Interview with Charles Stross

Science Fiction Book Club

Interview with Charles Stross (December 2025)

 

Charles Stross has written seven Hugo-nominated novels and is the winner of the 2005, 2010, and 2014 Hugo awards for best novella. He has won numerous other awards and been translated into at least 12 other languages. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

 

Damo Mac Choiligh: You are regarded as a space opera writer, at least according to Wikipedia. Do you agree? Do you think there is a distinct British tradition of space opera, deriving from Banks, Reynolds and other writers from the 80s? If there is, are you part of it?

 

Space opera, like all SF, reflects the author's view of their lived reality onto the silver screen of a fictional world—in this case, a far future wide-screen epic with spaceships and interstellar travel.

 

The UK ran a world-empire until 1947, and its controlled demolition—in the wake of WW2—left the rubble of the British collective subconscious quaking. (Arguably, it's still doing so.) Before about 1956 and the Suez crisis (which unambiguously hammered the nails into the coffin lid of British imperial aspirations) British SF tended to reflect a self-image of unconscious cultural dominance. Since then … well, the message is still sinking in, and the aftershocks are still ringing. (Brexit was one of them, a last delusion of imperial autonomy that gripped enough of the right wing to convince them that going it alone was a viable economic strategy. Spoiler: it isn't.)

 

The USA *acquired* a world-empire in 1945, or at least the sort of global hegemony the British Empire had circa 1850. And now it's visibly sliding: in both cases, they came in with the shift to a new energy economy (the British Empire ran on coal, the US Empire ran on oil), and in both cases, an energy transition destabilized them (spot the current one!).

 

Anyway … British space opera historically reflected the British attitude to empire, even if the authors were self-consciously anti-imperialist. And there was generally *less* of it than in the US—it takes a very particular kind of brash self-confidence to do the genre unironically, as witness all the hard work George Lucas has put in since 1985 or so into making the Star Wars universe from the first movie seem, well, unironic. (I don't think it's any kind of accident that the late-imperial spasm of Trumpism coincides with Mel Brooks authorizing a sequel to "Spaceballs"!)

 

Then Iain Banks came along in the mid-80s and kicked the whole rotting apple cart over in his own inimitable way. He's one of two authors who completely revolutionized space opera in that decade—the other was Bruce Sterling, whose "Schismatrix" is very much the Velvet Underground of the New Space Opera (not many people went to their gigs, but everyone who did seemed to form a new wave band). While Schismatrix had a claustrophobic cold-war sensibility to it, lacking any hint of an authoritarian hegemony, Iain went in a very different direction: what if there's a galactic hegemony, *and they're left-anarchist idealists*?

 

Anyway, those two visions detonated the whole field of space opera, and the rest of us are just playing in the wreckage.

 

Damo Mac Choiligh: Your bio says that, like several science fiction writers, you have spent time working as a technical writer. Does this type of work influence your writing style for fiction or are they entirely different?

 

Entirely different. We call it "writing", but really, it's a different process.

 

Damo Mac Choiligh: I have heard that you tweeted that you believe yourself to be autistic - do you think this influences the way you write? Do your stories reflect this in plot, characters or any other way? Does it influence the type of stories you read?

 

Yes, very much so. It probably explains why literary fiction didn't really speak to me before I hit middle age—we tend to take a lot longer to become socially astute enough to make sense of the neurotypical world. And it influences my whole approach to writing, which is ideas-driven (although I try to illustrate them by having human protagonists directly experiencing their consequences—otherwise I'd be as dry as Olaf Stapledon).

 

SFBC Member: Have any of the science fiction ideas you've written about in the past ended up becoming present day reality? Do any examples stand out in your mind?

 

A bunch. But having said that—we who write SF are not in the business of predicting the future! Rather, we're popular entertainers spinning yarns that people want to read, and sometimes we hit the target by accident.

 

I'd like to note my two near-future Scottish police procedurals, "Halting State" and "Rule 34", that came alarmingly close to reality (written 2005/6 and 2008, published 2007 and 2009, set in 2017 and 2022). The first dealt with economics in MMORPGs in a world where AR goggles had caught on, as seemed plausible a decade or two ago … and the use of networked games for coordinating espionage rings, which is something that IIRC has actually happened. Meanwhile "Rule 34" dealt with a variety of forseeable stuff ranging from ransomware targeting 3D printers—I don't *think* it's happened yet, but the 3D printing boom seemed to stall in the 2010s—to non-sentient AI taking an alarming role in human relationships: it was a very near-miss at predicting our LLM-riddled present.

 

Damo Mac Choiligh: What was it like writing 'Rapture of the Nerds' with Cory Doctorow; did you enjoy the collaborative process? Do you both share the same sense of humour?

 

Yes, but it was also irritating as hell! We later agreed that we'd both written 80% of the same book, because we ended up playing table tennis with short chapters then rewriting each others work, and we were pulling in slightly different directions.

 

Dave Hook: Although I deeply understand the appeal of writing series works, is there any chance you will write any more standalone novels?

 

That's a business question! And currently publishers seem to be pushing for standalones.

 

Having finished two gigantic series, I'm currently trying to spin up something new. And what I'm working on is two books in a vast space opera setting—so different they concern different species in different eras, and can plausibly be read entirely as standalones, much as Iain's Culture novels were all standalones.

 

I just turned 61; the Laundry Files took 25 years to write, the Merchant Princes took from 2003 to 2021, and I don't think I've got another 20 years left in me. So if only to avoid leaving an incomplete series and thereafter being cursed forever by my readers, I'm going to stick to standalones or shared settings rather than tackling anything larger than a trilogy.

