Hey, I'm Jinn Tiole from @adultfiction and your host for today's interview. 

I'm about to meet my partner in a very special place, on an island. Steven Brandt already awaits me on the veranda of an old but fancy two storey beach house. He sits in a wicker chair, a small table holds two frosted glasses with a dark liquid. A plate overflows with chocolate candy. I gaze out over the overgrown garden and a stretch of white sand to the turquoise sea. This is a truly magical place. I wonder where the road leads that disappears into the waves not far from the house—the waves that roll onto the white sands with a whisper of secrets and untold mysteries. But I'm here to talk to an author, not dream up my own stories.

JT: Hello Steve, I'm so glad you were ready to meet me. How are you?

SB: Hi! It's good to come back to the old beach house.

JT: I like this setting. Would you mind telling us something more about it?

SB: Well, for those of your readers who don't know, this is the set on which the anthology "Undeath by Chocolate" was enacted. As you may recall, the premise of that story was that it was the year 2040, and you, me, and the other authors involved were now world-famous. We were supposed to be on a bus to ComicCon, and suddenly we found ourselves here with no memory of how we got here and no idea where we were.

*SB scratches his head and looks confusedly around.* We drove in on that road, right? *SB points to the only road."

JT: Now you mention it... and wasn't there a butterfly? *smiles*

Well, I really liked the way you brought ten different stories together to make a whole. I'm sure this was a lot of work. Thank you for this and also for sharing your skills as an editor. Are there any tips you might give future self publishers among our crowd?

SB: I think the biggest thing I've learned is that writers are stronger together than we are apart and that anthologies are a great way to learn, connect, and help each other to achieve success. I've been toying with other ideas for anthologies: "Freebooters in Freefall, a Space Pirate Collection," or maybe "A Field Guide to Night Creatures," which would have a Potter-like textbook feel.

As long as I'm on the subject, let me give a shout-out to some great authors:

@JesseSprague

@GeekAtlas

@RainerSalt

@jinnis

@krazydiamond

@Holly_Gonzalez

@FoolsErrand

@NancyBrandt

@KGillenwater

@ChaytonAvalerias

@The3Dreamers

@AngusEcrivain

JT: Ah, I like the pirate one. If you ever get around to start it, count me in! Now to your book 'Warriors of the Hollow World,' which is also our recommended book of the month. What's it about in your own words?

SB: First, let me point out that the story just won Best Space Opera in the 2017 Ooorah's. I recommend checkout that list. Now to directly answer...

The concept was Star Trek meets Xena, Warrior Princess. :) I first started thinking about the story when Star Trek Voyager debuted. I was disappointed that when we finally got a female captain, the archetype seemed to be a mother figure. Maybe that's not a fair take on Janeway, but that's way she appeared to me. Anyhow, I tried to think who I would prefer, and Xena came to mind. I asked myself what would happen if a technologically primitive, war-like person became captain of a starship? So I created a fake blog called "Star Trek: Against the Federation" in which I put a warrior princess on the deck of a Federation heavy cruiser. Rather than write the episodes, I just wrote synopses and pretended the show had aired (you can find it here, if you're interested: http://stevenrbrandt.com/ntrek/).

Eventually, I had so much fun I wanted to turn it into something real and start writing in earnest. So I de-Trekked it, replacing Vulcans, Klingons, and Romulans with my Metaphors, Ta-Tran, and Viztrel. I made a few attempts to find a publisher, but I knew my writing was not of high enough quality, so I put it aside. After gaining years of writing practice, I resurrected my manuscript and re-wrote it in serial form for Wattpad.

JT: As an old Trekkie myself I can relate to this. Nevertheless for me, 'Warriors' belongs clearly into the sub genre of ethnographic science fiction. The worlds of C. J. Cherryh come to mind, a writer I thoroughly admire for her worldbuilding and insights into potential alien behaviour. Where did you find the inspiration for the different humanoid and alien races?

SB: This came about naturally because my inspiration came from the Star Trek universe. Trek was always about exploring races and racism. A question that always hovers in my mind is how do our natural prejudices play out when races actually have different abilities?

Also, as the adoptive father of a boy with African heritage, I tend to always want to portray stories with racial diversity. You'll find this to be true both in WOTHW, and my other novel, "The Turquoise Bones," published with Clean Reads in which the pink and brown-skinned humans meet the green and blue-skinned Starstealers.

JT: And you play this very nicely, especially the ballast of racial prejudice! On another note, let's talk about technology—or science—in the book. It seems well thought of and plausible. I gather you base it on your amazing professional background. Do you care to elaborate?

