Author Interview: Steven H. Wilson / Part Two

My interview with fiction writer, small press publisher, and podcaster, Steven H. Wilson continues!   Click to read Part One.





 

7.       Your first novel, Taken Liberty, is based on characters and situations from The Arbiter Chronicles audio show.   Are you planning any more printed works from that universe?

 

Working on an Arbiters novel right now, in fact. The working title is “Unfriendly Persuasion.” I’m still in the plotting stages, but plan to begin writing in April and have a couple chapters in my hands at Balticon. 

 

In addition, I’m talking to another author as we speak about novelizing the Arbiters radio shows. I think there are some people who want the whole chronology in prose form, so we’re going to give that a try.

 

 

8.       What inspired Peace Lord of the Red Planet?

 

Couple of things. One, I love SF and comics, but I’ve come to a place in my moral and philosophical journey where I have a big problem with violence. I understand there’s sometimes no option and you have to defend yourself and your family. It troubles me, however, that we perhaps take all the violence and warfare in SF for granted, forgetting that these are horrible forces which, in reality, destroy lives. They’re not fun and exciting. They’re frightening. Or they should be. I fear there’s an assumption on the part of a lot of fans that, without egregious violence and death, you have no story. So going beyond writing SF where the nice guy tries the peaceful solution and then winds up fighting, I decided I wanted to do a story which questions those assumptions that, eventually, you just have to be violent. (That said, yeah, there’s violence in the story. In fact, it opens during the American Civil War, and I’ve had some readers tell me that the level of violence was pretty high.)

 

And anyone who reads Peace Lord’s jacket knows that it’s also a tribute / parody inspired by the John Carter novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. In those, a man of Earth goes to Mars and becomes a great warlord because he’s stronger than everyone else there, due to the atmosphere. I love those stories, and that concept is all well and good as entertainment. But, in real life, especially if you’re an SF fan, you’re generally not the strongest guy in the room. You’re often the weakest. And you have to learn how to succeed in spite of that. 

 

I love classical mythology, so assembling a pantheon of gods for my alien world was fun, and one of the things that made me really want to write the story. 

 

Finally, I was challenged by a friend to do the NaNoWriMo thing where you write 50,000 words in 30 days. And I did hammer out Peace Lord’s 60,000-word first draft within the limit. Then I let it sit for a couple of years, went back and read it, liked the first eleven chapters a LOT, trashed the ending and wrote a new one. Then I published it.
 

 

 

9.       In 1993, you co-founded Farpoint with your mother in law, Bev Volker. Farpoint, an annual science fiction media convention that still runs strong today, occurs every February in Timonium, MD.   I’ve been attending since 1995 and I enjoy it immensely.

 

 

                Give us a brief history of how and why Farpoint came about.

 

Farpoint was the direct descendant of ClipperCon and OktoberTrek. Those cons began in 1984, and the first ClipperCon was my first fan-run con. Within a year, I was on the committee. When the late Marion McChesney decided to stop running ClipperCon (a February con), Sandy Zier-Teitler grabbed the baton and founded OktoberTrek (guess the month.) Sandy ran that for three years, and then it was my turn. I named my new con Farpoint, and invited the ClipperCon/OktoberTrek committee to join me in running it.  At the kickoff meeting, however, Bev announced that she wanted a shot at being chairman. Bev had been our program chair, the toughest job at any con, for years.   So I handled the money, and she chaired it. When Bev stepped down, I stepped up. And when I stepped down in 2001, we moved back to February, and now Sharon Van Blarcom and the aforementioned Sandy are holding the bag. My wife Renee and I are still kibitzing as Operations Managers. We get to tell everyone what to do, but we don’t have to sign any checks!

 

 

                What drives you to continue organizing this convention year after year?

 

A chemical imbalance? Seems the most likely explanation. 

 

Actually, it’s because I love Fandom. It’s a community that welcomed me when I was a kid who didn’t quite fit in. It is, I think, the most egalitarian, encouraging, supportive community on this planet. I want to see it go on so that future weird kids have a place to go where they can be weird in safety and comfort and learn to develop the skills which will someday allow them to conquer this backward planet and remake it in our image. Or something like that.

 

Jokes aside, Fandom encourages us to celebrate fantastic ideas and be creative. And I think anything that does that needs to continue. Conventions are the town meetings of our community, and I’m happy to be one of the people that makes sure we keep gathering. 
 

 

 

10.    When did you start attending conventions?    Which cons do you attend regularly, aside from Farpoint, of course!

 

My first convention was one which shall not be named in 1981. I attended those cons a couple of times a year until I discovered ClipperCon in 1984. I’m a regular at Balticon and Shore Leave (although the last three Shore Leaves have unfortunately overlapped other commitments.)  
 

 

11.    What motivates you to remain so intensely involved in science fiction fandom?

 

I sort of answered that in the Farpoint question. Shoulda read ahead, huh? But in addition to my altruistic (Ha! Don’t have an altruistic bone! Not one!) desire to see Fandom thrive, the fact is that I create a product that there’s a limited audience for. SF that doesn’t have swords, dragons or sparkly undead guys holds a vanishing market share. If I want to actually get my stuff to an audience, I’d better be going to the place where those few, stalwart holdouts also go. 

 

Also, a con is a great place to discover beers and whiskeys you didn’t know existed.
 

 

 

12.     What’s next for you in terms of writing projects whether in print or audio?

 

As I mentioned, I’m writing a second novel set in the Arbiter Chronicles universe.   I’ve also got a collection of short fiction that I need to find time to publish. It’s all done, but producing a title takes a lot of work. Other than that, I’m currently outlining a plan for a third series of Arbiter Chronicles audio dramas. Those will take a few years to get written and produced, but I believe there’s an audience for them, and they’re great fun both to write and to perform. 

 

13.       What does Steve Wilson do when he’s not writing?

 

I’m an IT Manager for the local Fire Department and a New Media Consultant (what else to call an IT guy who publishes books and does a podcast?) I have one son in middle school and one in college, a wife who is happily my partner in life, work and fannish endeavors, and two cats who… well I have two cats and they’re damned adorable even when I’m hunting them down and plotting their exquisitely painful demises. (Demises? Is that really a word?) 

 

I watch a little TV – currently I love Shameless, Big Bang Theory, S___ My Dad Says, Bones, How I Met Your Mother and Weeds.   And I read whenever I can, SF of course, history, biography, mythology and social commentary by people who worship neither Rush Limbaugh nor Michael Moore.   (Oh, wait, are they the same person?)   

Related links:

Steven H. Wilson on Goodreads

Steven H. Wilson on Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki

Farpoint

BaltiCon