 

Dave Hook: One of my favorite works by Mr. Stross is the 2000 novelette "A Colder War". I have always felt this story is independent of the Laundry Universe works beginning with the 2001 "The Atrocity Archive". At the same time, it felt to me there was some overlapping themes. Maybe this has been discussed elsewhere, but I would be interested in his thoughts.

 

I wrote "A Colder War" between 1992 and 1998—it spent about six years at the back of a drawer—to process my trauma from growing up during the cold war in a small country with about 2000 H-bombs pointed at it: if WW3 ever broke out, nobody in the UK had any expectation of surviving more than six hours, and it could all happen by accident because some idiot politician in another country cracked a joke in front of a hot mike (I'm still sore about Reagan's "we begin bombing in five minutes" crack in 1984).

 

Anyway, ACW stands by itself: it brooks no sequels. (I mean, the end of the story literally takes place after the end of the world.) And I couldn't write more in that reality anyway: it's too corrosively bleak. But if something is bleak, you can make it funny and get a very dark humour out of it. So in 1999 I began writing a *funny* Lovecraftian story about IT tech support in a secret government agency dealing with world-ending horrors and also who has the key to the office supplies cupboard—and it kind of hung together.

 

Dave Hook: Finally, and I have not read it in a while, I have felt for some time that the 2006 Stross novel "Glasshouse" is one of the most terrifying novels I have read, in the context of reality and what is not reality. This may be a little more common today with the multiplication of works about simulated universes and virtual realities, but at the time it had quite an impact on me. Can I assume the intent was to depict a terrifying scenario?

 

The intent was to run a thought experiment: take the Zimbardo prison study and apply that same protocol to gender roles among people enculturated in a posthuman, post-gender society. Then it snowballed. Side-effects of mind uploading as posited in the book involve practical immortality and also mind *editing* by malevolent parties, and raise secondary questions: if there's a war, what do you do with the defeated combatants? ("Glasshouse" is British Army slang for a military prison. My big regret about the novel is that I didn't make that glaringly clear in the front matter.)

 

I'm playing with some of the same concepts again in a new work in progress (part of the new space opera setting I mentioned earlier) but it's unsold at present so I'm not going to discuss it further. (Can't be published before 2027, because business.)

 

John Grayshaw: Since your novels mix science fiction, fantasy, and horror, what is it you like about each of them?

 

I don't divide up my likes and dislikes along genre lines. Someone else invented those genres: not me. (What I write is usually described as cross-genre, anyway.)

 

John Grayshaw: What is it about the Merchant Princes series that makes you want to keep writing novels set in it?

 

I don't, any more. It's finished. The original 2003 plan was for a tetralogy of big fat books: the last of the original plan got crammed into the last hundred pages of "Invisible Sun" and it has run its course.

 

John Grayshaw: What is it about the Laundry Files series that makes you want to keep writing novels set in it?

 

It's a huge setting with a gigantic ensemble cast of characters … but it, too, is finished: it ran into a spiral of diminishing sales, so "The Regecide Report" wraps the original series up with a bow. The New Management books were originally intended to be Laundry Files: The Next Generation, but I handed in the first of them, "Dead Lies Dreaming", just as both my US and UK publishers went into lockdown in 2020 and the message got dropped, meaning they got sold as more OG Laundry Files, which annoyed readers who were looking for more OG stuff, not something for the next generation.

 

(There might be a final New Management novella or short novel in due course—it's half-written—but that project is on hold while I get the space opera spun up.)

 

John Grayshaw: What kind of research do you do for your novels?

 

I don't. Or rather, I constantly do *general* background reading about lots of things, and eventually they show up in a work of fiction when I've got enough material.

 

(Non-fiction authors typically work on a research-then-write cycle; fiction writers don't usually have the luxury of interrupting the writing process to do something else with an uncertain pay-off down the line.)

 

I will confess to writing with several browser tabs open on wikipedia at any given time, a scrapbook of papers saved off arXiv, and a bunch of incomprehensible notes I keep using SimpleNote.

 

John Grayshaw: When did you start to feel like you’d made it as a writer?

 

The imposter syndrome finally went away (and never came back) after the third Hugo award. That was about 20 books and 15 years into a full-time writing career, so go figure.

 

John Grayshaw: Which one of your works is your personal favorite and why?

 

I don't really have favourites—they're ALL my favourite thing while I'm writing them! (Right now my favourite thing is something called "Starter Pack" which you won't be able to read for a couple of years. And next year it'll be something new.)

 

John Grayshaw: Who are some of the science fiction writers that you enjoyed during your childhood?

 

With respect, that's a silly question. I'm 61 so you're asking about my favoures probably 40-50 years ago. The SF/F field was so wildly different back then that there's very little carry-through—a lot of SF that was popular in the mid-1970s has aged very badly indeed, especially SF that would have appealed to a teenager!

 

John Grayshaw: Who are some of your favorite current science fiction writers? And why?

 

I burned out on reading SF/F about a decade ago, after reading not much else for my first 50 years. So I'm absolutely out of touch with current developments. Critic James Nicoll is blogging a series of posts about the Arthur C. Clarke award shortlists including a poll on which novels you've read, and I realized I'd been at >60% until about 2005, then gradually began dropping, until after 2015 I was down to zero because I'm simply not reading within the field any more. (I really hope I un-burn-out sooner or later so I can play catch-up: I hear there've been a lot of good things.)

 

John Grayshaw: Do you enjoy going to science fiction conventions? Have any fun stories from going to them? Or have you gotten any interesting reader feedback from your works in general?

 

Yes, but my convention-going took a nose dive in 2016 and never recovered. (Entering the USA during any Republican presidency since 2000 has become distinctly unpleasant—I'm a foreigner, as far as ICE and CBP are concerned I have *zero* human rights—and I completely stopped during the first Trump administration. Then, just as I was getting ready to get back in the pool, along comes COVID19! And then another Trump administration, just like the last one only bigglier worse.)

