John Langan

John Langan is the author of two novels and three collections of stories. For his novel, TheFisherman, he was awarded the Bram Stoker and This Is Horror awards. With Paul Tremblay, he coedited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters. He is one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards, for whose first three years he served as a juror. Currently, he reviews horror and dark fantasy for Locus Magazine. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with his wife, younger son, and he isn’t sure how many animals, anymore. His next collection of stories, Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies is currently available from Word Horde.

His story, “Second Front”, appears in the Weird World War III anthology.

Tell me about yourself. Where are you from? What’s your background?

I was born and have lived pretty much all my life in New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley; the exception was a two year stint in Albany, the state capital. I am depressingly local. As a child, my dream was to be a comic book artist, and I spent much of my early years immersed in the Marvel comics of the 70s and 80s (and, when they were reprinted, the 60s). My dream changed when I entered high school, in part because my high school had no art program and in part because I discovered Stephen King’s fiction, which made me want to be a writer pretty much immediately. After that, I earned a BA, MA, and M.Phil in English literature. For many years, I was an adjunct instructor at a couple of local colleges, principally SUNY New Paltz. I’ve published two novels and four collections of stories. I also review horror and dark fantasy for Locus magazine.

What kinds of stories do you write? Why?

I write horror stories, because whenever I sit down with pen and paper, it’s where my imagination takes me.

Which of your short stories is your favorite? Why?

Currently, it’s a story called “Altered Beast, Altered Me,” which I wrote for Ellen Datlow’s film-themed anthology, Final Cuts. The reason is that it’s the story in which I stretched myself as far as I could as a writer.

What author has had the greatest influence on your writing? Why?

Reading Stephen King’s Christine made me want to be a writer, and gave me an example of how to write horror stories. Peter Straub’s work reinforced and extended that example. William Faulkner’s novels gave me a sense of the ways in which the deep history of a place and its inhabitants could foster and enrich narrative. As for why, I suppose the simplest answer is that these writers proved most useful for the longest amount of time to my own writing.

Besides yourself, which other contemporary authors would you recommend?

There are a ton of great writers currently at work. A woefully incomplete list would include Laird Barron, Nadia Bulkin, Michael Cisco, Jeff Ford, Glen Hirshberg, Brian Hodge, Stephen Graham Jones, Gwendolyn Kiste, Victor LaValle, Livia Llewellyn, S.P. Miskowski, and Paul Tremblay.

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

I’ve loved the time I’ve spent in France; it would be lovely to live there for longer. If not France, then maybe Edinburgh, which is one of my favorite cities.

Story’s Soundtrack

Each of the stories in this volume evoked certain themes and emotions that can sometimes be approximated with music. The below video is the editor’s best interpretation of the feelings and themes that this author’s story evoked. Please note that this is only the editor’s interpretation. The author did not know this portion of the blog post existed until the editor published it.

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October 5, 2020 2

David Drake

David Drake served as an enlisted interrogator in Vietnam and Cambodia in 1970. The Army took him from Duke Law School and sent him on a motorized tour of both countries with the 11th Cav, the Blackhorse. He learned new skills, saw interesting sights, and met exotic people who hadn’t run fast enough to get away. Dave returned to become Chapel Hill’s Assistant Town Attorney and to try to put his life back together through fiction making sense of his Army experiences. Dave describes war from where he saw it: the loader’s hatch of a tank in Cambodia. His military experience, combined with his formal education in history and Latin, has made him one of the foremost writers of realistic action SF and fantasy. His bestselling Hammer’s Slammers series is credited with creating the genre of modern Military SF. He often wishes he had a less interesting background. He lives with his family in rural North Carolina.

His story, “The Price”, appears in the Weird World War III anthology.

Tell me about yourself. Where are you from? What’s your background?

I was born in 1945 and raised in Eastern Iowa along the Mississippi. I was attending Duke Law School when I was drafted. The army sent me to Vietnamese language school and then to interrogation school, then shipped me to Nam where I was assigned to the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the Blackhorse.

I came back to the World, and finished law school. For 8 years I was assistant town attorney for Chapel Hill, NC. In 1980 I stopped lawyering and spent a year driving a city bus.

What kinds of stories do you write? Why?

I’m best known for my military SF. I write whatever I feel like, though.

Which of your short stories is your favorite? Why?

My favorite story is probably Airborne All the Way. Writing it broke me out of a bad place I was in after a long-time friend finished drinking himself to death.

What’s the craziest thing that’s ever happened to you?

The craziest thing? I suppose agreeing to be rewrite man on Newt Gingrich’s first book, Window of Opportunity. I’ve never been interested in politics, but I decided I couldn’t turn down the challenge.

