Steven is a Michigan native, who currently lives in Ypsilanti. He wrote his first SF story at the age of nine, and made his first professional writing sale (an article about raising rabbits) to Mother Earth News at the age of 13. His professional fiction writing career started in 1992 when Marion Zimmer Bradley accepted his story, “Hoard” for Sword and Sorceress IX. He has since written a variety of short stories and novels under his own name, and as Steven Harper.

All four of his Silent Empire novels (written under the name Steven Harper) were finalists for the Gaylactic Spectrum Award. They are currently available in a variety of e-book formats at Book View Cafe, where Steven also guest blogs each Monday. His most recent story, “The Soul Jar” (written as Steven Harper) appears in the Book View Cafe original anthology, The Shadow Conspiracy.

When he isn’t writing, Steven enjoys playing both the folk harp, and City of Heroes (but he can quit any time he wants). One of his children is autistic, so he also supports the work of The Judson Center. Steven keeps a personal blog at spiziks.livejournal.com.

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How did Book View Cafe crew decide to put out The Shadow Conspiracy anthology? Who is involved, and can you tell us anything about your contribution?

The BVC members had decided to put together an anthology of reprint and original fiction as a fundraiser for the site. This became Rocket Boy and the Geek Girls. (The title came up as a joke because at the time I was the only male member of BVC, and everyone liked this title so much, it became official.)

We all had so much fun with Rocket Boy, we decided to try an all-original piece, a shared-world anthology. And everyone’s first choice of genre was steampunk.

The idea for starting at the Year Without a Summer was Sarah Zettel’s. What if Mary Shelley weren’t writing fiction when she penned Frankenstein? Why did all the people who spent that cold, rainy summer in Geneva either vanish mysteriously or come to a dreadful, miserable end? Laura Anne Gilman and Phyllis Irene Radford offered to edit. A bunch of the rest of us laid claim to various characters and started writing. We have stories by Judith Tarr, Sarah Zettel, Jennifer Stevenson, Brenda W. Clough, and several others.

I received a nudge from the ghost of Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Almost twenty years ago, I wrote a science fiction story about a circus performer who falls in love with another man. Unfortunately, his new boyfriend has a possessive twin brother who tries to sabotage the relationship. The twins are clowns with the circus, and they perform the Lupino Mirror, an act in which two clowns stand on either side of an empty mirror frame and imitate each other. Mirror imagery was a major part of the story. I loved the piece and sent it to every SF market I could find. They all rejected it.

I’d sold several stories to Marion Bradley by then, so I wrote to her and asked if she’d be willing to look at it and comment on what might be wrong with it. She agreed. When she sent it back, she said it was a perfectly fine story and she’d buy it if she published science fiction. “It’s being rejected,” she wrote, “because the main character is gay.”

Sad and annoyed, I put the story into a drawer.

Then The Shadow Conspiracy came along. When I was casting about for ideas, my SF circus story popped into my head, and I could almost hear Marion’s voice saying, “Well?”

I had to rewrite the original story extensively. Not only have I changed as a writer in (cough cough) years, the setting for the new anthology was wildly different. But it was so much fun! Developing a relationship between two men in a steampunk circus in Dublin was a hell of a ride.

Incidentally, the fact that the twins in my story have red hair is a nod to Tommy Zane from Marion’s circus book The Catch Trap. Tommy was always one of my favorite literary characters.

The future in The Silent Empire books is riddled with some of the same problems our world faces today (slavery is common in certain places, for instance). How have LGBTQ rights changed in that future, and how do those changes affect the main character, Kendi?

In the Silent Empire future, sexual orientation and sexual identity don’t matter, and LGBTQ people have achieved equality, mostly because this is where I see our future as ultimately going. However, people remain fundamentally the same. Slavery has never disappeared. Human trafficking is a major problem all over the world, including this country, and enormous numbers of other people are slaves in everything but name. (Remember when WalMart got in trouble for locking its employees in the stores overnight and forcing them to work off the clock? I do believe the technical term for “unpaid worker” is “slave.”) So if you send a whole bunch of people out into untamed planetary systems, where they can start their own governments–or anarchistic systems–you’re going to get exploitation.

