Guy Haley is a long time science fiction journalist and writer. He has been deputy editor of SFX magazine, and editor of Death Ray and Games Workshop’s gaming magazine White Dwarf. He is the author of Reality 36, Omega Point, Champ...
Guy Haley is a long time science fiction journalist and writer. He has been deputy editor of SFX magazine, and editor of Death Ray and Games Workshop’s gaming magazine White Dwarf. He is the author of Reality 36, Omega Point, Champion of Mars, Baneblade and several more upcoming novels.
You can find hundreds of reviews, interviews, opinion pieces, free pieces of fiction and more on Guy’s blog.
Guy was kind enough to answer a few questions about his upcoming novel, Crash, and much more!
Kristin Centorcelli: Guy, first off, I’d love it if you’d introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background. Have you always wanted to be a writer?
Guy Haley: Hiya, sure! Thanks for having me. I’m Guy Haley (not sure if I need to say my own name or not here!). I’m from Yorkshire in Northern England, although I’ve lived near Bath for many years now. Yes, I have always wanted to be a writer, since I was 17, actually. (Um, I thought it sounded like a bit of a lark, to be honest, sitting at home, no suit, glass of whisky, roaring log fire. All that). I told my teacher this in a careers session and she promptly advised me to choose something else! I don’t want to give the impression that she was one of these teachers that go around crushing dreams, I got on with her very well, I’m sure she just thought that it wasn’t very likely. And it’s not really, is it? A tough gig to crack. Still, here I am.
Although time will tell if I can make a living solely out of writing novels, I have been writing professionally for 16 years as a journalist; nothing too onerous, no war zones or political digging. I figured that newspaper journalism was too tough to be successful in, stuffed as it is with highly driven, well-funded, privately educated Oxbridge graduates, and a long career in local papers wasn’t attractive at all. I did some work experience at a couple and was taken aback firstly by how bitter the staff were, and secondly by how low the pay was. I went into consumer magazines instead, where the pay was slightly better, but the fun quotient was a great deal higher. I worked on SFX, then edited Games Workshop’s White Dwarf, then Death Ray – all SF magazines in one way or another. I wrote fiction and off for years, but started to take it seriously from about 2000. I had a comic published in 2003, a story printed in 2007 by the ezine Hub, and my first book, Reality 36, accepted by Angry Robot two years later. I’ve written six books since, and a bunch of shorts.
KC: Your rather timely new novel, Crash, features The Market, an all seeing, all knowing entity that rules all, and the promise of freedom in space for a small group of people. Ok, I’m hooked! Tell me more!!
GH: It’s not so much about the Market, which is the semi-autonomous global stock exchange of the future in the book. I think that was seized on quite early for publicity, at a time when even I wasn’t sure what the book was about. Rather, the backdrop of Crash concerns the entrenchment of the current class of global super-rich, for whom the Market is the primary tool of enrichment, and their transformation into a de facto plutocracy. But I suppose thematically it’s really “about” hierarchies in human societies, and persistence – of families, of wealth, of cultures, of power, and of, even, the species. The story, however, is about a colony effort that goes horribly wrong for reasons that are slowly revealed in the novel. I love stories about against-the-odds human survival on far flung worlds, about broken generation ships, all that stuff. The slow plod to the stars just seems more likely than the zipping about at warp-speed of Star Trek and so on, while still acknowledging our drive as colonizers and explorers., and that’s what we do as a species – we’re always off over the next hill. I honestly believe we’re having a bit of a breather right now. That drive to head o
