Dave Freer Ignites YA Sci-Fi with Storm-Dragon

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory opens today the way you'd hope a conversation with an Australian ichthyologist-turned-novelist would: an extended riff on cell phones versus mobile phones, why Australians call beer "piss," and Dave's deadpan insistence that all Tasmanians carry a small scar where their second head used to be. From there, Dave Freer joins the same week he's set to accept a brand-new Prometheus Award, virtually, at three in the morning his time, for Storm-Dragon, the first year that particular Young Adult category has ever been awarded.Storm-Dragon exists because fellow author Cedar Sanderson told Dave that boys had stopped reading, and that Raconteur Press was building a line specifically to fix it. So Dave went back to the book that hooked him at ten years old, Jack Vance's Blue World, and built his own version: a boy and a small, hungry alien creature who starts their relationship by biting him. The telepathy between them isn't hand-waved fantasy, either. Dave spent years studying sharks and electric eels, and Snarky's mind-reading runs on real biology, a species that can sense and transmit electrical fields through water too murky to see through, reverse-engineered into a scientifically grounded psychic bond.From there the conversation gets personal. Dave describes himself as a "reverse plotter" who starts at the ending and works backward, until his own characters start refusing to do what he originally planned for them. He talks about fully immersing himself in another author's vocabulary and sentence rhythm before writing tie-in fiction, and tells a striking story about hanging by two fingers on a rock face at nineteen, realizing mid-climb that he'd stopped caring what anyone else thought of him. That sentiment has fueled over a quarter century of novels and short stories, give Dave a read!The GuestDave Freer is a South African-born, Tasmania-based science fiction and fantasy author who has published over twenty novels since his 1999 debut, The Forlorn. He is a two-time Prometheus Award winner, for Cloud-Castles (2023) and Storm-Dragon (2026), and is known for the Rats, Bats and Vats series co-written with Eric Flint. Storm-Dragon is published by Raconteur Press.More from Dave Freer: https://davefreer.com Get Storm-Dragon: https://raconteurpress.comWant to be on the show? Have feedback? Send Mookie a text!Support the show