 

I'm going to some British and European conventions these days, but mostly just as a fan, hanging out there (and being on a few panel discussions).

 

I will add that my first SF convention was in 1983 or thereabouts ...

 

John Grayshaw: Any of your works under option for movies or TV?

 

Yes. There's a TV option on the Laundry Files right now. It's the third time someone's bought an option on the books since 2008, and if it gets as far as a pilot episode it'll be a first.

 

Note that I don't watch films or TV. I have "exciting" eyeballs, as one ophthalmology professor put it, and I probably also have a mild degree of ADHD; I get really annoyed by movies (the ones I can physically see, because they're not just a muddy motion blur on the screen) because the plots telegraph themselves minutes ahead and the emotional beats are transparently manipulative (I spend too much time anatomizing the narrative structure of fiction), and TV season pacing bores me to tears: I can't sit still for more than 15 minutes.

 

John Grayshaw: What are some of your hobbies other than writing?

 

I have no life outside writing.

 

John Grayshaw: Do you have a writing routine that you stick to?

 

Nope: every book is different. I've tried all sorts of working routines over the decades, the only thing that sticks is what doesn't work—I don't write while I'm on vacation/travelling (which is important to keep me from going completely stale) and I can't concentrate in public. So I work in my home office.

 

John Grayshaw: What are you working on currently and what are your plans for the future?

 

I'm currently working on my big next space opera setting, which currently has three works in it: the novella "Palimpsest" (published in 2009, won the Hugo for best novella in 2010, collected in "Wireless"), a novel titled "Ghost Engine" that I've been trying to wrestle into submission since 2015 (it's an Iain M. Banks homage, and Iain was a literary writer first and foremost—there's a lot more to the Culture than sarcastic starships with odd names), and another novel titled "Starter Pack", a Harry Harrison homage (elevator pitch: "The Stainless Steel Rat gets Isekai'd").

 

This is all I can see for the future right now, although I have just had a mad idea for a sequel to "Starter Pack", which I can't even begin writing until early 2027.

 

 

Jim Shooter (1951-2025)

 

Comic book writer and editor, Jim Shooter died a few weeks ago (June 30^th) and I just wanted to write a quick post about who he was.

At age 13, in mid-1965, Shooter wrote and drew stories featuring the Legion of Super-Heroes, and sent them in to DC Comics. On February 10, 1966, he received a phone call from editor Mort Weisinger, who wanted to purchase the stories Shooter had sent, and commissioned Shooter to write Supergirl and Superman stories.

"The editor called up and said, 'We want you to write for us regularly' and started giving me assignments and I worked my way through high school. He didn't realize that -- about that time I'd just turned 14 -- until some time later. I lived in Pittsburgh and he asked me to come to New York, spend some time in the office and learn a few things. I was kind of hesitant, because I was in school. I said, ‘I'm 14.’ He said, 'Put your mother on the phone.' My mother had to come with me on my first business trip. Which is a little embarrassing. I worked for them for five years essentially."

Shooter did the job because he needed to support his financially struggling parents. He said, “My family needed the money. I was doing this to save the house; my father had a beat-up old car and the engine died – this is before I started working for DC – and that first check bought a rebuilt engine for his car so he didn't have to walk to work anymore. I was doing this because I had to, working my way through high school to help keep my family alive.”

Shooter has studied the recently rising Marvel comics and adopted their character-based narrative approach. He created new Legionnaires Karate Kid, Ferro Lad, and Princess Projectra, as well as the villainous group known as the Fatal Five. He also created the Superman villain Parasite in Action Comics #340 (Aug. 1966). Shooter and artist Curt Swan devised the first race between the Flash and Superman, two characters known for their superhuman speed, in "Superman's Race with the Flash!" in Superman #199 (Aug. 1967).

In 1969, Shooter was accepted into New York University, but after graduating from high school he successfully applied for a job at Marvel Comics in New York but he only lasted three weeks before quitting and moving back to Pittsburgh. After leaving Marvel, Shooter took up work in advertising concepts, writing, and illustration for several years, supporting himself through several menial jobs during periods when advertising work was unavailable.

A few years later Shooter was back at DC writing Superman and the Legion of Super Heroes again. However, Shooter's relationships with both Superman editor Julius Schwartz and Legion editor Murray Boltinoff were unpleasant, and he claimed that both forced him to do unnecessary rewrites. In December 1975, Marvel editor-in-chief Marv Wolfman called to offer Shooter an editorial position. And on January 2, 1976, Shooter joined the Marvel staff as an assistant editor and writer.

Because of the quick turnover at the Editor-in Chief position at the time, Shooter rapidly found himself rising in the ranks, and in January 1978, he succeeded Archie Goodwin to become Marvel's ninth editor-in-chief. During this period, publisher Stan Lee relocated to Los Angeles to better oversee Marvel's animation, television and film projects, leaving Shooter largely in charge of the creative decision-making at Marvel's New York City headquarters.

Although there were complaints among some that Shooter imposed a dictatorial style on the "Bullpen", he cured many of the procedural ills at Marvel, successfully managed to keep the line of books on schedule (ending the widespread practice of missed deadlines popularly known as "the Dreaded Deadline Doom"), added new titles, and developed new talent. Shooter in his nine-year tenure as editor-in-chief oversaw Chris Claremont and John Byrne's run on the Uncanny X-Men, Byrne's work on Fantastic Four, Frank Miller's series of Daredevil stories, Walt Simonson's crafting of Norse mythology with the Marvel Universe in Thor, and Roger Stern's runs on both Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man. Shooter also had two great runs writing for Avengers. And he was also the editor that oversaw the famous “Secret Wars” crossover event.

