DJR: What inspired your
book, Haze?
KK: For some time, several years really,
before I started work on it, I had a scene in my mind. A derelict, probably an
addict, was sitting on the sidewalk in a far future city when a military
officer came striding to offer him redemption . . . for something, I didn’t
know what. But they turned out to be Dan Brennan and Captain Evans. I started
writing from there.
DJR: How does it relate to your other hard
sf?
KK: When I wrote POLAR CITY BLUES, back in
the 1990s, I didn’t realize that it was the beginning of something longer.
After years of working on the Deverry Saga, I wanted to write a one-off,
something that ended! One of my friends, Kate Daniel, thought otherwise. She
wrote almost all of POLAR CITY NIGHTMARE even though my name’s on the cover –
commercial reasons, of course. In these two books, Humanity have settled only a
few exoplanets. The dominant species are the Kar-Li and the H’Allevae (known as
Hoppers), but the Leps are represented too, under the condescending name of
“lizzies”.
In a short story I wrote, “Its Own Reward,” another
sapient species appears, the Val Chiri Gan. This story takes place a long while
before the Polar City pair, when the Old Earth is dying. They may reappear in
ZYON. I’m not sure yet.
SNARE and PALACE are two books more closely linked to HAZE. Both are victims of the sudden closing of the same interstellar shunt. PALACE was another collaboration. I had nothing to do with the sequel, however, and unlike PCN, my name certainly belongs on the cover of PALACE itself.
Since I wrote these books in between other series, the
timeline is pretty vague. I didn’t keep close track. If anyone reads the older
books, I suggest you just ignore the little notes that tell when they’re taking
place in relation to our present time. Here’s how things seem to have shaken
out:
PCB and PCN – 200 years from now. Yes, I was dreadfully
over-optomistic.
HAZE – about 1500 years from now, more or less. By that
time the Republic has grown immensely strong, thanks to our species love of
violence and general greed.
ZYON follows directly on from HAZE.
PALACE and SNARE take place at the same time, some
hundreds of years after Haze and Zyon, that is. Not as far from our time as
their notes say.
By the way, FREEZE
FRAMES isn’t part of this world or sequence. It probably can be thought of as
future fantasy with nods toward real science.
DJR: What authors have most influenced your
writing?
KK: Like all fantasy writers, I’d be lying
if I said Tolkien never influenced me. His books showed me that fantasy could
break out of the Conanesque or Ancient Evil stereotypes that seemed to dominate
the genre back in the 1950s and ‘60s. I devoured his books rather than merely
read them.
When it comes to
science fiction, Ursula LeGuin. I loved SF when I was a teenager, but as I grew
up the relentlessly patriarchal, even misogynistic SF of the 1950s made me stop
reading it. Not long after it was published, I rather randomly came across THE
LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS when I was working in a bookstore. I felt like she’d
opened one of those magic doors that lead to a new alternate reality. Back I
went to reading SF, and yes, mostly that written by women.
DJR: How does your work differ from others
in your genre?
KK: I honestly don’t know. I suspect the
following is true, however. Writers like Nora Jamisin or RF Kuang, just to name
two of the many, break out of the usual patterns and subject matter to tell
amazingly creative stories. I tend to take something familiar, such as a Celtic
based fantasy, and dig in deep to explore it in new ways. New character types,
new “plots”, new details that add the feeling of physical reality to the
setting. All of my work is character driven rather than depending on the story
line itself.
DJR: How does your writing process work?
KK: I always start with the characters.
That is, I’ll get an image or small bit of action featuring a character. Dan
Brennan in HAZE was such a one. When I start writing, I begin to see what happens next. I don’t
outline, I don’t have a plot except in the vaguest way. I do create a
situation, and the plot come out to ‘what are these people going to do about
it?’
DJR: What have you written recently? What
lies ahead?
KK: I’m currently working on a sequel to
HAZE. While many of the same characters will return, there are new ones. And a
whole new planet, Zyon, settled a long time ago by religious fanatics. After
that, I don’t know – at my age, it’s better to think one book at a time.
DJR: A sequel…oooh!
DJR: What advice would you give an aspiring
writer?
KK: Read widely. If you want to write
fantasy, read mysteries and science fiction as well, and of course vice versa.
Read literature as well as genre. Not necessarily modern litfic, but those
“depressing” books you found boring in school. A book does not have to be
entertaining to be worth reading. The
classics will show you many and different ways of writing a story.
Buy Haze here:
Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/3abuz58z
Barnes and Noble: https://tinyurl.com/4nj67j2h
Katharine Brahtin Kerr was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1944 to a family which considered itself British-in-exile far more than American--and Royalist to boot. Since she was taught to read on British books alone, these sentiments resulted in her inability to spell properly in either system, British or American, though fortunately there were no other lasting effects. Just to compound the culture shock, the family moved to Santa Barbara, California, when Katharine was a schoolgirl. She was horrified to realize that in Southern California, beaches are far more important than books. She vowed to leave as soon as possible, carrying out the threat in 1962, when she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. Since then, she has left it only to visit relatives in the British Isles and currently lives in San Francisco. Eventually she had the good fortune to meet up with an old friend from secondary school, Howard Kerr, who loved cats, books, and baseball as much as she does. They were married in 1973 and stayed that way until Howard’s death in 2020.
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