Featured Interview With Michael Smorenburg
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I’m African.
I was born in 1964 at the tip of Africa, Cape Town, South Africa.
Quite why,I have no idea, but I was drawn to be an entrepreneur straight out of college. I’ve consequently never had a salary in my life.
In 1995 Michael I moved to Southern California where I founded a business consultancy and online media and marketing engine in the burgeoning internet space.
But once Africa has a hold of you, it is impossible to resist, and back to South Africa I returned in 2003 where I launched a security company.
In 2015 I semi-retired and divested of the business to write full time.
My greatest love is the ocean, reading history, keeping up with the latest breakthroughs in science, understanding the cosmos and sharing all learn as best I can.
I consequently “dress facts up as fiction”–I find interesting historical, anthropological or other scientific facts I think would fascinate people, and I weave them into stories that give them context.
I live in paradise – in the suburb of Clifton (look it up) in Cape Town where I have a wife, two young adult daughters, a lazy dog and 6 glorious cats who are my best mates.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
Aged 31 – on vacation on a beach in Spain. It struck me out of the blue and destroyed our holiday as I spent 10 days furiously getting the 400 page story of “LifeGames Corporation” down.
My father always said I had a fertile imagination – “Full of bulldust”, is actually what he said.
I’m a dreamer, I guess – and a dreamer is just a visionary without money. So, since I can’t finance my inventions, I write about them.
If you wanted to bump off my now aging school teachers, you’d tell them I write novels – they’d fall over stone dead with shock, as I showed no such intellectual persuasion at school.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Frankly I get bored with most stories unless I’m getting something out of them.
I’m a facts guy. I read a lot of non-fiction to understand how things and people and cultures and history works.
To me, reality is more exciting than any fantasy I’ve ever encountered.
So, fairly limited fiction:
James Clavell, Leon Uris, James Michener, Wilbur Smith
Just about ever science, history and anthropology popular textbook out there.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
I’m simultaneously working on two books right now – both are sequels:
1) A sequel to Ragnarok — one of the planes that went missing in the aurora that almost took Tegan’s plane crash lands onto the Hudson — and a decade later the now-retired captain is starting to remember where… or ‘when’… they went (hint…. He and his plane of passengers caught in a high energy military experiment were pushed back through time and landed in the Hudson a thousand years ago – his ‘second’ crash into the Hudson a decade ago returned him to our epoch and the authorities scrubbed his and the passengers’ memories. But those memories are starting to return.)
2) A sequel to my “Slave Ship Saga” – the third in the trilogy. In the 1980s (fact) I found a shipwreck off our coast… in 2015 the Smithsonian of Washington identified it as the 1794 São José Paquete Africa, the first and only slave ship in history ever to have wrecked (with 400 chained aboard) and be discovered. “The Praying Nun” told the story of our discovery and then takes the reader aboard the fated ship where we meet one of the slaves. The actual ship in history had 200 survivors who were ‘saved’ and then sold the next day to recover costs. “The Reckoning” follows one of those slaves and his experiences of 1794. The book I’m working on, tentatively called “The Accord”, follows the same surviving slave but now in an overlap of his story through the eyes of our protagonist, Jayne Alphen, wife of the newly arrived governor of the colony at Africa’s tip. Jayne, an heiress, is in an miserable arranged marriage with her much older husband who she has come to despise for his meanness, cowardice, and perversions. He only has power through his marriage into wealth. Horrified by encountering a slave culture for the first time, Jayne is terrified that she is falling in love (or at least is infatuated) with a most unusual slave she encounters. His freedom promises to become a vicarious emaciation of her own imprisoned heart… but her husband has seen her obsession and she must tread carefully.
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