Minister Faust subverts conventions. And he speaks his mind. In other words, he likes to take risks.
"When you stop taking risks, you stop making discoveries and doing truly remarkable things. You’ll make mistakes via risk, and plenty of them, but the road to success is covered with the gravel of with mistakes. The road [...]

Introduction
"Fantasy," said Elizabeth Bear, the author of The Sea Thy Mistress and the forthcoming The Tempering of Men (with Sarah Monette), "is the purest form of the imagination, and it gives us courage and persistence."
It gives us courage and persistence.
"Epic Fantasy is built into us, part of our most fundamental human fabric, and in [...]

Erin Hoffman’s first novel, The Sword of Fire and Sea, opens on an island. And the brief paragraph reveals most of what we need to know about the central character:

Though the coastal island of Siane’s Eye was lush with whispering palms and tropical flowers too exotic for the names of men, the wind that swept [...]

South African novelist Lauren Beukes enjoys writing. And it shows in every word and on every page of her fiction.
"It’s a great privilege to be able to play, to make up stuff, to see where it takes me," Beukes said. "I love the craft and assembly of it. I love how type [...]

Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have been writing together since the late 1990s. They’ve both had active solo careers in addition to their Dune collaborations.
Brian Herbert is the author of such novels as Sidney’s Comet, Prisoners of Arionn, and Sudanna Sudanna. He points to his Timeweb Chronicle novels as [...]

In the opening scene of Fuzzy Nation, a dog named Carl steps on a detonator panel and sets off more than just the plot. The novel, as Scalzi says, is a "reimagining of the story and events in Little Fuzzy, the 1962 Hugo-nominated novel by H. Beam Piper." Scalzi borrows the [...]

Cory Doctorow has a pretty straight-forward job. All he has to do is, as he says, "keep up with new technological developments" and write prose that makes his readers want to live life as though it were, to borrow from Dennis Lee and Alasdair Gray, the first days of a new [...]

David Weber has been writing about Honor Harrington for twenty years. The original proposals, as sent to Jim Baen back in the 90s, promised space opera featuring a female naval officer. Harrington was supposed to die in the fifth book in the series. That was half a dozen books ago. Harrington [...]

"I don’t have an agenda for science fiction," said Walter Jon Williams. "It’s the thing that turns me on, both as a reader and a writer, and that’s enough for me."
A sense of playfulness and wonder pervades Williams’ stories, a sense that he is exploring the whole sandbox, every dimension, every [...]

There is a crystalline quality to Theodora Goss’ poetic lines — clear, sharp, prismatic. The cumulative effect of those lines is breathtaking. She writes gorgeous poems of fountains and ravens, pomegranates and isinglass. Take, for instance, the first stanza of "The Bear’s Daughter":

She dreams of the south. Wandering through the [...]