C.L. Anderson’s novel, Bitter Angels, has been nominated for the 2010 Philip K. Dick Award for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States. Following her nomination, we posed a few questions to the author and the result is the interview below.
You’re nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award–do you have a favorite story of his?
I particularly enjoy Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which is the novel the movie Blade Runner was based on. The book and the movie are very different. The book is smaller, sadder in a number of ways, and ultimately, I think, more disturbing than the blockbuster.
How would you describe Bitter Angels?
I’ve been calling it John LeCarre in space. It’s the story of a future agent in a future where war has been eliminated from the Solar System, and her job is to keep it from coming back.
Where’d you get the idea for your novel?
That’s a much tougher question. War is a major theme in science fiction as a whole and right now, obviously, a major concern for the US in general. The few stories where a future is presented without war generally divide into two camps: Either there has been some kind of major alien and/or genetic intervention that changes the essential nature of humanity, or war has been eliminated due to some sort of totalitarian oppression. I wanted to look at what a future where humans chose to end large-scale conflict would look like, and to examine the dynamics and problems of such a system, as well as the sacrifices that would be demanded of the agents who worked to maintain the peace.
When not writing award-nominated sci-fi, what authors/books are you reading?
Let me check the pile. I’m reading a lot of history right now. I’ve just finished David Saul’s The Prince of Pleasure about George IV and Regency, England, and started A.N. Wilson’s excellent: The Victorians. I’m also reading a lot of YA and “mid-grade.” I’ve just gotten The Nine Pound Hammer , which is a riff on the John Henry legend by John Claude Bemis, and The Tied Knot , which is the sequel to Ingo by Helen Dunmore, about mermaids off the coast of Cornwall.
What’s are you working on now?
Right now I’m working on a slower-than-light steampunk space opera series that I’m really excited about. It’s working title is Machines of Earth. I’m also putting together a proposal for a children’s fantasy book set in dust bowl Kansas.
About Bitter Angels by C.L. Anderson
