PLANETFALL

About the Book

5 questions about the book itself:

1) What’s up with the title? What does that mean?

Well, I can’t tell you. This story is sort of a science fiction mystery. You don’t know what’s really going on until the very end, but you have fun on the way. And revealing the etymology of the title would give too much away. You’ll know by the end.

2) Tell me something unusual about your story? What’s compelling about it?

The first thing you’ll probably notice is the structure. The book is divided into four parts. Each part has some of the story take place in a different setting-underground, on Venus, underwater and at the South Pole. I wanted a big, sweeping canvas, as wide and empty as the Montana skies where I grew up (in Montana, not in the sky.) Furthermore, each part is its own story; it follows a character, showing his or her back story and then their current situation that leads them to the final act where all the characters come together to decide to either save the world, or let it burn.

3) Where did you get your inspiration?

Several factors influenced the structure: Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, Alex Garland’s The Tesseract, and the movies Night on Earth, and The Three Colors Trilogy. Each of the four parts is written in a slightly different style-“Dark As The Ground Where My Love Is Buried” is sort of a cyberpunk/magna story, “The Greening of Kenneth Anderson” is more classic sci-fi, “Somewhere Beyond the Sea of Love” was inspired by an Indian movie I saw, and “The Goddess Engine” came from a dream I had about 6 years ago. The whole “save the world” theme is in here, a staple of sci-fi movies like The 5th Element and Armageddon, but with twists on that theme, as you’ll see when you read it.

4) Why is it so short?

Yeah, to tell the truth I wanted to have passed that magic 200-page mark. I just finished Toby Litt’s excellent mystery, Corpsing, and on page 59 he blasts a book that is “180 pages…of forced pathos.” I died a little when I read that (Is that me? Am I doing that? Etc.) But I was faced with a choice: interrupt the rhythm of a scene or a chapter, or even the whole book just to fill an arbitrary page quota, or stick with the story that was in my heart and sounded good in my mind’s ear.

5) Why do you think you write in that manner?

An editor at a big publishing house called my prose, “strong and clean,” but she “didn’t know how to market it.” (Hmmm…strong and clean…has she thought about marketing it as a breath mint?) I don’t waste words. I try not to be too self-indulgent. I get bored writing long, descriptive passages, and I think a generation that is used to receiving information at high rates of speed won’t sit still for something being doled out over 600 pages. Of course, publishers love those kinds of books, because they can feel comfortable charging $30 or more for them. My feeling is that if you like science fiction, you’re probably pretty smart. You probably have quite an imagination--a storehouse of images from TV, film, comic books and video games to draw from. I don’t need to tell you how space flight works or what a robot shaped like a samurai looks like, because you KNOW. My hat’s off to people that can keep a reader enthralled with very little action (early Stephen King comes to mind). I’m not that kind of writer. Not yet. But I won’t cheat you. I promise. I pack a lot of references, concepts, flavors, scene changes, emotion, images, and ACTION into tight little sentences that follow each other like musical beats. There’s something like thirty-two points of action in this novel, an amount you’d be hard pressed to find in a book three times as long. And th

About the Author

Erik Johnson was born in the late 20th Century. He is not, as far as he knows, an alien abductee, a clone, a cybernetic organism, or a program in a highly realistic computer simulation. He lives in Southern California, and can be reached at eshiva3001@aol.com.