ABOUT RHYS HUGHES: Rhys Hughes was born in 1966 and began writing fiction from a young age. None of his early efforts saw print, mainly because he never submitted them anywhere or even showed them to anyone else. Those stories have all been lost.

Eventually he began sending his work to editors. His first published story was called “An Ideal Vocation” and it appeared in an obscure anthology in 1992. Encouraged by this “success,” he then proceeded to bombard the British small-press with hundreds of eccentric tales for almost two decades. His first book, the now almost legendary Worming the Harpy, was published by Tartarus Press in 1995. He has published many volumes since then, chiefly collections of short-stories but also a few novels, in several languages.

He considers his three best and most “Hughesian” books to be The Truth Spinner, Tallest Stories and The Abnormalities of Stringent Strange. You can get in touch able to get in touch with him easily enough through his blog The Spoons That Are My Ears.

I first ran across Rhys Hughes’s brilliantly funny, sharp, and perceptive work when a story of his — a smart, heartfelt tribute to Philip José Farmer’s classic The Lovers — appeared in an anthology alongside a story of mine. Since then I’ve been both dazzled and highly entertained by his unique and multiform output of fiction. Hughes’s latest novel, The Abnormalities of Stringent Strange, is forthcoming from Meteor House, so let’s find out what the author is up to this time.

Christopher Paul Carey: You are not primarily known as a genre writer, but your work is not exactly mainstream either. How would you categorize your work, or can it be categorized?
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Win Scott Eckert has posted the table of contents for the upcoming collection Tales of the Wold Newton Universe

Here’s the book description:

A collection of Wold Newton-inspired short stories by Farmerphiles, experts, and the Grand Master of SF himself.

The book collects, for the first time ever in one volume, Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton short stories, and also includes tales by other writers.

The Introduction by Win Scott Eckert (coauthor with Farmer of the Wold Newton novel The Evil in Pemberley House) and Christopher Paul Carey (coauthor with Farmer of the Khokarsa novel The Song of Kwasin) will provide an overview of Farmer’s Wold Newton Family and Mythos. In addition, Eckert and Carey will provide brief introductions to the stories themselves, explaining why each entry is a Wold Newton tale.

Here’s the table of contents…
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ABOUT DAVID HERTER: David Herter was born in Denver, CO on Halloween, 1963. He subsequently lived in California, Utah and Washington State, where he attended the Clarion West writers workshop in 1990. His books have been published by Tor, PS Publishing and small presses; his short stories have been collected in Best New Horror. His favorite authors include Gene Wolfe, Brian Moore, C.L. Moore, Henry Green, Leigh Brackett, Manley Wade Wellman. His favorite TV shows include Star Trek: TOS, The Colbert Report, The Rockford Files and Kolchak: The Night Stalker. His favorite composers include Leoš Janácek and Bob Dylan.

I think it’s becoming something of a tradition with me: for the past couple years as Halloween approaches, I’ve taken down David Herter’s October Dark from the aerie of my bookshelf where it respectfully resides, eager to slip away into the novel’s enchantments and phantasmagorias and travel back in time to 1977, the year of “The Star Wars,” as the protagonist of the story so quaintly puts it. This fall, however, the talisman has changed. October Dark has been released in a newly revised ebook edition. Herter fans should have cause to rejoice: without losing any of the original version’s magic, this new edition of October Dark is sharper, more concise in places, and, yes, darker.

I was happy to take a few moments to interview David Herter about his newly revised Halloween epic, October Dark, which is available for just $2.99 through the rest of the month at Amazon.

Christopher Paul Carey: October Dark is quite different from your other novels, such as your Vernian fantasy Evening’s Empire, your far-future Ceres Storm, or your Eastern European SF-inspired First Republic trilogy (On the Overgrown Path, The Luminous Depths, and One Who Disappeared). What inspired you to write a novel about Halloween 1977, a haunted movie, Star Wars, and stop-motion animation?

David Herter: I had been trying to write a book about 1977 for a long time, but nostalgia always got in the way. Like Will, my main character, I was thirteen in 1977, and a regular 8mm stop-motion animator. I read Famous Monsters of Filmland and Eerie and made crazy little animated films. I heard about The Star Wars from my friend Jim months before the opening. We saw it on opening day at the UA Cinema 150 in 70-mm and 6-track Dolby, with his brother and his brother’s girlfriend driving us into Seattle in their VW, pretty close to the scene I wrote in the novel. Star Wars took over my spring and summer, and the next five years or so. Shortly after high school, I wrote a feature-length screenplay about a kid and his friends and their adventures on the opening days of Star Wars and its sequels (the final chapter, The Revenge of the Jedi, hadn’t been released yet, so it was speculative fiction on my part). Surprisingly, the results weren’t that great (ha ha), so I shelved the idea for a couple decades. When I finally turned to it, I had to step back, far back, from my actual experiences. Only when I realized that Something Wicked This Way Comes could inspire the book on a literal and meta level, with the mirror maze at its heart brought into the realm of cinematic special effects, did everything start to click. To use a term from the world of stop-motion animation, Bradbury’s novel became my ghostly armature.

