Were there any challenges/obstacles regarding integrating a romance with the military and indigenous Australian mythology elements?
SM: Integrating a romance with the military was easy. Integrating Australian mythology itself is the harder part. The Indigenous people of Australia have many different myths and customs that often compete with one another, and I didn’t want to offend any one group by using only the details of another. So that was a balancing act. TGE: Do you have any favorite SF&F books featuring stories with a framework other than, as you once put it, a “traditional European-American worldview?” SM: David Anthony Durham is doing great work with his Acacia series, and I’m excited to see N.K. Jemisin’s “The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms” coming out soon – I read that in workshop form, and it’s very powerful. The Australian writer, Maxine McArthur, has a Japanese sf mystery with a strong female protagonist – “Less Than Human” is the book, and it won the Aurealis award. Charles Coleman Finlay has some short fiction with the Russian perspective – “The Political Officer” was the first, and “The Political Priso