Despite his success in revitalizing Marvel, Shooter angered and alienated a number of long-time Marvel creators by insisting on strong editorial control and strict adherence to deadlines. Shooter occasionally found himself in well-publicized conflicts with some writers and artists. Creators such as Steve Gerber, Marv Wolfman, Gene Colan, John Byrne, and Doug Moench left to work for DC.

John Byrne said “Shooter came along just when Marvel needed him – but he stayed too long. Having fixed just about everything that was wrong, he could not stop "fixing"…Shooter had put Marvel into a place where all that was needed was a kindly father figure at the helm – and that was not Shooter!”

Shooter was fired from Marvel on April 15, 1987.

I was lucky enough to meet Jim Shooter at the Big Apple Comic Con in NYC in 2008.  I was surprised by how tall he was. (6’ 7”).

I had Shooter sign Adventure Comics 346, the first comic he did when he was 13. He didn’t think much of it, “Yeah you could tell how young I was when I did that.” Then he signed Adventure Comics 352 and he said “I was just starting to really get it when I did this one.”

He signed Avengers 161 for me next and he said, “Someone in the business told me the other day this was their favorite Avengers. That made me feel pretty good.”  Lastly, he signed Avengers 171 for me.

Shooter’s Avengers and Legion stories were important to me when I was a kid and I still think they stand the test of time today. And when you look at everything else that was happening at Marvel while he was in charge Claremont/Byrne's X-Men, Byrne's FF, Miller's Daredevil, Simonson's Thor, Secret Wars, etc. These are comics that still resonate with readers today and continue to fuel the Marvel today in comics, and movies/TV.   

Interview about Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett

 

Science Fiction Book Club

Interview with John Grayshaw (Jan 2025)

 

John Grayshaw is the creator and administrator of SFBC on Facebook. He has done about 100 of these Q and A interviews with science fiction authors, biographers, historians, and other experts. He recently had a research article about orphaned stories from Harlan Ellison’s Last Dangerous Visions published in Amazing Stories.

Wesley Grubb: What was Edmond Hamilton’s bestselling, or most successful, book that he wrote?   

His Captain Future stories were published in sci-fi magazines from 1940 to 1951 and later published as novels. There were about 30 stories.

Among his novels, the most successful were ‘The Star Kings’ series: ‘The Star Kings’ (1949) and ‘Return to the Stars’ (1968) and the ‘Starwolf’ series ‘The Weapons from Beyond’ (1967), ‘The Closed Worlds’ (1968) and ‘The World of the Starwolves’ (1968).

Wesley Grubb: Edmond Hamilton is one of those bridge-authors, who began writing before the “Golden Age” and continued to write into the “New Wave” era. How well did his writing develop, and how well did his stories mature, from his early career compared to his later career in the 50s and 60s? 

In a 1975 interview with Luna Monthly, Hamilton talked about how quickly he was writing stories back in the pulp era. He said:

“How do I feel about the rapid, high-production way we oldtime pulp writers employed in our work? I can’t speak for others, but for me it was the best way in the world to work. I might have been a more polished writer had I worked in more leisurely fashion, but I might too have been the centipede who didn’t know which leg to lift first.

One of the most ghastly stories I ever wrote was “Outside the Universe,” a wild tale of three galaxies at war. I wrote that in 1928, over 50,000 words of it first draft. I used a very small portable typewriter on a big, flat-top inherited desk. In writing those hectic space-battles, my hard pounding made the little typewriter creep all over the desk, and I would stand up and follow it in my burning enthusiasm.”

In the same Luna interview he also talked about the so called “sci-fi ghetto”:

“I think that there has been too much crying about sf being forced into a ghetto, and away from the mainstream. I think this is a lot of b.s. The reason why us pulp writers of sf didn’t appear in the mainstream was simply that we weren’t good enough writers for the mainstream. Those of us who were good enough . . . Bob Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and a few others, were welcomed by mainstream markets.”

He was asked in Tangent interview if he regrets not winning more Sci-fi awards and he said:

“I’d be delighted to get one, too. I was also nominated for one, but most of our science fiction has been in the adventure/entertainment scene. If you don’t have Big Thinks in it the people who vote on these are not greatly impressed. If they can understand every word of it, then it can’t be great you know? That’s their attitude.”

In the 1975 interview with Luna Monthly, Hamilton lamented the more modern New Wave trend of literary science fiction over science fiction with an emphasis on science: 

“About my interest in science, and the attitude of us early sf writers toward science, I believe you have cleared up for me a puzzling thing about many present day sf writers . . . their lack of interest in science. This explains the mystery (to me) of why so many of them have not the slightest interest in the space program and its great achievements. To me, sf without the scientific element amounts to very little. I believe that young writers do regard stories not as something whose subject matter interests them passionately, i.e. scientific possibilities, but as exercises in English lit. I don’t think without true passion about whatever you write, no matter how crude it may be, you can ever be as happy writing. That is just my opinion.”

Jason Bleckly: How does Allen Steele's resurrection of Captain Future compare with Edmond's original stories?

Firstly, let’s talk about Captain Future in general. Edmond Hamilton authored most of the Captain Future stories, but the character was created by Better Publications editors Mort Weisinger and Leo Margulies before the 1st World Science Fiction Convention in 1939 and announced at that Convention. His stories were published in the namesake pulp magazine from 1940 to 1944, after which more stories written by Hamilton were published in various sci-fi magazines until 1951.

