I didn’t set out for these books to be about war, at least not when I wrote The Silver Ship and the Sea. Current events, however, have a way of coloring artistic work, even science fiction that’s being written about a far future. The Iraq War and The Silver Ship and the Sea started at about the same time. So the series ends up being driven by a battle that happened on the colony planet Fremont and driven to a bigger battle that will happen in space between splintered factions of the the Five Worlds. While space war is not the throughline story for any of the books except the last one (not written yet), war turned out to be the throughline for the series as whole. Which surprised me when I started to think about it, but also makes sense in the larger context of our society.
While I still wouldn’t classify the series as military science fiction, I hope it might interest milsf readers. So when a call for people to interview went out, I decided to volunteer. Thanks to author Mike McPhail for the interview. You might also just drop by www.milscifi.com while you’re out and about the nets as well. The site has interviews with people like Bud Sparhawk, Jack McDevitt, and Lawrence M. Schoen, as well a number of newer authors.
Great interview, Brenda. I saw that it was a MilSF site and I was like “wait a second…” but right out of the gate, you had it covered.
Thanks Jeremy! If I get to write the fourth book, it will be pretty squarely there, even though the series itself still won’t be straight mil sf (nor do I want it to be, although I like Honor Harrington and ripped through about ten of them in a week once).