Interview with Author Joseph Hurtgen

I had a such a good time talking to K.M. Jenkins for her author interview, that I’ve decided to do a whole lot more of them! I find it really fascinating to learn what other authors find interesting and what inspires them to write!

Tell us about yourself! What would you like readers to know about you?

I’m an English professor and a family man. My perfect day includes writing 500 words, reading for a couple hours, adventuring at the park with my daughter, and having good discussions with my students about stories. I’m not your Harlan Ellison type, driving around in a muscle car and skidding to a stop to jump out for a fight. I’m a passivist, permanently in lecture mode, endlessly analyzing. Everything is a theory.  

What book or books have most influenced you as a writer?

Let me start by apologizing here as I tend to try to think in syllabus format as a result of my profession. The books I’ve listed could best be organized into three different classes: Classic Science Fiction; Cyberpunk Literature; Postmodernism.

Classic Science Fiction:

Contact by Carl Sagan; 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke; The Space Merchants by Kornbluth and Pohl; The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Time Machine, and The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

Cyberpunk Literature:

Islands in the Net, Distraction and Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling; Neuromancer by William Gibson; Snow Crash and The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson; Software by Rudy Rucker; 

Postmodernism:

Simulacra and Simulation and America by Jean Baudrillard; The Original Accident and Pure War by Paul Virilio; The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland by Thomas Pynchon; White Noise by Don DeLillo; Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson 

What are you doing to de-stress during the pandemic? Is there any coping mechanism you’d recommend?

I get outside.

“Have you reckoned the earth much?” —Walt Whitman

It’s a rhetorical question. A rich life is a life outdoors, even if it’s just in your backyard. One of the secrets to living well is to connect with nature. I tend to live in my own head a lot, so getting out helps me get to a place of mindfulness. You go out and look at a massive tree, watch the breeze gently play with the branches. The ruffling leaves look like ocean waves or maybe they just look like leaves, either way it’s beautiful. You spend some time thinking about the longevity of a tree. Trees common to Kentucky can hit two or three hundred years. It’s rare to find anything that old now, but they have the potential for it. There’s awe there. Feeling awe is good for the human spirit. So, by day I feel awe for the trees, the shape of hills, and then by night, you can stargaze and get tangled in the mystery of time and space.

Do you like playing video games? What’s your favorite game right now? Has a video game ever influenced you as a writer?

Absolutely! I’m typically drawn to strategy games. I’m not sure if chess counts, but I’ve played it online off and on for decades now, ever since Yahoo.com created an online gaming platform. My favorite games in recent years are Faster Than Light, Cardhunter, and Sins of a Solar Empire. Though I’m more likely to run an emulator to play something weirdly old like Castles II, Out of This World, or Top Gear 3000. Abandonware is forever. 

Two of my books, Tower Defender and tae-kwon-GO, my work in progress, feature video games played in virtual reality and augmented reality. I’ve never played those types of games myself, but the competitive nature of online gaming as well as the community building that takes place in an online game have given me a lot to draw on in my books.

Tower Defender by Joseph Hurtgen, interviewed by Alexis Lantgen at LunarianPress.com

What advice do you have for other writers or people just getting started in writing?

Read as much as you can. Not just fiction either. Read books about the craft of writing. Read grammar books. Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences helped me a lot. So did Constance Hale’s Sin and Syntax. I like some advice that I recently read from William Gibson. Take care of your gums, he said. Finally, enjoy your life. Even if no one else in the world knows what you’re up to, don’t let that stop you from enjoying your own creative process and the art you make.

How do you choose what books you want to read?

I’m a little insane with books. I’m a book hunter. I horde the things and simultaneously try to read everything, particularly science fiction, philosophy, political science, and works that academia loosely calls theory. As often as possible, I’ll read Nebula and Hugo award winners and nominated works. Those books aren’t necessarily my favorite, but they provide a good window for the development and alterity of the genre. As far as more scholarly works I read, I follow the yellow brick road of citations. Scholarly writers are forever citing other thinkers, other writers. So, you read Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Happen and he mentions Paul Virilio. That becomes the next read.

What technology or innovations or scientific discoveries have inspired your work?