Hamilton talked about the series in his 1975 Luna Monthly interview. Mostly he was using it as an example of how fast he was writing in those days

“I stopped writing so fast, long ago. I did make an exception for the Captain Future series. They didm’t at first pay much for those. So I did them first draft, a chapter a day, allowing 2 days for the first chapter, which is more difficult. Later, when they upped the price they paid, I did two drafts and the writing of the stories improved. There is no use, however, in giving advice to someone to write at high speed, because as I say, the market has so changed that you can’t sell that high-speed stuff any more. I should explain, referring to my statement on the Captain Future series, that I did not make a practice of hurrying the writing of stories that would not pay well. I’ve always believed that a writer should do every story the very best he can, no matter if it'll be paid for in buttons. But I was trying to make a living writing sf, and when they asked me to take on the Captain Future chore, I had to specify that until they could pay more for the stories, I’d have to do them in as little time as possible. They agreed, and the first few of them were just sort of written off as rapidly as possible . . . though I had made out a schema of background for the stories, which I adhered to carefully. But I have never believed in dashing out a story because it was an unpretentious thing.”

According to the SF Encyclopaedia: Hamilton's early 1940s absence from adult sf, through his work in comics and his involvement with Captain Future (Young Adult titles aimed primarily at teenaged boys), made it initially somewhat difficult for him to be accepted after World War II as a competent and versatile professional.

Coming back to the question about Allen Steele; he has done two very different takes on Captain Future. He first did a novella ‘The Death of Captain Future’ (1995), which is set in Steele’s ‘Near Space’ universe. In the story, a man named Bo McKinnon collects "ancient pulp magazines" and acts out a fantasy life based on the Captain Future stories. Steele’s, more gritty universe contrasts with the Future’s Pulp setting. The novella won the 1996 Hugo Award for Best Novella. ‘The Exile of Evening Star’ (1999) continues and concludes the story. They include many quotes from the original stories.

Then Steele wrote ‘Avengers of the Moon: A Captain Future Novel' (2017). It is a continuity reboot which gently updates the narrative (including the science) to fit with a more modern sensibility. The novel features the main characters from the original stories and presents a new origin story for its protagonist. ‘Captain Future in Love’ (2019), ‘The Guns of Pluto’ (2020), ‘1,500 Light Years from Home’ (2021) and ‘The Horror at Jupiter’ (2021) have followed. 

Damo Mac Choiligh: Leigh Brackett wrote Westerns, Crime novels and Science fiction - did she regard herself as being primarily a genre writer and was any one of these genres particularly close to her heart? 

Science Fiction was definitely the dearest to her heart. She said in an interview with Tangent in 1976:

“I knew that what I really wanted to write anyway was science fiction. If I want to write about Mars, who’s going to contradict me? Nobody’s been there. And besides, that’s what I really wanted to write about so that’s what I did. Sure enough, there wasn’t a heck of a lot of money in it, but it was a heck of a lot of fun; there’s some awfully nice people.”

Later in the same interview Hamilton is talking about Brackett starting to write crime novels.

Hamilton (to Leigh) “You had quite a strict family back then—”

Brackett- “Oh, yes, very.”

Hamilton: “I got you back at ten o’clock one night and you got quite a scolding for being out that late. A few years later, during the War, I picked up this novel she had written called ‘No Good From a Corpse’. It was a tough private-eye novel. The hero was named Edmond, wasn’t he?”

Brackett: “Uhm-hmm.”

Hamilton: “I always felt you were dreaming of me [ laughing ]. I hoped.”

Brackett: [chuckling] “I just liked the name.”

Hamilton: “She had written this novel that was full of Humphrey Bogart-type characters. “I grabbed her and said, ‘Doll, you’re quite a dish’” and all this sort of thing and people were shooting other people up, and I told my folks…Betty and Phil had looked at that novel…and I said I didn’t know where she got all this experience because I couldn’t keep her out past ten o’clock at night [laughing].”

Brackett: “Well, I’ll tell you where I got it. I got it from reading Hammett and Chandler.”

And it is no doubt ‘No Good From a Corpse’ that had Howard Hawks shouting “find me this Brackett guy.” If he really said that, but we’ll talk about that later in the interview.    

How did Hamilton and Brackett meet?

Apparently, they met through Hamilton’s friends in the comic business. I’ll let them tell it. This is from Hamilton and Brackett’s interview in Tangent fanzine from 1976: 

Hamilton: “Well, it was in 1940. Mort Weisinger and Julie Swartz, my old friends, were out in Beverly Hills from New York on vacation, Juile was my agent at that time and Jack Williamson and I went over to see him in Beverly Hills, and Julie said, “ I have a client here, a young girl who lives in Los Angeles, and she’ll be coming through this morning to see me.” So, when she arrived, she was overcome with awe to meet two great science fiction writers like Jack Williamson and myself; but I was quite kind to her, put her at her ease…I think I’ll let her tell her version of it now.” [laughing to Leigh]

Brackett: [laughing] “Well, they were both looking thoroughly auctorial; they were both wearing sweatshirts, looking like geniuses. I nearly fell through the floor. Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton, they were the two great names. Seven years later he got around to asking me to marry him.”

Damo Mac Choiligh: Ray Bradbury famously served as Best Man at the Brackett/Hamilton wedding; was he particularly close friends with one or both of them?

Yes, Bradbury was a sort of protégé of both of them. And he must have been a damn good friend as he was as you said, the best man, and they got married at his place in San Gabriel, California.

Here is what they said about Ray Bradbury in the 1976 Tangent interview:

Brackett: “Ray was a member of the LASFS group [Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society] This was before he had started to sell so he was writing like mad and trying like mad to break in. “(to Ed): That summer that you and Julie [Swartz] were out there Ray was selling newspapers on the corner about a block or so away from our place.”

