Interview: Glynn Stewart

When Canadian science fiction author Glynn Stewart realized that mainstream publishers weren’t interested in his brand of science fiction, which mixes fantasy and SF while holding on to mil-sf to account for the realities of space war, he turned to online publishing.  Now, more than fifty books later, he’s not looking back. SFRevu was happy to get a chance to talk to Glynn about mixing the streams, good versus evil, and why he’s on Kindle Unlimited.

SFRevu: Starship’s Mage (2014), Your first book was upfront about mixing fantasy and science fiction. Don’t you know that you should never cross the streams?

Glynn Stewart: I’ve made the comparison a few times in my career to tandoori chicken pizza. For some people, crossing the streams is what they’re looking for! It is, of course, necessary to make sure that people KNOW they’re getting tandoori chicken pizza, but sometimes the blends are where we find the best bits.

In my case, the main culprit behind Starship’s Mage was TV Tropes. Specifically, the page “A Wizard Did It,” talking about how when you’re working in science fiction, a lot of technobabble is basically a handwaved magic wand. That hit with other things rattling around my brain and created a setting where, literally, faster-than-light travel was by wizards. And then, once you’ve got magic in a setting, well, you have to answer how it got there and what else it can do and so on and so forth.

SFRevu: We’re always curious about the journey from reader to writer. What’s the first science fiction book you read? Who did you love back then, and how did that make you want to be an author yourself?

Glynn Stewart: My parents had a vast library of science fiction and fantasy of all kinds, and I had read the vast majority of by the time I was maybe thirteen. Remembering which specific book was the first one I read would be impossible. There was a lot of Niven and Pournelle and, of course, Tolkien (fantasy, not SF, but the point stands).

The first SF book I truly remember is probably Ringworld by Larry Niven. I re-read The Lord of the Rings a gajillion times (in one instance that sticks out in memory, I read the entire omnibus of the trilogy in one day while home sick from school).

I was immersed in these fantastical worlds from a very early age and I don’t even remember when I started trying to create my own. There’s at least one very bad WWII / Crusades / Redwall attempt at fiction I wrote in notebooks in junior high that I am rather glad didn’t survive the move back to North America!

I basically do not remember ever NOT wanting to be a writer.

SFRevu: I understand you’re a DM.  How does D&D inform your writing?  And, what platform are you using?

Glynn Stewart: I feel that every writer should run tabletop RPGs. They’re great practice for dealing with unruly characters. They also make good practice for structuring stories, engaging people, etc, etc. I’m not sure any of my gaming directly informs my writing, but it certainly helps sharpen my storytelling chops.

I’m currently taking a hiatus from running to play in someone else’s game on Roll20 and plotting a Savage Worlds online game that is intended to use little more than Google Meet and the present function for pretty pictures.

SFRevu: The year after Starship Mage came out, you switched to hard-core mil-sf space opera with the first Castle Federation novel, Space Carrier Avalon. In a lot of ways, it’s almost hard-sf in its respect for what can and can’t be done, given certain established sci-fi technologies, especially FTL and gravity control. How did you decide what the limits to the universe were?

Glynn Stewart: In many ways, military SF space opera is and remains my home ground (given that I have more of those series than anything else, I’m sure my readership is shocked). I blame David Weber and David Drake. I’m sure there are some other people to blame too, but those two are definitely up there.

Space Carrier Avalon was an attempt to do a few things differently and better than other books out there. I won’t name names: they outsold me in the end. Among them was a focus on logistics and economics as a justification for things that otherwise didn’t make sense – like space fighters. I very specifically set out, working with the established “canon” of potential future SF, to create a setting where the non-FTL space fighter made sense. In the case of Castle Federation, that reasoning was primarily economic: starships were massive and expensive, so having expendable – if still expensive — lighter spacecraft to do the weight of the fighting made sense.

SFRevu: After six books about the Castle Federation fighting off the unwanted, and occasionally brutal, attempts of the Confederation to unify them into Terra’s warm embrace. After a break of a few years, you’ve switched sides in The Dakota Confederation series, with Admiral’s Oath, now telling the story from the Commonwealth’s, or at least Admiral Techumseh’s, POV. Did you need a break from that universe? Why the change in viewpoint?

Glynn Stewart: By the time I finished Operation Medusa, I knew that I eventually wanted to tell the story of the Commonwealth’s fall. I also felt that I needed a break from the setting and wanted to try some different things in different universes. I generally have found that six books is a perfect length of time for me to play around in a universe, though I’m experimenting with other options as I keep going.

Tecumseh was always the “token good guy” on the Commonwealth side. The Commonwealth was always being intended to be a by-and-large understandable (if not sympathetic) antagonist.  Their primary motivation, after all, is a reskinned version of the USA’s “Manifest Destiny” idea from the 19th century, with people of varying levels of morality. Walkingstick, of course, is one of the two or three characters in the original series I’d call closest to evil and he’s a point of view character!

