Adam-Troy Castro is a well-known writer, and not only in English. He published more than eighty stories and has been nominated for numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Stoker. In 2007, with Jerry Oltion, Castro won the Seiun Award (the Japanese equivalent of the Hugo) for Best Foreign Language Short Story of the Year for "The Astronaut from Wyoming." His novella The Shallow End of the Pool has been nominated both for the 2009 Black Quill Award and for the 2009 Stoker Award, and his novel Emissaries From The Dead is among the nominees for the 2008 Phillip K. Dick Award.
In this small but exclusive interview, Castro spills the beans about his influences, his character Andrea Cort and her novels.
Post-Weird Thoughts: What are your favorite authors? And your influences? Are Jack Vance and Chad Oliver among them?
Adam-Troy Castro: Sorry. But for the possible exception of short stories encountered in anthologies, Jack Vance and Chad Oliver are two complete holes in my science fiction education. I know Oliver's name but cannot recall any specific stories to mind. I have oddly been told, by no less an authority than Harlan Ellison, that some sections of my Nebula nominee novelette "Of A Sweet Slow Dance In the Wake of Temporary Dogs" reminded him of Vance, but if that's accurate, I have no way of knowing. My lifelong sole exposure to Vance was one of his "Dying Earth" stories, encountered in childhood decades ago, and now completely forgotten but for a really neat bit involving a staircase descended in perfect darkness.
No, my gateway drugs into science fiction were Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, both of whom influence the Andrea Cort stories in ways visible to me now. I see a clear line of descent of Asimov's Susan Calvin to my own Andrea Cort. Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg and Robert Sheckley came a little later, and can be found lurking between the lines of various other stories I've written, not so much in the Andrea tales. My entry drug into mysteries was the pseudonymous Ellery Queen, including among my favorites the installments that I later found out were ghostwritten by the likes of Theodore Sturgeon and Avram Davidson and Fredric Brown. The subgenre of all the works featuring the character Ellery Queen and published under the Queen name is almost completely out of fashion today, but thrilled me as a kid, and informs much of the ratiocination Andrea Cort employs in solving her own conundrums. As do the works of Agatha Christie, by the way.
Later, there was Donald Westlake, one of the most versatile, most elegant writers of popular fiction who ever lived. Ed McBain. Stephen King and Clive Barker, who between them brought me into horror - no small thing, since I've written more horror stories than anything else. John Steinbeck and Mark Twain for passion. These days: gimme Jack Ketchum; gimme Robert Reed; gimme Joe Lansdale. I am currently head-over-heels in love with the Temeraire novels of Naomi Novik and the works of a new thriller writer named Cody McFadyen, whose heroine Smoky Barrett makes Andrea look well-adjusted.
PWT: What exactly is the AIsource? Are they completely alien? If so, how they manage to communicate with the human race, and the other carbon-based alien races? Why do they even care?
ATC: The AIsource are not a species, per se. They're a conglomeration of advanced software intelligences who have outlasted or achieved independence from the various organic species that spawned them. They seem to speak with only one voice, but are in truth an internally quite fractious group, which presumably includes some factions so alien that direct communication with them is impossible. The ability of the consensus to speak with human beings and the other sentient races who wander Andrea Cort's universe is in part a function of their own vast intelligence, as their ability to speak colloquially with us amounts to baby talk or, more accurately, a human being cooing at a dog, "Who's a good boy?" As for why they care, let alone market their services in the interstellar economy, it's in part because their physical needs are minimal and they have nothing else to do with their time, in part because an advances the agenda Andrea learns about in EMISSARIES FROM THE DEAD.
PWT: 3. In binary code, One One One (111) equals seven (7). Does that mean there are other artificial worlds created by the alien AIs? If so, will we be seeing them in other adventures of Andrea Cort?
ATC: There are, and yes, you might, though no such environments figure in the works currently in the pipeline.
PWT: By the way, could you tell us something about THE THIRD CLAW OF GOD? What sort of dangers will Andrea Cort be facing?
ATC: Here's where the Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie influences come in. THE THIRD CLAW OF GOD belongs to that hoary mystery subgenre involving a murder in an enclosed space occupied by the rich and famous, that obliges the veteran detective among them to stand over the body and announce to the rest of them, "Somebody in this room is a murderer!" (Yes, Andrea gets that exact quote, and it's fair to say that I wrote the novel in large part so Andrea would get to say those words, though I gave one of the suspects a comeback line that takes the wind out of her sails pretty quick.) The setting is a luxury car on the space elevator taking the whole motley crew down to the surface of a world that functions as the headquarters of the Bettelhine Munitions Corporation, and about all I'll say about that is when Andrea gets around to naming the murderer, there's still more than seventy-five pages left in the manuscript, because the stuff that really rocks her world is still coming up.
One thing I would like to footnote: the Bettelhine Munitions Corporation, and Andrea's fellow passenger Dejah Shapiro, might both be familiar to long-time readers as among the supporting cast of my series of short stories involving the space rogues Ernst Vossoff and Karl Nimmitz. This has been a rather tangled web.
PWT: The Andrea Cort novels constitute a trilogy, or there are no limits set for her exploits?
ATC: The Andrea Cort stories were never intended as a closed trilogy, but as an open-ended series. I'll continue writing about her in either novels or short fiction for as long as the market exists. I will say, however, that I only have a publishing commitment as far as the third (and still untitled) book, and that (at this point) only for a foreign publisher. I recognize the economic reality that book three might turn out to be Andrea's swan song at novel length., so I have designed a final development that drops a depth charge into her disordered little life. After that, the issue will be not whether she moves on, but what as.
PWT: What are your plans right now? What is Adam-Troy Castro writing at the moment?
ATC: Right now I'm about halfway through the third Andrea Cort novel. Once I'm done with that I intend to cleanse my palate with something completely different, maybe a horror novel or a comic caper or romantic fantasy. It's been a while since I exercised myself in a field other than Andrea's, and I'm looking forward to the challenge.
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