Hamilton: “Julie always liked Ray very much, so when he’d lay in some beer and whiskey and so on for our evening parties, he would always get some Coke for Ray. He was such a kid he didn’t drink anything and Julie would say, “I'll get a little coke for the kid.” As I say, Ray was very young, and he would bring his stories over for Julie and I to read. Finally I told him, “You don’t want us to tell you how to write. You know very well what you want to do and you’re going to do it your own style. What you’re bringing these stories over for is that you want us to tell you they're good. They’re good. So just go ahead and write them.” I think it was that summer he published his first story that he collaborated with Henry Hasse on. [Super Science Stories, November 1941- The Pendulum] Well, he brought the magazine over to show us beaming like the sun, and then he was so overcome that he took the magazine like this and he kissed it and kissed it.” [laughter from all ]

And then there is the story of how Brackett and Bradbury collaborated on the novella ‘Lorelei of the Red Mist,’ This is from an article on Leigh Brackett by Bertil Falk in Bewildering Stories 2007:

“At that point when Hawks summoned her to his office, she had prepared half of the 20,000-worder “Lorelei of the Red Mist” for Planet Stories. She had written the line “Then it was gone, and the immediate menace of the foreground took all of Starke’s attention.” At the same time that she wanted to accept Hawk’s offer, the assigned story had to be finished. She had to make some kind of decision.

The dilemma was solved. Ray Bradbury was five years younger than Leigh Brackett. She was a kind of mentor and a sounding board for this aspiring writer. She turned to Bradbury and asked him to complete the story. He accepted the challenge.

Where Brackett had stopped writing the story, Bradbury jumped into medias res and continued with the following sentence, “He saw the flock, herded by more of the golden hounds.” Then he completed the story in ten days and ‘Lorelei of the Red Mist’ was published that same year. The rest is, if not exactly history, at least science fiction history.”

Damo Mac Choiligh: I think it's fair to say that 'The Long Tomorrow' is Leigh Brackett's most well-regarded novel. Do you think she was drawn to the agrarian life portrayed in the book? When she and Hamilton married, they moved to Kinsman, Ohio, which Wikipedia tells me is a tiny village. Did they want to embrace a rural lifestyle or small-town life? Or was it more a matter of leaving the city?  

Don Sutton, Brackett and Hamilton historian and their former neighbor said:

“She had pitched some Sci-fi to Hollywood. They said it would be too expensive with special effects and production costs,  so she wrote ‘The Long Tomorrow’ as a response. Then they told her that there weren't enough special effects. The book began in Kinsman and I could see the locations in the book.

They bought the house across the street from his family. It was one of the oldest houses in Kinsman. They gardened and remodeled the house. They liked the privacy. In later years they had a winter home in CA.   When they would come back home in the spring they would say ‘It’s good to be home.’   They said their best writing was in Kinsman.”

Brackett and Hamilton talked about “The Long Tomorrow” in an interview with Amazing Stories in 1979:

Brackett- “Well, I became fascinated by the Amish way of life. I had not known anything about these people before we moved back to Ohio and I observed their methods of living, which were quite fascinating, and I said “If the atomic collapse does come they’ll go sailing right on because they don’t depend on all the artificial appurtenances of civilization as we do. If our electricity goes we’re sunk, because the entire house runs on it. They don’t bother with it.”

Hamilton- “Before she never even saw them to think about them, but seeing them with a fresh eye she came up with this idea.”

Brackett- “It occurred to me that if this web of civilization ever collapsed, they would be the ones to teach the lost skills of how to exist without it to the survivors.”

Damo Mac Choiligh: The director Howard Hawks famously asked his secretary to find "this guy Brackett" to help William Faulkner write the script for 'The Big Sleep'. Although Hawks had no difficulty when he found out Brackett was a woman, did she encounter sexism from others in Hollywood?

That may just be a story. Brackett was adamant in interview after interview that she was not discriminated against.

In the Tangent interview in 1976 Brackett said

“But no, there was never actually any discrimination against women screenwriters. The first job I ever got was at Republic and the highest paid person on the lot was a woman. The discrimination against women came in later, much later, when television came along with all these male-oriented western series and detective stories, and they figured a woman wouldn’t be able to write that kind of thing. Which is where the problem came in. Dorothy Fontana gave a very concise, intelligent discussion of that one night out there at UCLA. This is breaking down now. In other words, they are reading the script to see if it’s a good script and not who wrote it.”

In a Luna Monthly interview from1976 Brackett said:

“I have never in my life thought of myself as A Woman. I was always me, an individual, free-standing and in the round. Whatever I do or think or feel, I do or think or feel it not as some component of a mass group, but as myself. I have always refused to be bound by stereotyping or limited by any other limitations than my own. To me, my sex has never been of the slightest importance outside of the bedroom.”

And later in the same interview she said:

“I have never been discriminated against because of my sex, that I know of. Editors aren’t buying the sex, they’re buying stories.”

Damo Mac Choiligh: How did she find it working with a literary giant like Faulkner on 'The Big Sleep'?

In an interview with Starlog from 1974 Brackett says:

“I went to the studio the first day feeling absolutely appalled. I had been writing pulp stories for only a few years, and here I was expected to work with William Faulkner, who was one of the great literary lights of the day. I wondered what I had to offer.

That question was quickly resolved when Faulkner came out of his office to meet me carrying a copy of Chandler’s novel. He put it down and announced “I have worked out what we will do. We will write alternate chapters. I will write these chapters and you will write those chapters,” Faulkner went back to his office and I didn’t see him again. So, the collaboration was quite simple. I never saw what Faulkner wrote, and he never saw what I wrote. We just turned our pages into Hawks.”

And I have to mention the famous anecdote of Faulkner, while working on the screenplay calling Chandler to ask who killed the Sternwood family's chauffeur, Owen Taylor, to which Chandler famously replied, "I don't know." This might also be just a story, but I’ve always loved it.

Who were some of the writers Hamilton and Brackett grew up reading?

