With a Celtic-Indian mother and a father of North African/Roma descent, Stewart Hotston is a somewhat confused second-generation immigrant living in the UK. His novels include the BFS and Subjective Chaos finalist Entropy of Loss, as well as the tech thriller Tangle’s Game and the science fiction novels based in UBISoft’s Watch Dogs universe—Daybreak Legacy and Stars & Stripes. He is also co-owner of one of the UK’s largest LARP systems, Curious Pastimes, and is an internationally competitive historical fencer with a PhD in theoretical physics.
Today he takes that diverse curriculum vitae and tells us about his Six Books.
1. What book are you currently reading?
I’m reading
Blood over Bright Haven by ML Wang. For nonfiction I’m reading Judith Butler’s
Who’s Afraid of Gender? I’m really enjoying both. Wang’s feels pretty timely, and an interesting take on a whole number of issues that are important to me (intersectionality, prejudice, colonialism) wrapped up in a meticulously crafted fantasy world.
2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?
Mahmud El Sayed’s science fiction novel
The Republic of Memory is the one most on my radar. Having just seen the cover and read the first chapter, I’m really very excited for what he’s bringing to the genre—a unique cultural perspective, a fascinating stor, and what looks to be interesting structural choices.
3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to reread?
I’m not much of a rereader, but I have promised myself I’m going to reread
The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez and the
Tyrant Philosopher series by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about—either positively or negatively?
Annie Bot. I’m not sure I’ve changed my mind—I really disliked it when I first read it, but it then went on to win the Clarke Award, and I’ve promised myself I’m going to return to it and reassess to see if what I found so difficult the first time remains a sticking point on a second readthrough.
5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?
Oh, wow. That’s a difficult one because I read A LOT as a younger person and much of that has stayed with me. In terms of lasting influence on my writing, though? I think I was about 25 (I’m 50 now, so I’m going to let it count) when I read
House of Leaves, and that really showed me that writing was more than content, more than delivering plot, that it could be about the words, the structure, the form itself. I’ve never written anything like it (and probably never will), but it remains a revelation to me that I return to again and again. Especially when I encounter people telling me there are rules to writing.
6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?
My latest is
Project Hanuman, which is a space opera in the
Culture mode, if that’s not too pretentious to say. More specifically, it’s also a retelling of how the god Hanuman lost his powers (and got them back), wrapped up in the collapse of a pan-galactic civilisation called the Arcology, and follows three of the survivors as they seek to build back. I am a trained physicist, and as a result this is one weird book, because modern physics says some incredibly strange things about reality, and I wanted to make those part of the story as much as the mythic elements around Hanuman.
Thank you, Stewart!
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
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