SB: I have a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois for doing the first numerical simulations of rotating black holes. A consequence of that work is that I understand how great a barrier light speed is. It's not something we can hope to push past like the speed of sound, but something far more fundamental. Shortcuts through spacetime are the only hope. There are two basic types of shortcuts: wormholes and hyperspace. For a wormhole to be traversable (i.e. for you to go out as well as go in, and not be turned into spaghetti in the process) one needs negative mass energy (not antimatter, which has positive mass but opposite charge). Negative energy is sometimes called "phantom energy." You'll find lots of phantom energy emitters in WOTHW. :)

If you want to find out more about phantom energy and the science of WOTHW, check out the short encyclopedia at the end of the paid version of the story (https://www.amazon.com/Steven-R.-Brandt/e/B01LZYPTFM). There you will find information about my alien cultures, characters, religions, tech, biology, etc.

Does phantom energy exist? Well, something like it is currently proposed as "Dark Energy," the repulsive force observed at the largest scales of the universe. I've been working out other consequences to having negative mass energy, which I plan to make use of in the sequel.

We'll probably never exceed the speed of light in our attempts to journey to the stars, but that shouldn't stop us from dreaming.

JT: I'm sure it won't. Isn't there a saying that dreams make us human? Talking about dreams, a recurring element of 'Warriors' are the Nightmares. On one side there's the Claw people's innate horror, on the other hand Patrick Kerr's personal visions of the past. I suppose this is more than coincidence?

SB: I have a fascination about what's going on in the dark depths of our subconscious. Human beings are interesting, in part, because we don't always know why we do things and surprise even ourselves. I'm also fond of the trope where characters have partial memory loss and remember the truth of their origins only gradually.

I loved the moment in Divergent where Beatrice surprised herself by declaring she will leave Abnegation and enter Dauntless.

JT: Your protagonists are not only faced with their personal and racial dark memories but also with philosophical and theological discussions and existential decisions. Is there an underlying message for the reader?

SB: In my opinion, if you walk away from a story with a clear understanding of a message or moral lesson was, the writer has probably failed. Hopefully, what I have done is to prod people to think about (and, hopefully, past) their beliefs, biases and prejudices, whatever they are.

When the movie Avatar, for example, made some of its obvious references to Bush and the war in Iraq, it took me out of the movie. Regardless of one's feeling about such a moral lesson, it hurts the story and re-awakens all of the viewer's cognitive biases.

However, that being said, I have a theme that racial hatred is almost always reduced or eliminated by understanding. This repeats in a lot of ways. Olara, the hero, begins by hating the people known as the Door Clan. Though she does not appreciate it at first, understanding her enemy and overcoming her feelings for them are key to her own race's survival.

I suppose I am also hoping the reader comes away with a more positive feeling about spirituality. Our society seems too focused on the negative aspects of that dimension of our lives.

In my other novel, "The Turquoise Bones," which takes place in a bronze age culture on an alien world, I put the reader in the position of religious characters whose beliefs are all true because they come from an astronomy textbook. If it worked the way I intended, both atheists and believers will set one foot in the other's shoes for a while.

JT: This sounds like an intriguing concept. As a writer, I often develop a special relationship with one or several of my protagonists, and not always with the main character. Whom of the players in 'Warriors' do you relate with more than with others?

SB: Interesting question! Patrick Kerr was, initially, supposed to be that character. After all, he's more like me than anyone else. However, I find myself identifying with Ketzhura in a lot of ways. Her act is almost together, but she's constantly realizing how little she understands.

One thing I find interesting about the writing process is the way our characters vocalize our subconscious. Sometimes I write a bit of dialogue, "This is stupid because...." and realize the character is raising a valid criticism of the story.

JT: Ah, I know the feeling only too well... Somewhere, I heard the word sequel. Can we count to read further adventures of Olara, Ketzhura and Patrick on Wattpad soon?

SB: Yes! That is definitely the plan! I have a rough draft of the sequel finished. I don't want to promise a specific timeline because, well, writing is not my full time job and I never know quite how much time I'll have. If all goes well, we'll start hearing from them again early next year.

It might be worth pointing out that while Olara, Ketzhura, and Patrick do not make an appearance in "The Turquoise Bones," the story is set in the same universe. The connections might not be obvious, but I will point out that both stories mention a non-humanoid race called the Starfarers.

In the meantime, my current project is a high fantasy (which I hope to finish before the year is out). It is a sequel to the book I wrote with my wife, "Sword and Illusion." This story follows a girl named Greenblade who lives on an island race of matriarchal warriors called the Sarl. She wants to be a warrior, but her mother has forced her to train with the religious instead. Only now, at age 16, can she decide for herself what she wants to be. No one expects her to do well in the annual fighter competitions. She's smaller than the other girls and less muscular, but she was trained by a spirit warrior from long ago and wields a battle magic that she is only partly aware of.

In other news, I have a completed novel in the paranormal genre which I'm trying to find a home for. It's called "Hell-Touched" and is about a young woman on modern day earth who finds herself becoming apprenticed to an evil but powerless necromancer from another world in hopes of stopping a greater evil.

Yes, I have too-many-project-itis.

JT: Well, then I won't keep you longer from all the writing that waits for you! Thank you for your time, and can you please tell me how to leave this island paradise? I can't really remember how we did it the last time...