Once again, I’ll let them speak for themselves. Here is what Hamilton said about how he got into Science Fiction in the Tangent interview in 1976:

“Some people, myself included, are born with a feeling about these things. In my case I couldn’t even read. This was on a farm in Ohio back in 1908 when I was four years old. I got hold of some magazine that contained an article by H.G. Wells called ‘The Things That Live on Mars’ It was, as I see it now, a follow-up to his very successful ‘War of the Worlds,’ and it had these pictures of tall slender tress; strange looking Martians moving about. I looked at that magazine until it wore out. I wasn’t yet able to read it, to read the article, but those pictures! I sat and wondered if Mars was a long way off and if it was a very strange place. This feeling I say; I think people have a bent towards this, that is to say, I had a very large family and I don’t think any of them read anything but maybe my first story. They just had no interest in science fiction. They were all great readers, but not science fiction.”

And here is what Brackett said in Luna Monthly in 1976:

“On or about my eighth year, a milestone event occurred and changed my entire life. Someone gave me a copy of Burroughs ‘The Gods of Mars’. I had always refused to read girls’ books. I liked stories where things happened, the wilder and more exotic the better. I knew all about Indians and pirates and Fuzzy-Wuzzies and Mowgli’s jungle, and the terrible charge of the Highland men. But suddenly, at one blazing stroke, the veil was rent and I had a glimpse of the cosmos. I cannot tell you what a tremendous effect that idea of Mars, another planet, a strange world, had upon my imagination. It set me firmly on the path toward being a science-fiction writer. From then on, I could not get enough of fantasy.”

How did Hamilton get involved in writing comics and did he enjoy writing them?

As was mentioned before, Hamilton had two close friends from the early days of SF fandom, Julius Schwartz and Mort Weisinger who were two of the heads of DC Comics at the time. And in the Tangent interview from 1976 Hamilton said “Well, of course, the main attraction with comic books was that they paid so much more than science fiction.” He wrote many comic stories in the 40s-60s. Various Batman and Superman comics, Mysteries in Space, and Strange Adventures. And he also wrote all the earliest stories of The Legion of Super Heroes which have always been personal favorites of mine.

What parts of Brackett’s Empire Strikes Back script ended up in the final script and movie?

According to The Making of The Empire Strikes Back: The Definitive Story Behind the Film by J.W. Rinzler (2010): 

“George Lucas said he asked Brackett to write the screenplay based on his story outline. Brackett wrote and finished the first draft title “Star Wars sequel” that was delivered to Lucas shortly before her death from cancer on March 18, 1978, but her version was rejected and Lucas wrote two new drafts and then turned them over to Lawrence Kasdan (who had just written Raider of the Lost Ark) to rework some dialogue.”

And according to a 2021 article by John Saavedra in Den Of Geek:

“In this draft there is a love triangle between Luke, Leia and Han Solo. Yoda is named Minch, Luke has a hidden sister named Nellith, Lando Calrissian is Lando Kaddar, Luke’s father is still a distinct character from Darth Vader and appears as a force ghost on Dagobah, and Han Solo, at the end of the script, leaves to search for his uncle Ovan Marek, the most powerful man in the universe after Emperor Palpatine.

However many aspects are similar to the final movie, we still get a version of the Battle of Hoth, the wise words of an old jedi master, the excitement of zooming through a deadly asteroid field, a love triangle, a majestic city in the clouds, unexpected betrayals, and the climatic duel between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.”

Where is a good place to buy their works?

Haffner Press http://www.haffnerpress.com/ offers many of Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett’s works. 

Did they ever collaborate on a writing project?

In his introduction to The Best of Leigh Brackett (Ballantine, 1977) Hamilton wrote:

“We found, when we first began working together, that we had quite different ways of doing a story. I was used to writing a synopsis of the plot first, and then working from that. To my astonishment, when Leigh was working on a story and I asked her, ‘Where is your plot?’ she answered ‘There isn’t any ... I just start writing the first page and let it grow.’ I exclaimed, ‘That is a devil of a way to write a story!’ But for her, it seemed to work fine.”

According to Bertil Falk’s 2007 article in Bewildering Stories on Leigh Brackett:

“Over the years the two affected each other’s writing. Leigh Brackett learned plotting from her husband. Even though he plotted his stories before he wrote them, he had nevertheless been a hack writer all the way from
“The Monster-God of Mamurth,” published in Weird Tales, August 1926. Under the influence of his wife, he stopped using his typewriter as a machine gun. He no longer wrote in a hurry and took an interest in carefully forming his sentences.

When Startling Stories asked Hamilton, in 1950, to revive Captain Future for a series of short stories, he was busy working on other assignments. He wrote the first story “The Return of Captain Future.” Then he wrote the synopses for the other stories. But when I visited them, I was told that it was actually Leigh Brackett who wrote them under his guidance using the “pen name” Edmond Hamilton.

In 1964 it was the other way around, when Hamilton expanded Leigh’s short story “Queen of the Martian Catacombs” into “The Secret of Sinharat” and “Black Amazon of Mars” into “The People of the Talisman.” Both stories were originally penned in the 1940’s.”

In the 1976 interview with Tangent Hamilton said:

“The fact is I was out of the running for a couple of years with a sickness. When I was recuperating in the hospital I wrote the first half of this story with a pencil and pad. This was Harlan Ellison’s story for THE FINAL DANGEROUS VISIONS. What he wanted was a collaboration between Leigh and myself; you know a formal collaboration. The story is called “Stark and the Star Kings” and if I may say what’s funny about it; the first half of it I wrote and it’s all about Stark. She wrote the part about the Star Kings.”

The story was not published until 2005 in the collection “Stark and the Star Kings.”

Did Hamilton and Brackett have any particular writing habits or routines they stuck with? 

Here is what Brackett said about her writing habits in a 1976 interview with Luna Monthly:

“Working habits. Normally, I get to the typewriter first thing in the morning: otherwise, the day is generally lost. Normally I work all morning. I seldom work in the afternoon, unless the pressure is extreme. I sometimes work at night, though not as much as I used to I don’t know why, exactly.”

