Interviews, and some Sly Mongoose reviews

Ego stuff ahead, skip if you could care less.

I have an interview up at the Nebula Awards site:

There are plenty of people, I think, who work at it harder than me. Part of it is that I made some tough choices as to where I invested my time. Most teenagers and people in their early twenties partied and watched lots of TV, played video games. Until a couple years ago I had no cable in the house, much to people’s astonishment. No TV. No videogames. I didn’t club, or party, or do any of that stuff. From 15 to 25 I wrote during the time that everyone else played games or watched TV. The average American watches 20-30 hours of TV a week. That’s almost watching TV like a full time job. By swapping out writing, I worked at writing.

The needle skipped there, btw, I meant to say ‘by swapping out watching TV, I worked at writing.’ Oops.

The second half of my interview up at Crucial Taunt is here.

I have heard that there’s sometimes a negative stigma for tie-in books and authors. Have you encountered any of that?

I’ve had a few older writers give me some guff, but we’re in the age where Jeff VanderMeer is writing a Predator novel, Marjorie Liu, bestseller and awesome author, has written a cool Wolverine novel (I’m jealous of her for that, by the way), and Sean Williams and Karen Traviss have written some neat Star Wars novels. It’s common. Besides, we’re also getting to the point in history now where all of us grew up with these shared experiences around us. While in the 50s everyone wrote about Galactic Empires and shared these common settings, now a lot of us are growing up around these media ideas. If you grew up watching Star Trek and it was something you enjoyed, the impulse to play with it and get paid for it is understandable. When I first played Halo I told a friend ’someone creating this game read a lot of my favorite SF/F.’ After meeting the creators, I was quite pleased to find out I was right.

My friend Mark Terry reviews Sly Mongoose:

SLY MONGOOSE is, more than anything, a fast-moving action novel with lots of battles and airships and stuff like that. On the thought-provoking side, it’s got a lot to say about politics (not much of it positive) and responsibility. Perhaps even more so, and I’m starting to see this is a theme in Toby’s works, there is a lot to be noted here about poverty in a rich world and that technology can fail, particularly for poor people.

King of the Nerds has this review:

Speaking of action Sly Mongoose has plenty of it. Buckell seems to have taken some lessons from Ragamuffin, a certain scene involving no gravity and a minigun, and pulls together some compelling set pieces starting with Pepper’s introduction, continuing through Timas’s travel on the surface of Chilo, and ending right at the titanic conflict at the novel’s climax. The three novels Buckell has written so far certainly show a strong progession of a writer with a clear eye for action (especially those “oh shit” moments) that has only grown with each book he has written. Pepper is a fun character, though a familiar archetype, and Buckell’s deft manipulation of his cirumstances here add a bit of depth to his personality that is great to see and damned fun to read.

And Bookgasm had a very flattering review:

Tobias S. Buckell’s rip-roaring Caribbean-infused novels have been delicious treats so far, but after the Aztec-alien dirigible battles of CRYSTAL RAIN and the grand-scope space rebellion of RAGAMUFFIN, I initially was skeptical of SLY MONGOOSE. Could Buckell keep cranking out good books on a yearly basis? The answer is “Holy crap, yes!”

Filed under the topic My Writing: My Books: Sly Mongoose: Reviews on September 11th 2008 at 8:33 am. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.