Helloo!!!

I absolutely loved Hel's Eight by Stark Holborn a deliciously fast paced science fiction tale with a dash of Mad Max and cosmic horror thrown in. Strongly recommend you get this series. It was therefore a delight to invite Stark back to the blog to talk about the book and what else we can look forward to in the future!

How do you like to booktempt Hel’s Eight?

I’d probably make a bold and inflammatory statement like MAD MAX: FURY ROAD meets GIDEON THE NINTH meets DUNE (David Lynch version please).

Or I could just throw my inspirations at people; if you like The Thing or Alien3 or The Ballad of Halo Jones or Philip K. Dick or fast-paced adventure stories with female protagonists and a diverse cast in a queernorm world… then Hel’s Eight might be for you!

Was Esterhazy’s story always in the back of your mind writing this?

As soon as I introduced her as a character I wanted to know more about her; in Ten Low we meet her towards the very end of her life, though she drops hints about her wild and colourful past. It seemed natural to focus on how she arrived on Factus, and that gave me an opportunity to explore the roots of some of the themes and settings I raced past in Ten Low. It was fascinating to imagine the world through her eyes. In her sections she’s in her mid-fifties; a fence and brothel owner and convict who left Earth aged eighteen and bounced around the system before winding up among a cohort of prisoners on Factus… Her age and experience give her authority, but it’s her empathy and her ability to accept that see her through.

How much fun is it to create a truly unusual alien such as The Ifs who always appear very inhuman and terrifying? Why is choices versus the power of chance so scary for us?

It’s two sides of the same coin, I think. We like to feel that we’re in control of our lives and behaviour and choices, but on the one hand that’s an illusion which slips away when we’re confronted by the sheer random nature of the universe, or on the other, by how conditioned we are by our surroundings and past in often deeply subconscious and unfathomable ways. We might not be as free as we think… The Ifs are a manifestation of that, really. There’s also an argument to say they’re beyond human comprehension and this is just how people on Factus are able to interpret them, or that they don’t exist at all and are just people’s paranoia…

We’ve had Ten and Eight what is the secret to the numbers in the titles?

We’ll flip a coin next time we meet and if you win, I might tell you…

EEEEEk

What else can we look forward to from you in the future and where can we find out more?

If all goes to plan there should be another book in the Factus series out in 2024… can’t say much yet, except that it features a few familiar characters, but it’s shaping up to be quite different again, structurally. I also recently finished Triggernometry III and am hoping that will be released later this year. As for games writing, the game I’ve been working on for the past three years – an immersive, sci fi noir detective sim called Shadows of Doubt – has just been released in Early Access, and we’ve been blown away by the positive response. I’m also currently writing as part of a great team on a project called Nivalis: a follow-up to the bestselling cyberpunk delivery game, Cloudpunk.

What great books have you read recently? 

I finally got around to reading The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa and loved its fabular quality – deeply moving. I also recently dipped back into E.J. Swift’s The Coral Bones again, and highly recommend it. Apart from that I just started Ian McDonald’s Desolation Road; so far so intriguing.