And here is what Hamilton said about his writing habits in 1975 in Luna Monthly:

“How did I work? I just sat down and wrote like crazy ... I took no notes, or outlines. I started by doing a rewrite of each story, then for quite a few years I wrote everything out first draft and the hell with rewriting. Of course, the fact I wasn’t getting paid much for those stories had something to do with that. As time went on, I became more careful.

About planning my early stories, or not planning them ... I must have given you the wrong impression if you thought I did not plan out those early yams. In fact, for many years I planned each story rigorously and the longer ones in a chapter-by-chapter synopsis. I ceased to do this in later years. I suppose by then I had confidence enough that I would not go badly astray but could develop the plot naturally as I went along. It’s been a long time since I outlined a story in advance. I just start, and let the subconscious develop the thing. One thing, though ... I always had a weakness for wanting to know what the very last line of the story would be. I suppose that is because it is the place where you leave the reader, and therefore I feel it is the final impression you want the story to give.”

What were some of Hamilton and Brackett’s interests other than writing? 

Brackett brilliantly spoke about Hamilton and their domestic life in an 1976 interview in Luna  Monthly:  

“What is Edmond Hamilton really like? He is Brilliant, of course, with immensely wide-ranging interests. A formidably knowledgeable bibliophile; he can tell you every edition of every book of any note, no matter how obscure, published since Gutenberg started the whole business, and from memory. He has a steel-tap memory. Nothing read is ever lost, and he has read nearly everything. He has an independent mind, forms his own opinion, and is not impressed by prevailing modes of thought. He has never to my knowledge, lost a friend. He is extremely conscientious about his work. I’ve seen him throw away the result of many days hard labor because he thought it wsn’t good enough. He has done many stories, probably more than most writers, on order; to fit a cover, or a particular need—the sort of assignment that is sometimes referred to as hack-work, but I have never known him to ‘hack’ a story, i.e., to write it cynically, without care, without pleasing himself or trying to please the reader. He gives his best to everything he does, which in my book means true professionalism: the ability to turn out a story to order and still make it good. He has never learnt properly how to tie his shoelaces. He is unimaginative in his dress (brown suits, brown slacks, brown sport coat, tan shirts, white for special occasions, one black suit for banquets) but he is fastidious in the extreme. Getting him rigged out to go somewhere is worse than habiting a seventeen-year-old girl for her first prom. He is a creature of habit, like a cat. He placed the furniture; it has never been moved. He loathes housecleaning, doesn’t mind a reasonable amount of dust, but insists on neatness. No jackets tossed on chairs, etc. He loves the country. He does not like big cities. He prefers to visit with a few friends at a time, rather than many. He promised me when we married that, though I might have to pull the plough, he would never ride it. He never has. But he will not work in the garden, except to run the cultivator now and again if I don’t catch him in time; he sometimes fails to note where the weeds leave off and the young beans and potatoes begin. He enjoys mowing and spends hours at it. He is not a good carpenter, and where work of that sort is concerned tends to be impatient rather than methodical. He enjoys travelling, but it must be done with a purpose, to see someone or some place of especial interest. On ordinary brief jaunts, the some place is inevitably a bookstore. He does not like to eat out. No comment. He has great charm and a fine sense of humor. Life with him has not been dull.”

Please tell us about Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett Day in Kinsman.

This was a special event that they did for two years in Kinsman. Don Sutton and the Kinsman Historical Society were the main driving force. (As I mentioned before Sutton is a historian and bookstore owner in Kinsman). There were many events including presentations by Stephen Haffner from Haffner Press, a presentation by Don in which he portrayed Hamilton. There was a presentation of Hamilton’s and Brackett’s slide collection which had never been seen by the public before. And there was a walk to Hamilton’s grave at dusk where they drank a toast to him.

Sutton told me they are getting a Science Fiction museum in Warren, OH that may be open in 2026. And that currently there are some Science Fiction pieces displayed at the Medici Museum in Howland, OH and that he will be working on a section for Brackett and Hamilton.

What is Hamilton and Brackett’s legacy? Why was their work significant at the time? And why is it still important today?

I think that despite Brackett’s nonchalance about her importance as a woman writer, that she (along with all the other women sci-fi writers of the time) threw open a lot of doors for all the women that would come after them. Also, I think she is unique in that she found so much success writing not only pulp stories and novels, but also movie scripts. Her novel, ‘The Long Tomorrow’, as well as her scripts for ‘The Big Sleep’, and of course ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ will all stand the test of time.

For Hamilton, I don’t think he is a household name in the same way that Brackett is, however I do think that a lot of his work is remembered more than his name is. Allen Steele was only able to revive the Captain Future series because it is still remembered. And as long as Batman, Superman, and the Legion of Super-Heroes are still being published Hamilton will be remembered as one of their most prolific writers in the Golden and Silver Ages.

Orphan Stories from Last Dangerous Visions

(Image is me on Christmas morning with Last Dangerous Visions)

I've been working on a research project for about 3 months and it is finally published!

The project is about all the "Lost Stories" from Harlan Ellison's "Last Dangerous Visions." 

After JMS got a version of the project published in October. I starting wondering what happened to all the stories he didn't use and would any of them see the light of day in the future or were they lost to the cruel mistress of time.

Well, I started reaching out to the authors and since the LDV project started over 50 years ago, some of the author's estates. And here is the article on the wonderful Amazing Stories Magazine: 

 https://amazingstories.com/2025/01/the-last-orphan-stories/

I am eternally grateful to Damo Mac Choiligh who came aboard when I was on the about 10 yard line but exhausted and out of energy and he started doing proofreading, editing, rewriting, and research to get me into the end zone.