Tell me about a time you almost died.

We’d gone on a madcap just on the Viet Nam side of the border. I was riding the flame track, a Zippo: 200 gallons of napalm in an aluminum box with a whip antenna 15 feet in the air. We were on the dike between rice paddies when monsoon storm hit us coming from the left side. Lightning hit a 10-foot tree on the dike to my left. Then lightning hit a tree to my right and the storm was over us. All that happened to me was that the book in my pocket got soaked.

Tell us something about you that very few people know.

On that same madcap the village chief came over and offered me and the other interrogator little paper bags of peanuts. I thanked him and asked how long they’d raised peanut, which I didn’t think of in connection with Vietnam.

“Three years,” he said. They’d had a rubber plantation. Then the planes came over and all the trees died. They replanted peanuts because rubber takes too long to grow.

What was your favorite subject in school? Why?

Favorite subject through high school would be History.

What’s your favorite book? Why?

Favorite book–The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett. The viewpoint character is coldly ruthless with no bluster.

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

I live in central NC. The climate is temperate and well watered. El Paso (language school) was too dry and no trees; Iowa got very cold in the winter.

Story’s Soundtrack

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October 4, 2020 2

T. C. McCarthy

T. C. McCarthy is an award-winning and critically acclaimed southern author whose short fiction has appeared in Per Contra: The International Journal of the Arts, Literature and Ideas, Story Quarterly and Nature. Baen Books released his latest novel, Tyger Burning, in July 2019. His earlier debut military science fiction trilogy (Germline, Exogene and Chimera) was released in 2012 and is available worldwide. In addition to being an author, T. C. is a PhD scientist, a Fulbright Fellow, and a Howard Hughes Biomedical Research Scholar.

His story, “Zip Ghost”, appears in the Weird World War III anthology.

Tell me about yourself. Where are you from? What’s your background?

Originally I’m from Leesburg, Virginia, and I’m a scientist who would rather work full time as a writer. All I want is an unlimited amount of money, absolute power over my own destination, and complete and total creative freedom; that should be easy to obtain, shouldn’t it? In all seriousness, I think that the most fortunate people in the world are those that have the luck or the means to do exactly what they love for a career.

What kinds of stories do you write? Why?

I write stories that have literary merit – that at least try to push the boundary of language just a tiny bit. I do it to show that I can. I see a lot of Tor and Orbit authors claiming the mantle of writing “literary SF” but they don’t; they think that by having the most gay characters in a book, or by having alien races that have no gender is edgy or weird – and therefore literary. But it isn’t. Literary is about bending language almost to the point where it breaks but doesn’t; it works.

What author has had the greatest influence on your writing? Why?

Two authors: Michael Herr and Guy Sajer/Guy Mouminoux. Michael Herr’s dispatches was the first book to electrify me because of the way it used language to describe war. Herr was an embed in multiple units during the Vietnam War and he brought almost a sense of beatnik descriptive powers that made the war leap from pages of his book, Dispatches. I like Guy Sajer for kind of the same reason, but less so for language. Sajer recounts his experience of trying to survive in one of the most horrific situations one could find himself in: fighting for the Germans on the Eastern Front of WWII. Sajer takes a matter of fact approach that’s like a constant string of gut punches.

Tell me about a time you almost died.

I almost died of thirst in Death Valley; there’s a reason they call it that, in case you didn’t know. I was an undergraduate geologist doing field work and we decided to take a look at the “Race Track” – a dried lake bed where the boulders move on their own and leave tracks. It’s 30 miles off road, in the middle of nowhere. We were in rental sedans and decided to take an off road trail that went over the nearest mountain range, which was fine until we got stuck and realized that the road had washed out and that we couldn’t get back the way we came; on one side was a cliff, on the other was a mountain and one of the professors started crying because they both were convinced we were dead. It was a hundred and fifteen degrees and there was no shade anywhere. As the youngest one in the party, I grabbed the shovel and rebuilt the washed out sections of the road so we eventually got to civilization, which only took us fifteen hours. I was majorly dehydrated.

If you could live in any time period, when would it be? Why?

The 1990s. If I had my way it would be the 1990s all the time. The music was amazing, cell phones weren’t a big thing so you had to interact with people face to face instead of texting, and I was in my 20s. Now that I’m over 50 everything hurts and the world is on fire.