I don’t generally believe that anyone is evil from their own point of view. That’s a painful point of view to take on the day that I am writing this, but I generally do find it to be true. Everyone has their own reasons to do the things they do. That doesn’t prevent people from being evil, but it should prevent them – in fiction at least, where the reader has a lot more information than real life – from being incomprehensible.

SFRevu: We first met Admiral Techumseh in Stellar Fox, the second Castle Federation novel, where he stands aside to let an Alliance ship pursue a rogue Commonwealth ship…which he was in pursuit of himself.  When did you know you’d be coming back to his story?

Glynn Stewart: I suspected when I wrote Stellar Fox that Tecumseh was going to be important. He was a mirror to Walkingstick – same first name, similar backgrounds in North American’s First Nations, etc – that made him a useful point of reference for the Commonwealth. By the time I brought him back in Rimward Stars, I knew the rough shape of the Fall of the Commonwealth and that Tecumseh would be my viewpoint character for it. I didn’t know when I’d get around to writing it, but I knew from that point on that Tecumseh would be the lead for it.

SFRevu: Tecumseh is a Shawnee, and the Dakota system is populated by hundreds of tribes, you’ve always had a diverse cast, but what made you choose Native Americans for the story’s core?

Glynn Stewart: I’d trapped myself in it. I try very hard, as a white dude, not to steal other people’s voices for my own. Walking that balance in Admiral’s Oath, between Tecumseh being who he was and drawing on those histories for the worlds around him, versus stealing the voice of Native American futurism, was a very careful exercise. I’m still not entirely sure I got it right, though I’ve seen at least some positive commentary from First Nations readers.

But from the moment I decided to make James Calvin Walkingstick Native American to draw out the Manifest Destiny comparison of the series, I need another Native character to compare and contrast (and not have the only major First Nations character be the villain!). So Tecumseh was born in Stellar Fox and rapidly became my planned sequel POV character.

As I was preparing to actually write this series, I realized that Tecumseh’s arc had to be about the conflict between his identity as a child of the “Old Nations” (as our various indigenous nations are referred to in the Commonwealth) and his identity as a flag officer of an expansionist, colonialist, empire. Once I knew I wanted to work with that identity, it was absolutely necessary to give him close exposure to a more traditionally future First Nations community. So the Dakotan Confederacy was born to provide a foil to Tecumseh.

SFRevu: Your output is frankly mind-boggling. Last year alone you wrote “seven novels and a novella” and you’ve got to have more than fifty novels at this point…over a writing career of only eight years. I know you work from outlines, which has to help, but how long does it take to come up with one, where do the ideas come from, and how much of the plan survives contact with the enemy?

Glynn Stewart: As I write these answers, I have published fifty-eight novels and written sixty-one (five with a co-author, one that will never be published). It isn’t as easy for me to count the novellas (my spreadsheet is set up to enable easy counting of the novels)

By the time a book comes up in my schedule, it’s been rattling around my head for three months to three years, depending. So I have a reasonably good idea of what goes on in it at the highest level. That gets turned into a 3-4,000 word outline over the course of about three days, and then I kick into the book.

Most of the time, everything in the outline ends up in the book. So, usually, do a bunch of things that were never in the outline!

SFRevu: It’s great that your books are available through Kindle Unlimited. After reading Admiral’s Oath I wanted to dig into the main character’s backstory, and being able to download that as part of my subscription made that easy (easier than putting the books down). Why did you choose this route for publishing, and will you stay with it?

Glynn Stewart: To quote Abba: “Money, money, money.” The last time I have decent numbers for is 2018, but at that point KU readers were approximately 15% of the US e-book reader market. All non-Amazon e-book stores combined were another 15%, with straight Amazon sales making up the other 70%.

With read-through on KU helping drive visibility on the main Amazon stores and Amazon requiring exclusivity to be in KU, the decision is pretty black and white. We spent a lot of time trying to be on the other stores, but we have experimented enough to be quite certain that we make significantly more money being in KU than we do with the books spread across all e-book platforms.

The current plan is to stay with our structure until something suggests that the market structure has changed. So far, I haven’t seen anything to challenge Amazon’s market dominance in e-books, so we’re going to stay in the nine hundred pound gorilla’s corner.

SFRevu: Who and what do you read now? In the unlikely event that we run out of your books, who do you recommend?

Glynn Stewart: I’m currently reading “Warship 2021” on Kindle and Norman Friedman’s “US Cruisers: An Illustrated History” in a hardcover copy. Fiction is a much smaller component of my reading habits than it used to be.

My usual go-tos in Kindle are Nathan Lowell and Lindsay Buroker. Outside of KU, my top recommendation for SF is and always will be Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books.

(We totally agree on your go-tos. Nathan Lowell’s Solar Clipper series is terrific, and nobody beats Bujold for space opera. – ed)

SFRevu: What’s the sequel to Admiral’s Oath, and when does it come out?

Glynn Stewart: To Stand Defiant is currently planned for toward the end of this year.

SFRevu: Are you having fun?

Glynn Stewart: Pretty sure? Non-work stuff is a big mess right now, but the writing is a blast and always has been.

SFRevu: Glynn, thanks so much. This has been terrific and we look forward to more great stories.

 

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