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Christopher Paul Carey informs us that Hadon of Ancient Opar, the first novel in Philip José Farmer’s Khokarsa trilogy, will be published by Titan Books in January 2013 in in paperback and ebook formats. Carey will be writing the introduction.

Here’s the synopsis:

Twelve thousand years ago the great lost city of Opar was in its prime, with its Atlantean tradition, its fabled jewels, its living goddess and Hadon, son of ancient Opar, whose claim to a throne launches him upon an enthralling and dangerous venture.

Book info as per Amazon US:

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Titan Books (January 15, 2013)
• ISBN-10: 1781162956
• ISBN-13: 978-1781162958

[Do you have an idea for a future Mind Meld? Let us know!]

We asked this week’s panelists…

Here’s what they said…

When I think of a great novel about a revolution I think immediately of Harry Harrison’s To the Stars trilogy, which I first read in an SF Book Club omnibus decades ago and which I’ve unhesitatingly recommended over the years to authors who want to write great action SF. Revolutions are a serious business, and they often don’t turn out as planned. We can see that today in looking at what’s happened in Egypt over the past year, as one example where the initial joy and excitement of overthrow gives way to the counterrevolution and the difficulties of switching from a revolutionary mindset to one where compromise might need to be made in taking actual power in society. But there is that joy. There are the people who have to plot a revolution and stay one step ahead of the established tyranny. There are the people who have to be the foot soldiers, perhaps risking all including their lives to fight for what they believe in. That’s what a certain kind of fiction is about, people striving against impossible odds to do what everyone says could never be done. And yes, when you do it, there is a moment of real joy and real elation and real happiness, however short that moment may be. Harrison’s To The Stars trilogy may be heavy on the romance of it all, it is a quick action sf read, but should we object in our fiction to getting to experience the romance of it all without having to worry about the reality, for a few passing hours at least?

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Christopher Paul Carey is the coauthor with Philip José Farmer of Gods of Opar: Tales of Lost Khokarsa. His next tale set in Farmer’s Khokarsa is Exiles of Kho, coming later this year in a signed limited edition from Meteor House. He is an editor with Paizo Publishing and the award-winning Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, and the editor of three collections of Philip José Farmer’s work: Up from the Bottomless Pit and Other Stories, Venus on the Half-Shell and Others, and The Other in the Mirror. His short fiction may be found in such anthologies as The Worlds of Philip José Farmer, Tales of the Shadowmen, and The Avenger: The Justice, Inc. Files. Visit his website at cpcarey.com and follow him on twitter at @cpcarey.

This month sees the release of Gods of Opar: Tales of Lost Khokarsa, my collaboration with Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning author and SFWA Grand Master Philip José Farmer. Yeah, those honorific titles leave me humbled and in awe too, and they’re enough to make my inner voice frequently exclaim, “Whoa, wait a minute, how did this happen? How did I end up working with the Wizard of Peoria to complete the long-awaited-and long feared to be forever stalled-conclusion to his Khokarsa series?”
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[Do you have an idea for a future Mind Meld? Let us know!]

Rumors surfaced recently that Amazon is contemplating opening a small brick and mortar store in Seattle to sell their ebook readers and their Amazon branded books. Couple this with Amazon’s recent foray into SF/F publishing and that got us to wondering:

It’s a difficult one to answer. I think Amazon is often seen as being responsible for the change in how books are sold/published, while it would be more accurate to see it as a product of that change. That it is currently the biggest, most successful model does not mean it would be one ten or twenty years from now, nor will it be the only major player.

I think there is plenty of room for traditional publishers, even while they struggle with the changing landscape of bookselling. That we are facing a shrinking presence of physical bookshops is undeniable – the question is where the next big online presence will come from.

I suspect we’ll be seeing partly the emergence of boutique sellers – in genre we can see the buds of such a move with specialist shops like Wizard’s Tower Books and Weightless Books – and at the same time the rise of other giant retail outlets like Amazon. Certainly big publishes are all backed by major corporate players, so we might see something from that direction.

The market is changing so rapidly, I think it’s pretty much everyone’s field at the moment – perhaps already being put into action in someone’s basement – or, alternatively, a boardroom.
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