Chris Roberson, author of Set the Seas on Fire, answers the questions in the latest of our author interviews.

We’re in the bar at a convention buying you a drink - what’s it to be?
Strangely, my usual order is a glass of iced tea and a pint of beer (wheat beer for preference, though a lager works just fine). This strange two-fisted combination means that I can drink for hours on end without getting completely blitzed. The only downside is that chasing one diuretic with another means that I’m back in the men’s room on an extremely regular basis.

Tell us in one sentence what your book is about.
Set the Seas on Fire is a Napoleonic-era nautical adventure blended with a love story, with Polynesian zombies thrown in for spice.

Why should we buy your book over all the other books out there?
If the Polynesian zombies aren’t enough to sell you, then how about loads of sword fighting, grog, and cannon-fire, to say nothing of scantily clad Polynesian gals and guys?

Which of the characters in the book are you most like and why?
Probably the main character of Hieronymus Bonaventure, though the resemblance is pretty slight. Hieronymus is a true-blue adventure hero, with a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other, driven to seek excitement and action in the hopes of avoiding boredom. I, too, am driven to avoid boredom, but instead of going out to seek adventures I stay at home and write about them. On the other hand, I don’t have to spend months at sea eating weevil-ridden biscuits and trying not to get scurvy like Hieronymus does, so maybe it balances out a bit.

How did you get your start?
I started writing down stories in elementary school, with my first magnum opus being an epic space opera entitled “Space Crash,” that ran to all of five hand-written pages, and bore no resemblance whatsoever to Star Wars, which had appeared in theaters the previous year. No resemblance whatsoever.

I continued to write through middle school and high school, wrote most of a novel my first two years at college, finished another in my senior year, and didn’t look back from there.

Do you ever draw inspiration from current events?
I do, but probably just as much as I draw inspirations from cartoons I watched as a kid, comic books I’ve read, or the show I just watched on television.

Do you have any writing superstitions?
Not superstitions, I suppose, but habits that develop over time. For example, at the moment I can only outline at Starbucks, and can only write finished prose when sitting at the desk in my home office. That’s just a result of having only outlined at Starbucks for the last few months, and only written at home. Habit leads to character, as some dead Greek said, and having done something for a few months now it’s stuck. I’ll shake it sooner or later, I’m sure, and set up a new habit that I’ll be forced to follow for a while, instead.

What, or who, inspires you to write?
Besides filthy lucre, you mean? Well, most often it’s the idea that sparks off in my head that leads me to write. The ideas themselves can either come from a documentary I’m watching, or a book or article I’m reading. Often I find myself reading someone else’s novel or story or comic, and after the first few chapters things end up going in a very different direction than I expected. And I find myself wanting to read the story that was in my head, instead of the one the writer actually did. And, being a writer and all, I realize that I can write the story myself.

In much the same way I’m often rewriting things that I enjoyed when I was a kid, but which on revisiting them as an adult turned out to be not nearly as good as I remembered. In those kinds of cases, I write the thing I remember it being, not the thing it actually was. In the end, it often bares only the slightest resemblance to the original, which was filtered through my little kid eyes and then left to steep back in my brain for another twenty or thirty years until it was unrecognizable.

What non-literary influences can be seen in your work?
If comics count as literary, then television and movies. If television and movies count as literary, then video games, perhaps? Old role-playing games? I’m not sure, I don’t really tend to differentiate between them. It all falls under the general rubric of “stuff I like.”

Who would you most aspire to be able to write like, and why?
Alan Moore, I think. He’s simply amazing on every level, with terrific ideas and unparalleled plotting abilities, but an incredibly gifted stylist to boot.

What made you choose SF/F over any other form?
Science fiction is my native culture. It’s what I grew up enjoying. I was a child of the seventies, and as a kid, everything that I read, everything that I watched on television or at the movies, all of the toys I played with, all of it was sf/f in one way or another. Even GI Joe (who British readers will remember as Action Man) had by that time quit the army, grown a beard, and started palling around with an atomic guy and a flying bullet-man. On television I watched stories about bionic men, and irradiated hulks, and amazons who could deflect bullets, and wagon trains through the stars. At the movies it was all light sabers, and dark crystals, and last star fighters. And the stuff I read was reprints of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Doc Savage novels, or tie-in novels with Dungeons and Dragons or Star Trek, or comics about alien space cops or superpowered teens in the future. Really, taking all of that into consideration, how could I not choose sf/f.

