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.
