When I was growing up, my idea of a writer was someone like Sven Hassel, that mysterious Danish author who wrote thrillers about men clambering over walls and getting tangled in barbed wire.
We do a hard fantasy as well as hard science fiction, and I think I probably single-handedly recreated military science fiction. It was dead before I started working in it.
My favorite show from the '60s was 'Combat.' And maybe 'The Man From U.N.C.L.E.'
I am reading "The Yellow Birds" by Kevin Powers and "Redeployment" by Phil Klay . Both Powers and Klay are Iraq War vets. Klay's stories are remarkable.
My first book, 'Contest,' had a guy fighting aliens in the New York Public Library. The second book, 'Ice Station,' and 'Temple' were present-day military thrillers.
There's an explosion of Indian fiction of all kinds, from military thrillers to chicklit. I think that's exciting.
The part of the strangeness of coming back from the war is the way we talk about it. We try to have a discussion about the war that doesn't turn into a discussion about one political side or the other. I wanted to reach out and talk to people about it through fiction, the way a narrative can draw someone in and ask them those questions.
Men Against Jive is a brilliant title! That's a military story, that's a difficult one to explain really because that's sort of a war... it's not just a war story.
