Stephen Brown Interview Published on: 24, Feb 2023

I was born in 1951 in Seaton, Devon, England. It was a different world. We had a radio because my grandfather ran a radio shop (he'd been a wireless operator on a battleship in WWI). We didn't have a television, although they were becoming available. We did have a telephone, something that was unusual back in the UK at the time. When we left for Canada in 1956 it was on a steam-powered train that took us to the 1920s-era, steam-powered ship that carried us from Southampton to Montreal (10 days). The family moved to Kitchener, Ontario where I lived until university. After graduating I worked at a series of jobs in industry before accepting a job at York University in Toronto where I worked until retirement. My wife and I always liked the idea of living in Prince Edward County, but there was little chance of a job here, so we had to live within commuting distance to Toronto. Shortly before retiring we built a house here in "The County" and have been here ever since.

Science fiction was my thing back then: Jules Verne, Arthur C Clarke, Robert Heinlein. The books that impressed me the most were Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Childhood's End and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. "Hard science fiction" interested me the most because it was only slightly beyond what was possible. I called shows like Star Trek "space operas" (I stole that phrase) because they just used space travel as decoration, not that it stopped me from enjoying them. When Star Wars came out I was really impressed even though it fell into the same category.

I wanted to see if I could do it.

I don't have any specific hobbies. I do a little woodwork, but only if exactly what I want isn't available. I built a small sailboat, but only because I wanted to see how it was done. I'm not a good sailor.

I'm not a writer. I'm an author. Writers are people who make a living writing. They have deadlines and mortgages and families to feed. They have to produce even when they don't want to. I'd starve if I had to do that. I write when I have an idea that interests me.

Try coming up with a title that hasn't been used before. Easier to come up with a new word (hence The Maisonist, Kreotopia, After the Polothians). In The Maisonist the main character wants to collect houses. Philatelists collect stamps. He decides that house collectors should be called Maisonists.

Very little. I try to make the physics believable, but basically I'm writing a story to entertain. The spacecraft in Transcending Venus has whatever kind of drive is necessary to make the timeline work.

The result was terrible, even I could tell that. I took a couple of stabs at Steamdragon before going back and trying again. The other challenge was that I started it with pen and paper, then a nineteen-thirties typewriter, then an electric typewriter and finally an early word processor. In the early days of word processors someone said that nothing good would ever be produced on one. I don't know how anything worthwhile can be written without one.

It was like being a scientific handyman. I got to do a little bit of everything: mechanical, electronic, hardware, software, optics. People who specialise are missing the fun. Of course, "Jack of all trades, master of none" does apply. You have to know your limits and not push too far beyond them.

Never. Sounds like work.

I don't read much science fiction. That's "science fiction", "speculative fiction" or "sf" but PLEASE, not "sci-fi" (see Star Trek, above). The reason I don't read much science fiction is that it makes me feel guilty. I should be writing it, not reading it. The best modern science fiction that I've read is "Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mandel.

Quantum Mechanics. Full stop. Somehow I passed the course in university. I watch lots of good Youtube videos that try and explain it, but I'm still trying to get my head around the thing. While I was working at York University I attended a lecture by a researcher explaining the problem with understanding quantum mechanics. One of the local professors who taught quantum theory was there. After the talk her response was "just give me the boundary conditions and I'll give you the answer". That's also known as "stop trying to understand it, just calculate."

I don't believe in ghosts (and a whole lot of other things), but I find the idea of ghosts fascinating. Writing a ghost story without implying that ghosts really exist was interesting.

I watched a short video of day-to-day life in the Soviet Union in the nineteen-fifties. It was done to the song Moscow Nights sung by Vladimir Troshin. One of the commenters asked how it was possible to be nostalgic for a place he'd never been. I'd like to capture that feeling in a story.

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