Brain to computer interfaces have my interest piqued. Funny enough, this technology is part of our archive of past futures. If you go back 35 years to Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix, he talks about two distinct types of human life extension therapies or modes, perhaps. The mechanist and shaping modes. Mechanists turn the body into a human/cyborg hybrid. Whereas, shapers use genetic interventions to alter bodies from the inside out. If humanity doesn’t impale itself on various manmade extinction events in the next century, then the human experience will most likely be very different. Namely, we’ll hit the medical singularity, the point when medical interventions successively extend human life by one year, meaning that barring serious traffic accidents or Highlander-esque swordfighting competitions, you can live forever. We’ll be fitted together with a lot of vacuum tubes and chrome, but we’ll benefit from living in unison with ten generations of family rather than three or four. The downside is that family get-togethers will get pretty expensive.

Joseph Hurtgen, author of Tower Defender and Sherman, interviewed by Alexis Lantgen at LunarianPress.com

Find out more about Joseph Hurtgen:

Blog: Rapid Transmission

Books: Sherman and Tower Defender

Twitter: @JosephHurtgen

Find out About the World of “The Starborn Legacy” by Leslie Conzatti for OWS CyCon 2019

Welcome to another fantastic stop in our World-building Showcase blog hop! On this stop, we’re highlighting a story that isn’t dependent on the Earth for the action, but you can find a full list of authors and topics on the OWS Cycon website. Let’s dive in!

Welcome Leslie Conzatti!

Before we dive in to the nitty gritty, what is “The Starborn Legacy” about?

“The Starborn Legacy” tells the story of a teenage girl struggling to find her place in a faraway space colony. She wants to connect and bond with her mother, but it’s been hard when the girl’s grandmother--a famous interplanetary explorer--spent most of the mom’s formative years absent and traveling among the stars, where eventually she ended up passing away while on a mission. The mom still hasn’t really come to terms with that, and it’s wearing on her own relationship with her daughter.

On the same day the girl’s father returns from an excursion to an unexplored area of the planet, she makes a stunning discovery about the legacy her grandmother left behind--and a mysterious virus threatens the lives of many colonists… including her mother. The girl faces a choice: Will she stay, and potentially save her mother’s life, or will she leave to an unknown destination to claim her destiny among the stars?

1.Did you invent any new slang or terminology during your world-building process?

Yes I did, and I had a lot of fun doing it! Inventing new terms by just adding “Dome” to the various living or activity spaces (“ExploraDome”, “ResiDome”, and so on) and even inventing an AI schoolteacher for the kids of the colony, naming her “Ivy-Rue” (or AI-V RU, an Automated Intelligent Virtual Response Unit). Then, of course, there is the term “Starborn”, a term used to refer to the people from the “Solarian” system (our solar system) who originally set out to colonize other planets, since to every other system, our Sun would be merely another star in the sky.

2. What do people in your world do for fun? Are there sports, games, music, or other activities they do in their free time?

It’s not directly mentioned or expounded much in the short story, but in my mind, there’s a whole lot in this colony, even though it isn’t too advanced. There’s a Commerce Dome, so they have an economic system in place for financial transactions. There is the Central Construct, the huge, main area that all the different Domes connect to: there’s shopping, and like a combination science/history museum and library in the ExploraDome. There are many families in the colony, so of course they wanted to plan for places and activities that families and children could enjoy. The only thing is that radiation from the “sun-star”, Taurus, and some hitherto-unknown chemicals and minerals in the air and the soil make anything outside the climate-controlled Domes uninhabitable… but terraforming is in process still!

3. What kinds of transportation and other interesting technology do your characters have access to? Are they ahead, behind, or a mix of different kinds of tech compared to where we are now?

Ahead, definitely, since this is a far-future setting. For example, the island in the kitchen is a large glass computer touchscreen, used for video calls, receiving and sending messages, and all sorts of things one would use a tablet for. Also the kitchen comes with an “InstaChef”, a smart cooking implement equipped with dozens of recipes, to provide meals within minutes at the touch of a button. They don’t need much long-distance transportation because everything in the colony is still within walking distance at this point.

4. Do you have different races or enhanced humans with their own unique abilities inhabiting your world?

Not unless you count the “Starborn.” They are the ones who still possess the DNA of the original pioneers from Earth. Genetic manipulation and generations of living in colonies on other planets have nearly eradicated this last connection to Earth--humanity has adjusted to living in strange, artificial environments--but there is rumor that there are still Starborn living among the colonists. Perhaps the famous “failed colony” where everyone died of a mysterious malady could have been composed entirely of Starborn.