You are granted five minutes with an author of your choice (living or dead). Who would you choose and what would you ask them?
I would chose Edgar Rice Burroughs, and would ask what he intended when he established in the first Barsoom novel that John Carter was some kind of amnesic immortal. That’s bothered me for the last two and a half decades.

What is your opinion on the state of publishing today?
I have a very long answer, to do with the long-tail and changing modes of distribution and the like, but the short answer is that creatively I don’t think it has ever been better. The sales of individual titles or authors might be down compared to some mythical golden age in the past, but the amazing diversity of stuff out there that I can pick up and enjoy as a reader is something that I don’t think has been matched before.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you be doing?
Before becoming a full time writer, I worked as a baker, a dry cleaner, a binder in a copy shop, a receptionist, a filing clerk, a network administrator, a middle school history teacher, a phone technician, and a product support engineer. If I wasn’t writing, I’m sure I’d be doing one of those, or another career equally as unsuited to my temperament.

What's your preferred way to relax after a long day of writing?
Reading. Or watching the Venture Bros. Or both.

When was the last time you didn’t finish reading a book, and why?
I don’t finish reading books constantly, and almost always for the same reason. If I don’t burn to know what happens next, if I’m not invested to find out what happens, I put the book down. Life’s too short.

What books have had an effect on you—for better or worse?
My dark secret is that one of the things that made me want to be a writer was reading L Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth in high school. I’d already dabbled with writing as a kid, but that was a book that really got into my head and took up residence, and I ended up reading it a couple of times in the span of a few months. I thought it was the best thing ever. Imagine my disappointment a few years later when I went back to reread it and quickly discovered that, whatever else it was, Battlefield Earth was most definitely not the best thing ever. There were enormous plot holes, some serious breaks in internal logic, and the whole thing had the appearance of having been dictated aloud to a group of attractive young stenographers, Jubal Harshaw-style, while Hubbard sunned himself on his decommissioned freighter in the Mediterranean. Not a terrific book, by any stretch of the imagination. But it resonated with me as a kid, and was one of the things that set my feet on my current path and for that, at least, I’ve got to be thankful.

Do you think there’s anything truly original left to say in the genre, or has it all been said?
I think that there are an endless number of truly original ways to say things that have already been said before.

What is your favorite non-writing job you’ve held?
Working at a bakery after college with a bunch of stoners. Enjoying contraband substances with people who have the keys to an entire freezer of cookie dough is an unmatchable experience. Best. Job. Ever.

What was your most unusual job?
For a few months after I graduated from college I wore a red cloth vest and gave change to teenage drug dealers at a video arcade for minimum wage. A terrific use of my education.

What do you do when not working?
Play with my three year old daughter, read, and watch television, mostly.

What subject did you like most at school?
It’s a close race between English lit and history, I suppose. Or physics.

Tell us your most embarrassing moment.
No, I don’t think so. That’s one for the bar, I think. Buy me a drink and then ask me about it again.

Happy or depressing endings, and why?
I prefer happy endings, but depressing endings seem to come naturally to me. I think that what I really respond to is satisfying endings, those that offer a nice bit of closure, which isn’t always the same thing as being happy.

What was your first published work?
The first “professionally” published work was “O One,” a story in Lou Anders’s Live Without a Net anthology in 2003. But I’d been posting things to a webzine for a few years prior to that, run by a writers collective to which I belonged called Clockwork Storybook. And a cringingly bad poem of mine was published in a student magazine in high school.

What are some of your most loved song lyrics?
Anything by Ben Folds, Elvis Costello, or Billy Bragg.

Tell us about some of your hobbies?
Now that I write science fiction novels for a living, no real hobbies left, actually. I turned them into a career!

What’s your preferred vacation spot?
Most of my “vacations” are actually science fiction conventions, and there all I’m really looking for is a good hotel bar well stocked with interesting sf/f people.

Do you have any pets?
I had a plant in college, but it died. I tried to keep a pet rock, but lost it. No pets, I’m afraid.

Married, single, not telling?
Happily married for the last seven years. We were joined three years ago by our gorgeous genius of a daughter, so now we’ve got the complete set.

What advice would you give a writer starting out today?
Read widely, write constantly, and don’t give up.