Featured Interview With Forbes West
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I’m a Chicago transplant living in Southern California with an unnatural Irish-American fetish for all things Cuban. I drink too much wine, smoke too many cigars, and think that I’ll being classy when I’m actually posing. But I’m entirely self-aware of my own silliness (I pray that I am so self aware) and I like to see myself as three characters- a real person of flesh and blood who’s a half-way decent guy, a goof who wants to just party my mind into oblivion, and a tortured author looking to grasp the infinite and somehow refine what I’ve witnessed into young adult stories so I can make a dollar and earn a pulitzer. So in other words, I’m trying to break my mind down quickly.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I realized my fascination pretty early on- I had a slight reading disorder of some sort (never explained really, but I guess I was just a slow learner) so my Mother tossed anything my way to read. Naturally it progressed from comic books to magazines to reading the never ending “Battletech” series because I’m a kid at the time who likes to hear about people in giant robot machines murdering each other in the 31st century. I started writing in 2001 when I got more into Stephen King- especially after reading “The Gunslinger”. The book was everything I loved mashed into one- the wild west, science fiction, supernatural horror, a bad ass hero- and I realized- holy shit, I want to do something like this. I want to see more of these stories. I need to make up some of these type of genre bending, screw the literary rules type stories because there wasn’t enough out there. So I naively thought, I gotta help out here. I gotta see more of this stuff. So when I write, I write stories I wanted to read and I’m sorry, I don’t write what I think an audience is looking for, per se. That doesn’t mean I don’t respect my audience I just think the moment you are trying to please an audience instead of focusing on what the story should be you are sunk before you can even set sail.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Science Fiction is my own personal cocaine that I am deeply addicted to but I like to cut it with some history at times with a dash of Hemingway. Favorite authors and their books? Well, here’s the laundry list: Frank Herbert’s Dune. Stephen King’s The Gunslinger (Plus its sequels). Nick Cole’s Wasteland Saga. Robert Hughes and his great book, The Fatal Shore (the founding of Australia might as well have been a science fiction story with the strange and interesting history of putting prisoners on the proverbial dark side of the moon) . Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka’s WarDay. Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings by V.I. Lenin and Slavoj Zizek. Ron Paul’s The Revolution: A Manifesto. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. All of those are books by authors who press on my mind and who have left dents in my subconscious.
Two people though inspire me to write- my wife, who kicks me in the ass to get writing again (domestic terrorism is good inspiration) who then loves my work (best inspiration to have) and Ernest Hemingway. He may have ended his life badly but his journey was one of a guy who lived to the fullest and then some. Not too many get live four or five lifetimes in one like he did.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Nighthawks at the Mission is a deconstruction of the settler in space story. Its about the reality of what would happen if modern day Americans suddenly had the means to colonize this new world- and for everyday types to make it through a portal and into this Lord of the Rings like land to exploit and abuse and make a cheap buck off it. Sarah Orange, the main character, is a 20 year old drunk and addict who on a whim takes off to The Oberon, this new world found in this universe’s 1995 and while there hooks up with this criminal salvagers (“Nighthawks”) while pretending to have a regular 9-5 job in order to make a buck. While in this new land filled with aliens and high tech abandoned cities of an extinct human civilization that’s become a feral zombie horde, she becomes the girl on the side to a slick con-man salvager, deals with terrorism, and discovers a very dark family secret while earning thousands of dollars.
Here’s what the book’s jacket says:
The Oberon. Off-World. Thousands of settlers from America have come to live in this mysterious land accessed only by an energy portal in the South Pacific. The settlers are there to mine orichalcum- a mineral that can give even the casual user magical powers – and to reap the strange high tech salvage that litters the dead cities of an extinct human civilization.
In today’s universe, it’s the last place a settler from the USA can find the old American dream alive and well. Facing a futureless existence and betrayed by her long-time boyfriend, Sarah Orange leaves the Earth. There she falls in with a group of illegal salvagers that operate at night in the empty ruins that dot the landscape. Sarah risks death and betrayal from The Oberon’s corporate overseers as well as the murderous hatred of the alien Ni-Perchta that live a medieval existence there. With her life spinning out of control, Sarah searches for love and money in a world so close to- and yet so different from- our very own.
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