Story’s Soundtrack

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Martin L. Shoemaker

Martin L. Shoemaker is a programmer who writes on the side… or maybe it’s the other way around. Programming pays the bills, but a second-place story in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest earned him lunch with Buzz Aldrin. Programming never did that! His work has appeared in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Galaxy’s Edge, Digital Science Fiction, Forever Magazine, Writers of the Future, and numerous anthologies including Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF 4, Man-Kzin Wars XV, The Jim Baen Memorial Award: The First Decade, and Avatar Dreams from Wordfire Press. His Clarkesworld story “Today I Am Paul” appeared in four different year’s-best anthologies and eight international editions. His follow-on novel, Today I Am Carey, was published by Baen Books in March 2019. His novel The Last Dance was published by 47North in November 2019.

His story, “The Ouroboros Arrangement”, appears in the Weird World War III anthology.

Tell me about yourself. Where are you from? What’s your background?

I’m a software developer from Michigan. I’m also a lifelong writer, starting my professional fiction career in 2010.

What kinds of stories do you write? Why?

I dabble across genres: mostly science fiction, but occasional fantasy or mystery. I also have a habit of mixing mystery in my science fiction. I prefer near-future, near-space hard science fiction, but I go where the story takes me. I tend to write middle-length works, novelettes and novellas; but I write a lot of shorter work as well, and I’ve written two novels. A third should be released at the same time as Weird World War III.

Why? is a more difficult question. A lot of my writing process is subconscious. Tomorrow I might wake up with the urge to write a historical adventure story. But what would probably happen is that I would realize how much research that would involve, since I’m not much of a historian, and I would set it aside. I don’t like to work that hard! With science fiction I need less research—in part because I can make up many details, and in part because this is where I live as a reader. It’s familiar territory for me. I’m a child of the Apollo era, of Star Trek and 2001, of Heinlein and Asimov and McDevitt. So as the old cliché goes: Write what you know.

Which of your short stories is your favorite? Why?

“Today I Am Paul”, the basis of my first novel, Today I Am Carey (Baen books, 2019). First it’s my most successful story. It was nominated for a Nebula, it won the Washington Science Fiction Association Award, and it was in four year’s best collections. But more important has been the reader response. Readers tell me that they saw themselves in this story of an Alzheimer’s patient, her family, and her android caretaker. They tell me that they feel better because someone understands what they’ve been through with their own loved ones. That’s a high compliment for an author.

What authors have had the greatest influence on your writing? Why?

How much time do you have? A could list dozens, but I’ll restrict it to two.

I was an early subscriber to Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, so I was there when Barry B. Longyear sold his first story. And his second, and his third, and… And not only was he a great writer (“Enemy Mine” is one of my three favorite short works ever), but he was the first emerging writer I knew of. Prior to Longyear, all the writers I read seemed to be established by the time I found them. Like they had always been there. But I watched from the sidelines as Longyear became a professional writer, and so I knew it could be done! It took another four decades for me to follow; but I would never have known how it worked without his example.

But during that forty years, I built a successful career as a software developer; and as a result, much of my reading time was devoted to the science and craft of software. I didn’t make as much time for leisure reading, for science fiction. But a random trip to a bookstore led me to Jack McDevitt’s A Talent for War, and Jack reignited my science fiction flame. That book is one of my favorites, and I’ve gone on to read and reread everything Jack has written. My first Finalist in Writers of the Future, the story that persuaded me to keep writing, was inspired by Jack McDevitt’s Echo. And I was honored when Jack asked me to write the foreword to his collection, A Voice in the Night; and then honored again when he wrote a very kind blurb for my first novel, Today I Am Carey.

And because of my involvement in the writing community, I’ve gotten to meet both Barry and Jack. Some rewards can’t be measured in dollars and cents.

Besides yourself, which other contemporary authors would you recommend?

Here are recent books I’ve enjoyed:

The Art of Madness by A.j. Mayall. He has a talent for mixing and matching tropes from multiple genres and turning them into something fresh and uniquely his. I first saw this in an anthology story in Cursed Collectibles, and I immediately went out and bought this book. I didn’t regret it.
Spine of the Dragon by Kevin J. Anderson. I am sorry to say that I’m mostly burned out on epic fantasy. I’m sure there’s a lot of it that’s very good, but it just doesn’t engage me. This book did.
A Star-Wheeled Sky by Brad Torgersen. Brad wrote a very exciting space opera here, with a nice twist on both science and empire. I’m looking forward to the sequel.Simon Says by Bryan Thomas Schmidt. This is like a classic 70s/80s buddy cop film, only set in the future with one of the buddies being an android. It’s the first in a series, and I’m enjoying all of them.
Split Feather by Deborah A. Wolfe. This book was a delight from start to finish, with a vivid protagonist who discovers her roots in the native communities of Alaska—and in a unique folklore and magic system that Wolfe makes very real.
Level Five by William Ledbetter. This was my absolute favorite book of 2018, a sweeping tale of artificial intelligence, space exploration, and a conspiracy to bring about the end of the world.