES, was the first series book with shorter tales and an essay that chronicles the creation and publishing history of Gonji.
BORN OF FLAME AND STEEL is quite an ambitious challenge, in some ways rivaling the epic "Deathwind Trilogy" that began the series back in the 1980s. For one thing, Gonji's parents were a trip to get to know, in BORN. His samurai father was a young daimyo---warlord---and his mother, a wild and vengeful shipwrecked neo-Viking shieldmaiden. Their meeting during an apparent apocalyptic event, with the Japanese islands at ground zero of a multi-dimensional gateway overlap, became so portentous that what began as a novella demanded the richness of treatment that only a novel could provide.
The story of Gonji's eventual birth (and mandate from Destiny itself) during the year-and-a-half-duration cataclysm even includes a possible origin for the classic kaiju---the giant monsters that so famously overrun Japan in the Toho Films movies. The delightful, if intense, challenge was to ground all the spectacular events deeply in the HUMAN experience of it all. It's a survival story of grim magnitude, which changes not only significant lives in my alt-history but also, to some degree, even the geography of Japan. (Our earth is one of many concentric planets in an interdependent, out-of-phase system---one of the key facets of the series mythology.)
So it's quite an undertaking.
The first five novels in the Gonji series (now in re-issue from Wildside Press) began in the middle of Gonji's life of adventures, which grew to encompass a background concerning sinister off-world tyranny that had quietly manipulated our Earth's history for millennia. The recently released sixth book, DARK VENTURES, was the first series book with shorter tales and an essay that chronicles the creation and publishing history of Gonji.
BORN OF FLAME AND STEEL is quite an ambitious challenge, in some ways rivaling the epic "Deathwind Trilogy" that began the series back in the 1980s. For one thing, Gonji's parents were a trip to get to know, in BORN. His samurai father was a young daimyo---warlord---and his mother, a wild and vengeful shipwrecked neo-Viking shieldmaiden. Their meeting during an apparent apocalyptic event, with the Japanese islands at ground zero of a multi-dimensional gateway overlap, became so portentous that what began as a novella demanded the richness of treatment that only a novel could provide.
The story of Gonji's eventual birth (and mandate from Destiny itself) during the year-and-a-half-duration cataclysm even includes a possible origin for the classic kaiju---the giant monsters that so famously overrun Japan in the Toho Films movies. The delightful, if intense, challenge was to ground all the spectacular events deeply in the HUMAN experience of it all. It's a survival story of grim magnitude, which changes not only significant lives in my alt-history but also, to some degree, even the geography of Japan. (Our earth is one of many concentric planets in an interdependent, out-of-phase system---one of the key facets of the series mythology.)
So it's quite an undertaking.
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