The Process

5. When you build a world, what is your process like? Do you do a lot of research upfront, wing it completely, or something in between?

I definitely winged it this time around. I think I took inspiration from shows like Firefly, especially with the concept of terraforming--in fact, I’m pretty sure that was as much “research” as I did, to decide the specific date of the story based on the fictional “timeline” of the history of terraforming on some fan website. To me, the world-building wasn’t as important as establishing the characters and working on them.

6. How central is the setting of your story to the story itself? Is it more of an interesting backdrop, or is it integral to the events of the story?

A little bit of both, maybe? On the one hand, it’s kind of just a cool backdrop because it’s a colony of people living somewhere that isn’t Earth, but to all of them, it’s the only life they’ve known, living on ships or in domes. To actually live in the atmosphere of a planet, to be able to walk freely on a planet’s surface seems like a distant dream.

On the other hand, it’s kind of integral because of a special connection the characters have with the titular “Starborn Legacy.” Like, if they weren’t on a planet so unlike Earth that it would almost kill some of the humans, then the story would be missing a massive element!

7. When helping the reader get to know the world you built, what techniques do you use? Do you tend to be upfront about things, or keep the reader in the dark and feed them only bits at a time?

Generally, when I’m writing a short story, there isn’t a lot of room for world-building, and very often, not all the details get answered. For “The Starborn Legacy”, there is a lot of information that is hinted at, “behind-the-scenes” things that might not be directly stated in the narrative, but are definitely affecting the characters, extra information that colors the way they interact with each other. A lot of the history between Reese (the girl) and her mom is implied through things they say, or the way they kind of stay very superficial with their conversations.

I like to be up-front as much as possible, to give the reader a clear picture of what’s going on--but there are times when the absence of information carries more significance than an abundance of it, so there is a sequence of moments in “The Starborn Legacy” where certain characters respond to a stimulus that isn’t fully described until it’s almost too late.

8. How did you come up with the storyline for “The Starborn Legacy”? Is it a brand-new story, or a combination of several different ideas?

As a matter of fact, the inspiration for “The Starborn Legacy” came from two different short stories I wrote years before, as a part of a serial novel I threw together just for the fun of it. One was a story about a mother and daughter working through the mother’s bitterness toward her “famous world explorer” mother’s absence in her life, and through it they discover a series of clues that lead to the revelation that the grandmother had actually discovered the Fountain of Youth and wanted to leave that discovery for her daughter (or, as it happened, her granddaughter.) The second was kind of a darker, horror story, about a colonel sent to investigate a space colony where everyone mysteriously dropped dead… and while he’s there he encounters a deranged android and discovers (too late) that his pilot was hiding a deadly secret…

Neither story by itself was quite the tone I wanted for my submission, so I took elements of both stories (the mother and daughter, the legacy, the “Starborn” concept, the mysterious, fatal disease, the failed space colony, among other things!) and worked them together into a separate story that bore many hallmarks of one story and the other, but at the same time, was very much its own tale.

Let that be a lesson to any writers out there: You might feel like an idea you wrote in the past (or the one you’re writing right now) doesn’t sound right, or it feels like you’re just writing meaningless crap--but don’t discount any ideas! You just might find a way to take the good parts of the idea and make them fit better into a brand-new story later on down the road! You never know!

9. Did you experience any difficulties while building your world? Any facts that refused to cooperate or inconsistencies you needed to address while editing?

Oh definitely! I went through like three or four different drafts, getting input from an editor. I had originally started the story from the point of view of the mother, just so the reader could understand why she’s responding a certain way to her daughter--but, as the editor pointed out, it created an inconsistency in point of view, and a short story should stick to one perspective only. There were a few more details that clashed as a result of trying to combine two vastly different stories--there are two letters written in the story, and I had to really comb through every single sentence to make sure I included all the necessary information, and remained suitably vague on those details that the characters (and the reader) shouldn’t yet know about. There was also the timing of everything--two days here, a couple hours there, and how much is happening in the space of a single day?--that was tricky to figure out and keep track of--I was so grateful to have help!

Where can people find you on the web?