I actually ran into a major problem when I decided to write in a universe with equality for LBGTQ people. Kendi is a free spirit, a straightforward guy who’s sometimes a little too open with what’s on his mind. Unfortunately, a major subplot of Nightmare had to revolve around Kendi’s tentative relationship with Ben–the wondering, the “Does he like me?”, the “What do I say?” moments. I had wiped out any social taboo against such a move, and there was no reason Kendi, as I wrote him from Dreamer, wouldn’t simply grab Ben’s arm and say, “Hey, I like you. Wanna dance?” The realization of an equalized society was going to wipe out most of my book!

I had to go back through Nightmare and create CHARACTER reasons for Kendi to be hesitant. It turned out to be a good thing–it gave Kendi a thoroughness and richness of background.

The character who was affected most by the LGBTQ-equal universe was actually Ben, Kendi’s eventual partner. Through Ben I got to explore the idea of loving a person independent of gender.

Before Ben meets Kendi, he isn’t attracted to much of anyone. When he starts falling for Kendi in Nightmare, he thinks this means he’s attracted to men, but later in the series when he and Kendi spend some time apart, there are hints that Ben has had relationships with women. (Exclusive for Outer Alliance readers: As the author, I know he did. He almost got married, but backed out at the last minute because he had doubts. Kendi has no idea how close he came to losing Ben forever, and Ben will never tell him.)

Ben loves Kendi, not because Ben is gay and Kendi is a man. Ben loves Kendi because Kendi is Kendi. Ben doesn’t self-identify as gay or bisexual–he identifies himself as in love with Kendi Weaver. In a world that forces people to pigeonhole their sexual orientation, Ben wouldn’t be able to do this.

You recently re-released your Silent Empire series through Book View Cafe. Do you have any plans to write more novels in that universe?

A number of readers have asked me for more Silent Empire books. I haven’t ruled it out. I have ideas for more, and Book View Cafe would allow me to write novellas and novelettes, shorter books made available at a lower price. The main difficulty is finding the time to write one. So the answer is . . . maybe!

At a time when the way readers find books seems to be shifting, a lot of authors are experimenting with new modes of Internet outreach. What’s the idea behind Book View Cafe, and how well has it succeeded so far in connecting authors with readers?

Book View Café is a cooperative site created by a group of writers who want to take advantage of the Internet’s possibilities for reaching a wider audience and to distribute their work directly to their readers. What this means is that we’re a group of 30-odd authors with a variety of non-writing skills, and we’re pooling our abilities to spread our fiction around.

It’s almost impossible to handle everything yourself when it comes to Internet publishing. I’m a fair hand at some forms of computer code and I’m good at coordinating social media sites, but I suck at graphics, photography, copyediting, and publicity. So if I want to publishing something on-line, it’s hard because I don’t have all the necessary skills.

But at Book View Café, we can trade jobs around. Vonda McIntyre and I format manuscripts for e-publication, for example, and Pati Nagle designs wonderful book covers around Brenda Clough’s fantastic photos.

We have web gurus, graphic gurus, publicity gurus, editing gurus, and, of course, writers. Pooling these skills allows us to put out both original and reprinted work as e-books and on-line.

We’re becoming more and more successful. The site has over 1,300 registered users, and we average 800,000 hits per month.

And finally, do you have any recommendations for us?

The Catch Trap, by Marion Zimmer Bradley. If you want an absorbing, can’t-put-it-down character novel, grab it now. How can you not love Tommy? Marion wrote it in the fifties and was told the only way she could publish it was as pornography. Then The Mists of Avalon came out, and mysteriously the porn objections vanished. I still reread it every couple years or so.

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Thanks, Steven! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out The Shadow Conspiracy at Book View Cafe!