Barton is bisexual and has been writing queer speculative fiction for 24 years. His latest novel, I Will is due out very soon from Virtual Tales. Two earlier novels, Ella the Vampire and Parole are available through Lyrical Press. Two more novels, Max and Me, and Year of the Human are slated for release later this year through Lyrical Press and Hearts on Fire Books.

As a physicist, Barton writes atmosphere models when he isn’t writing fiction, and spends a lot of time trying to raise awareness about global warming. He is a born-again Christian, a liberal Democrat, and a lover of science. He hails from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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OA:  You’ve written female/female, male/male and male/female relationships in your currently available works. What appealed to you about each of those? Do you anticipate writing more of any one type in the future?

BPL: I’m currently working on a novel which I think will involve two teen girls falling in love with each other.  But generally I don’t target the sexual relationships involved from the beginning; they just flow out of the characterization.

What is attractive about each?  Hard to say.  I think the hetero thing feels good because you’re exploring a cuddly, warm body different from your own and designed by evolution to mate with–also because men and women in most societies have slightly different subcultures and ways of looking at things, so it’s a chance to get close to someone with a (somewhat) different psychology.  The homo thing feels good, I think, because it’s reassuring to be with a body like your own, one you know, and it’s easier to know in advance what your partner will and won’t like.  And if you’re raised in a heterosupremacist culture, it can be awfully liberating to throw away the demanded gender roles and just do what feels good to you, and the hell with what society thinks.  That experience will fade with time as GLBT lifestyles become more accepted, God willing.

OA:  I Will was released a few days ago. If you could really visit the space adventure universe in the book, would you want to go? Why, or why not?

BPL: Heck, yeah!  It’s filled with all the cool SF stuff I craved as a kid–aliens, interstellar travel, strange planets, and a very comfortable, high-tech environment.  Plus Earth in this universe (it shows up in the sequel) has incorporated a lot of the policy changes I recommend.  When you’re creating the world, you can make it do anything you want!

OA:  Your bio on the Lyrical Press site describes you as a born-again Christian and a liberal Democrat, and says that this combination confuses people. Do you think this confusion is unwarranted, or are there times when you find your spirituality and your political beliefs in conflict?

BPL: It hasn’t been a problem so far, aside from occasional frustration with fellow Christians who embrace politics I don’t, and fellow left-liberals who reject my religion or all religions.  I can get along with anybody, but I have had a few occasions when I was told I couldn’t be a “real” Christian if I supported [pick an issue--free choice, gay rights, evolution...].  Also that I couldn’t “really” understand or believe science if I believed in God, and that as a Christian I undoubtedly embraced misogyny, homophobia, racism, creationism, and despoiling the environment.  Sometimes it was honest ignorance; sometimes it was just prejudice.

OA:  You have two more books coming out in the next year: Max and Me, and Year of the Human. Can you tell us anything about them? When can we expect to see them?

BPL: Max and Me is an SF action-adventure novel with a little speculative philosophy thrown in.  The protagonist is Gunnar “Gunner” Dahlquist, a bisexual veteran of Beast War III who now pilots a freelance spaceship out of 1 Ceres.  He lives with the bioengineered talking cat Max, who is even more cynical and foul-mouthed than he is.  Things get strange when, twelve years after Beast War III ended, people suddenly begin pursuing Max, one faction wanting to kidnap him, another to kill him.

Year of the Human is a young-adult SF novel.  Alien teen girl Throsu ka-Hohsh is a would-be astronaut and a nationalist; her planet fought a brief, inconclusive war with Earth years earlier.  She is thrown for a loop when her parents inform her they will host a human scientist and her daughter for a year–the daughter to live in Throsu’s room!  And soon that’s the least of her worries.

OA:  As a concerned physicist, what (if anything) do you think the global community can do to successfully end global warming? If it doesn’t work, what do you think the consequences will look like?

BPL: If we make a massive switch away from fossil fuels to solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, and hydro in the next five to ten years, and stop cutting down forests, we may just make it.  Frankly, I don’t think we will.  The human pattern is never to prevent a crisis; it’s to wait until the crisis happens and then react.  This time that pattern is going to kill us.  Global warming causes more droughts in continental interiors and more violent weather along coastlines.  12% of the Earth’s land surface was “severely dry” by the Palmer Drought Severity Index in 1970; by 2002 that figure was 30% and still climbing (Dai et al. 2004).  I expect human agriculture to collapse completely some time in the next forty years, and when that goes our civilization will go with it.

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Thanks, Barton! Join us again on Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out I Will at Virtual Tales, or other books by Barton Paul Levenson at Lyrical Press.

[1] (Back to post): My apologies for the tardiness of this week’s Spotlight. A series of international travel (mis)adventures left me without internet access on Friday and Saturday.

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