Thanks for reading all about “The Starborn Legacy”! If you’re interested in reading the story (and others like it, written by a host of authors who sell wayyy more books than I do!) then you can find it in the charity anthology DROWNED IN MOONLIGHT, a collection of stories, poems and art dedicated to the memory of Carrie Fisher. Just follow the hyperlinked text for the Amazon listing!

BONUS: Would you like to read the two original stories I mentioned, that served as the inspiration for “The Starborn Legacy”? Well, you can! I’ve posted them both on Wattpad! Click the hyperlinked text >HERE< to read the first one, “The Legacy”, and click >HERE< to read “The Vega Effect.” Hope you enjoy!

For more stops on our World-building Showcase, visit the tour page on the OWS CyCon website.

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Odin Oxthorn Shares Their Greatest SciFi Gadget for OWS CyCon 2019

Welcome to another fantastic stop in our Greatest Gadgets blog hop! On this stop, we’re highlighting awesome Scifi tech, and you can find a full list of participating authors and topics for this hop on the OWS Cycon Website. Let’s dive in!

Welcome Odin!

Hi there! Thanks so much for having me!

Before we dive in to the nitty gritty, what is Sleepless Flame about?

Sleepless Flame is a fast-paced mission style cyberpunk thriller featuring a nonbinary protagonist. You follow the exploits of Nara, an alien war criminal that made a new life for herself as a mercenary in the Undercity of Arcadia.

Things get interesting for her when the unconscious body of the heir of the largest Biotech conglomerate lands at her feet. The same company that also has the largest price on her head. Oh what to do?

What can you tell us about the piece of SciFi tech you’re featuring today?

Let me introduce you to the InSpec Araknyd Visualization Assistant. Ranked number 1 in reconnaissance and user experience.

This tiny AI will give you the power of sight from another camera’s eyes! Just switch it on then drop it, and  this ingenious piece of machinery will do the work for you! No more depending on open wireless ports to risky security systems.

The Araknyd will automatically seek out the nearest surveillance device and infiltrate its systems, handing off the device’s visuals directly into your Augmented HUD in YOUR preferred platform. Its eight output connectors are not only its mode of transportation, it is also guaranteed to interface with every type of port on the market! (And some off market too.)

Don’t be cornered on your information gathering excursions without taking one of these with you!

NOTE: InSpec is not held liable for actions that violate trade agreements and local law. The Araknyd is used for in-house corporate surveillance and not to be used to gain access to unauthorized property.

Here is an excerpt from Sleepless Flame describing it in action:

She extracted a tiny mechanical spider from a pocket, turning it on its back to reveal a switch on its abdomen. With a gentle push, the critter twitched to life, flailing its tiny needle-like limbs excitedly as she set it on the ground.

           The critter darted over the floor, racing up to the ceiling with an eager tempest of pointy feet. Consumed by its hunting instinct, the creature accelerated toward its hapless victim, stalking a vigilant surveillance unit monitoring the corridor. The predator encircled the base of the camera, rearing back on its hind legs as it sized up its foe. Having uncovered the device’s weak point, it lunged onto its prey, ramming two of its wiry projections into the base of the camera. After a moment, it let off a victorious chirp, alerting Nara of a successful connection.

           Proud of its achievements, the critter summoned a display into Nara’s screen, showing off the perspective of the conquered camera. As she zoomed in on the screen, she reached her hand out past the elevator door, watching her fingers disappear in a hazy mist of warping light as the bug worked its illusory magic.

Where can people find you on the web?

Thanks for having me! I have a booth over at OWSCyCon where you can check out my work and come chat with me:

https://owscycon.ourwriteside.com/forums/topic/odin-oxthorn-author-booth/

As well as my Books here:

https://www.amazon.com/Odin-Oxthorn/e/B07B546XXR

But you can also follow me around the internet here:

https://www.odinsmusings.com/

https://www.facebook.com/OdinsMusings/

https://twitter.com/OdinsMusings

https://www.youtube.com/user/odinsmusings

https://www.instagram.com/odinsmusings/

Hope to see you there!

For more stops on our World-building Showcase, visit the tour page on the OWS CyCon website. You can also find more great SciFi authors and books on our main Sci Fi event page.

Also, if you’re visiting from OWS CyCon, don’t forget to subscribe to my Lunarian Press newsletter using the Subscribe box below!