“The Heir of Night” F-SF Guest Author Series:

On Thursday 6, I announced that, as part of celebrating the launch of The Heir of Night into Australia and New Zealand, a number of my fellow AU/NZ F-SF authors—and one from Canada 🙂 —would be joining me on the blog for a  F-SF Guest Author Series.

The first of my fellow authors, whom I would like to welcome to Helen Lowe on Anything Really, today, is Australian Dark Fantasy author, Alan Baxter.

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F-SF Guest Series Post: Alan Baxter

Helen was very kind to invite me for a guest post on her blog today about why fantasy and science fiction rocks my world as a writer. That’s easy – absolutely limitless scope for storytelling.
I grew up a voracious reader. From the age of three I would sit on my father’s knee and read the paper with him. I didn’t understand the news, but I loved the concept of the written word, and I could read. I soon graduated to books and discovered the magic of stories.

When I was very young I loved books like Runaway Ralph, Charlotte’s Web, Stig Of The Dump. They were all, to some extent, fantasy stories. The constraints of non-genre fiction bored me.

Even back then I loved writing. At seven years old I wrote a story about a guy that goes back in time and has crazy run ins with dinosaurs. My teacher refused to believe I’d written this several page epic and rang my parents. When they told her that it was all my own work I had to read it out to the class. I had discovered two joys – writing fiction and other people enjoying what I’d written. I still remember standing in class, watching the other kids listen as I read. It was an epiphany moment for me.

At around ten or eleven years old I discovered real fantasy. A family member bought me a copy of The Hobbit for my birthday and I was transported beyond anything I’d experienced before. I immediately followed that up with The Lord Of The Rings and everything by Ursula Le Guin and then began consuming fantasy fiction as fast as I was able. I then discovered science fiction and, by about 15 or so, horror introduced me to the darkness available between the pages of a book.

Throughout this time I’d been writing stories, none of which were very good, and started my first (thankfully abandoned) novel at sixteen. It took me a long time to decide to take writing seriously, but by my late twenties I’d decided that I was a writer. It drove me, I couldn’t imagine not telling stories. And I couldn’t imagine not writing in the speculative genre.

Fantasy, science fiction and horror appeal to me for the complete freedom they give a writer to explore exactly what needs exploring. At the heart of things, any good story is really an exploration of the characters and the ways they grow and develop when presented with the path of life before them. As the characters grow, the world around them is changed. With SF&F that path of life is utterly unlimited. Any situation you can think of can be explored.

My writing always tends to be dark. There are probably many reasons for that – my personal history, my love of horror, the nature of life itself being often rather darker than we’d like – so I don’t avoid it. I enjoy exploring the darker side of human nature, and how good people stand up against that. SF&F is an excellent medium for that too.

I’m fascinated by ancient history and mythology. I love to play around with various religious mythologies in my fiction and explore the human need for belief. My novels, RealmShift and MageSign, are based around those very issues, with lots of magic and demons, mayhem and excitement thrown in. I think they’re best described as dark fantasy thrillers. That genre definition is probably where I’m most comfortable writing. Those two novels are contemporary urban dark fantasies and I’m working on a third novel now, separate to that duology but in the same version of our world I created with those two. My short fiction covers more of the traditional fantasy and science fiction ground and I’d like to write novel length works within those sub-genres one day too.

There are so many stories to be told. I can’t imagine ever getting bored with the massive scope that SF&F allows for creating those stories that I’m compelled to tell. Everything else, by comparison, seems boring.

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Alan Baxter

About Alan Baxter:

Alan is an author living on the south coast of NSW, Australia. He writes dark fantasy, sci fi and horror, rides a motorcycle and loves his dog. He also teaches Kung Fu. Read extracts from his novels, a novella and short stories at his website – www.alanbaxteronline.com – and feel free to tell him what you think. About anything.