D. Nolan Clark is the author of Space Opera novel Forsaken Skies. We got chance to catch up with him as the book is due out in paperback. We discussed Space Opera, influences and whether a pseudonym is a good idea or not…
Hello, David! Welcome to SFFWorld. Many thanks for doing this.
Q: We’re speaking as Forsaken Skies is being published in paperback in the UK. Congratulations! Can you tell us a little about it?
Thank you! Forsaken Skies is set several hundred years in the future, when humanity has spread out to the stars. When a remote planet is attacked by aliens, the corporation that runs the place decides it would be too expensive to defend it. Enter Aleister Lanoe, a decorated but aging spacefighter pilot. He has to put together a team to fight back against the invasion fleet—and in the process, solve an ancient mystery.
Q: So: this has a big Space Opera setting! One of the attractions of Space Opera is to write over a big broad canvas, with a multitude of characters and / or an epic time span. In your case, what was the attraction? Have you always wanted to write Space Opera?
Oh, absolutely. Ever since I saw Star Wars, as a child. It was why I wanted to write in the first place! I feel like I had to work my way up to this. Like my whole life and career was leading me to write this book. It was an amazing feeling when I realized that not only was I going to do it, it was also going to be the best thing I ever wrote.
Q: With such complexity, what came first for you – the world or the characters? Was Aleister Lanoe always going to be important?
Lanoe was the focal point for developing the story. He was one of those characters who just comes together, who kind of writes themselves. An old, grizzled veteran of a dozen wars, an ace pilot. He’s seen everything, or so he thinks. Yet at the heart of him there’s still the idealistic young pilot who joined up to defend Earth in a war nobody remembers. The good man who wants to help, even when the world around him only wants to revel in cynicism and greed.
Q: What do you hope readers will get from the book?
Entertainment, absolutely—I wanted this to be a fun story, an exciting action adventure… but if they find something more about trusting the people close to you, about being careful with your choices, well. I won’t complain.
Q: And this will lead to Forgotten Worlds, the next in the series. I understand the series will be a trilogy. Where are you with the next works in progress?
Forgotten Worlds is just about ready to come out—it’s been worked over, edited, checked and rechecked. The third volume is done but still in a rough state. Anyone excited for more of this stuff won’t have long to wait.
Q: I understand you are writing under a pseudonym. Can I ask why you felt it was useful to do so? Was it liberating to do so? Was your other writing useful to you when writing this?
I write in a lot of genres—horror, fantasy, thrillers, now SF. It was a decision made between my editors, my agent and myself to separate this book from the others, partly for branding (though I hate that term), so that readers would know what they were getting. Partly so people would know this was something brand new, something they’d never seen from me before, from David Wellington (my real name).
Q: Onto wider issues now. How long have you been writing for?
I mentioned Star Wars before—it was what got me into reading SF, when I was six years old. That was the same year I wrote my first novel. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t very good!
Q: Going back to that beginning, what other interests in the genre did you have before writing your own? How much have they influenced your writing?
When I had seen Star Wars five or six times (and I promise, not every waking thought I have is about that movie, only about 5% now) and I realized that there wasn’t going to be any more, not for years, I needed more. I needed more science fiction, even though at the time I had no idea what that meant. I went to the library and they had entire shelves of the stuff. I started at one end, with Asimov, and didn’t stop until I’d read the last Zelazny. When there wasn’t any more of that, I decided I would just have to write my own stories. It was a pretty intense summer—probably the same time I got my first pair of glasses, from all the eyestrain.
Q: What kind of books do you read for pleasure, any favourite authors now? Can you read for pleasure? (I know a lot of authors who can’t!)
I read constantly. I’m reading Moby-Dick right now, because I never had before. As far as more recent authors, I love me some Jonathan Howard, Felix Gilman, Scott Lynch. My favourite recent thing was though was a graphic novel called Prophet, by Brandon Graham and Simon Roy. An incredible vision of the distant future of humanity.
Obviously we wish you all the best with the next developments.
Many thanks for your time, David.
Thank you!
Forsaken Skies, David’s first novel in the series, is published by Orbit UK and is available in paperback and as a Kindle ebook now. Many thanks to David & Nazia at Orbit for helping set this one up.
