Doug Van Belle: Something Worth Sharing
Douglas A. Van Belle is an award-winning author and screenwriter, and winner of New Zealand’s prestigious Sir Julius Vogel Award. His recent work includes science fiction novels The Barking Death Squirrels, The Care and Feeding of Your Lunatic Mage, and the YA title, The Kahutahuta. He spends his days as a Senior Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington, where his research includes the politics of crises and role science fiction in society, which are related in surprising ways. Also an artisan bladesmith, he is a passionate advocate for the therapeutic value of playing with fire and pounding the living daylights out of white-hot steel.
Tell us a bit about your latest work.
A World Adrift was published by Wordfire Press in October, and I guess you could call it my breakout novel. Wordfire probably still counts as an indie but it has an established global distribution chain and a marketing program to match the big publishers. Perhaps more importantly, it’s run by a best-selling science fiction author, Kevin J. Anderson, who created it specifically for science fiction authors and fans. He knows the genre and its fans better than any other publisher out there so I suspected that I might have something special when he asked to see it even though Wordfire was closed to submissions. Then, just a few hours after getting his hands on a typo-laden monstrosity of a first draft, he emailed me a contract and I knew I’d finally managed to take that next step.
A World Adrift is set in the skies of Venus, roughly 800 years after humans first settled the habitable layer about 55 kilometers above the surface. It’s a steam-punkish world of Zepplin cities, kitesurfing airships, empires, war, and economic collapse. But unlike most things you might call steampunk, everything in the story is real or realistic. That habitable layer in the Venusian atmosphere exists, and all the steampunk elements are logical and realistic projections of the science, engineering, and socio-economic realities of living there.
The novel is about the people caught up in a coup, and again, every element is as accurate and realistic as it can be. I’m an academic who has spent decades studying the human side of the politics of crises and disasters, and that informs every aspect of the plot. Still, the politics and that plot are the framework, not the story. The stories are about the people; reluctant heroes thrown into the breach; decent people swept onto the wrong side; poor choices; plans that fall apart; improvisations that go wrong; and clever solutions that win reprieves but fall short of resolutions.
Drama is personal. Stories are personal.
Read the full interview:
https://seanhtaylor.blogspot.com/2023/12/doug-van-belle-something-worth-sharing.html
