Roly asked Steven Campbell:

How (if not available in an interview online) did you come across deciding to make a "Cyberpunkesque" series like Hard Luck Hank, and what influenced this creatively hilarious yet dark series? (I think that may have been two questions wrapped in an inevitable digital burrito).

Steven Campbell I don't think there was ever a single factor that made me do it. One thing I wanted to avoid was space ships. I wanted to concentrate on actual people, but in really advanced technological environments, that becomes harder because the technology is the key factor. In Star Trek, it's really the ship that is important. If that same crew was on a junky space ship, they wouldn't be significant at all. Likewise, if you look at Star Wars, small ships run away from big ships--unless they have some stupidly large flaw built into them. Ships have been done in science fiction. And they've been done quite well.

I'm also not interested in hard science fiction. I have nothing against it and used to read it quite a bit. I could make up particles and make up languages and make up this and that, but it's really the story I enjoy, not how toaster ovens work in a science fiction universe.

I sat around thinking about how in wars like WWI and WWII we gave out a lot more medals. And one reason was because a single person could be called upon to do more. They could charge machine gun emplacements or run across no man's land. It was possible to be a hero in older times. In modern wars, we call air strikes and sit in tanks and work in platoons with artillery support and satellites. So I thought about how to make the individual a big deal again.

One, was to ground them on a single space station. Explore the city's dynamics. A city is a huge thing and pretty exciting. I also like violence as humor. Kind of like Pulp Fiction. Not slap stick, because if there is no fear, it's just silly. The problem is, if you get shot once, you're kind of done, funny or not. So I could either change the physics of the universe, change the technology so they didn't have advanced weapons, or make my hero somewhat invulnerable. I did the last two. The HLH universe has space ships but they have weapons that are about modern earth level, which isn't very realistic. And Hank can take a lot of abuse and keep going. And that led to quite a growth in his character.

I know this seems like an awful lot of thinking for a comedy series, but this is the stuff that went into it. Putting them on a city out in the middle of nowhere made the people important. A single person could change his whole environment. But that also led to the logical corruption of Belvaille. And Hank being Hank, led to the formation of his personality.

And it's funny but there's very little in the way of science fiction comedy. There's lots of fantasy comedy. But every time I say the genre everyone just asks if it's like Hitchhiker's Guide. A number of agents even told me that it couldn't be done because sci-fi readers are serious. So after a while I was so disheartened by that, I stopped telling them it was comedy. Finally, I said screw it, I think people can like science fiction AND comedy without their heads exploding and I self-published. I'm not buying any private islands, and crashing remote control sharks into each other, but the response from the books has been great.

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