An hour-long interview with John C. Wright, Nebula- and Hugo Award-nominated author of some twenty-two novels, including the critically acclaimed The Golden Age and Count to a Trillion. His novel Somewhither won the Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of 2016. He’s also published numerous short stories and anthologies, including Awake in the Night Land and City Beyond Time, as well as non-fiction.

Websitescifiwright.com

John’s Amazon Page

The Introduction

John C. Wright

John C. Wright is a retired attorney, newspaperman and newspaper editor, who was only once on the lam and forced to hide from the police. He is the author of some twenty-two novels, including the critically acclaimed The Golden Age and Count to a Trillion. His novel Somewhither won the Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of 2016. He’s also published numerous short stories and anthologies, including Awake in the Night Land and City Beyond Time, as well as non-fiction. He holds the record for the most Hugo Award nominations for a single year. He presently works as a writer in Virginia, where he lives in “fairy-tale like happiness” with his wife, L. Jagi Lamplighter, also an author, and their four children, Ping Ping, Orville, Wilbur, and Just Wright.

The (Lightly Edited) Transcript

Welcome to The Worldshapers, John.

Excellent. Wonderful to be here.

We were just commenting before we started that we are the only two living members of the New Space Princess Movement, which has yet to take the science fiction world by storm. But there’s still time.

Yes. I wrote a novel with a space princess, an honest-to-goodness space princess, in it. She was the princess of Monaco. And she went into outer space. She went to the globular cluster at M-3. So that counts.

Closest I came was the daughter of an elected official on another planet, which…?

Doesn’t count. Elected officials. It’s got to be the daughter of a monarch.

I guess I’ve never actually written a space princess novel…

It doesn’t matter. These literary movements are very important for generating manifestos and discussions at coffee houses, not for actually affecting the literary world in any way, shape, or form.

That’s good, because I don’t think we have affected it much.

No, that’s okay. But if you remember, it was started as a joke based on the reaction against the mundane science-fiction literary movement, which was going to try to take away all the wonder and splendor out of science fiction. And you and I both thought that was such a terrible idea that we needed to get some good old-fashioned pulp fun back into the mix.

Well, and certainly there’s a lot of pulp fun to be had in the book we’re gonna be talking about, Lost on the Last Continent, which I’ve read a good chunk of, although I haven’t finished yet.