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In this episode of Castle Talk, Jason chats with former Brady and Gidget Caryn Richman, who plays a key role as a psychic who may be in over her head in the new film The Puppetman on Shudder.
Posted in: Books, Podcasts, Pop Culture | Tagged: A Pale Light in the Black, Castle Talk Podcast, K.B. Wagers
K.B. Wagers' Hard-Edged Diverse Military SF "A Pale Light in the Black"
This episode we're talking to K.B. Wagers, author of the new book A Pale Light in the Black, the first book in a new military SF series from HarperVoyager. The publisher says about the author:
K.B. WAGERS is the author of the Indranan War trilogy as well as There Before the Chaos, the start of the Farian War trilogy with Orbit Books. They hold a bachelor's degree in Russian Studies and a second-degree blackbelt in Shaolin Kung Fu. A native of Colorado, K.B. lives at the base of the Rocky Mountains with their partner and a crew of recalcitrant cats. In between books, they can be found attempting to learn Spanish, dying in video games, dancing to music, and scribbling new ideas in their bullet journal.
A Pale Light in the Black tells the story of the crew of a ship called Zuma's Ghost, especially Max Carmichael, a woman who defies her family to join the future Near Earth Orbital Guard (NeoG)—essentially the Coast Guard of Space. Wagers chats about how the series came together—HarperVoyager (a science fiction imprint of HarperCollins) reached out asking them to devise a new world that would capture the mission and feel of the Coast Guard in the way that Star Trek and David Weber's Honor Harrington series capture the Navy. But beyond that, Wagers had extensive freedom. The author went out of their way to fill out the cast with nonbinary and racially diverse characters. We talk about the need for representation in SF, and how seeing diverse characters works in two directions—as an invitation to marginalized readers, and as a demonstration of the need for diversity to military SF's often cishet male audience.
We also talk about what it takes to churn out two doorstopper science fiction books a year (at over 400 pages, Wagers says A Pale Light in the Black is big enough to act as an effective weapon), and dealing with the stress of disrupted writing schedules during a pandemic.
A Pale Light in the Black is out now from HarperVoyager.
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Jason Henderson is the host of the Castle of Horror and Castle Talk Podcasts, the editor of the Castle of Horror Anthology series, and the author of Quest for the Nautilus: Young Captain Nemo from Macmillan Children's Books.
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