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Overview
Gustav is from South America where he lives with his large family. He writes for a very thriving science fiction fan base there. We discuss his sci-fi military book, Colony, but also about being a South American writer and trying to sell in the United States.
Gustav is a Jumpmaster Press author and loves what they have done to help his career.
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Transcript
Stephen: today on Discovered Wordsmiths, I have Gustavo Bond. Bond. Is that correct? See, I didn’t ask the last name. Alright, so Gustavo, welcome to the podcast.
How are you doing today?
Gustavo: I’m doing great. Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here. Yeah.
Stephen: Yeah, this is great. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Some things you like to do, where you live, that type of stuff outside of writing, things you don’t besides writing. Cool.
Gustavo: I’m from Buenos Aires.
I’m currently in Buenos Aires. I live in Enos Aires. Nice. I have two young daughters. I live with my wife and two daughters, plus two children from my wife’s previous marriage. So there’s a lot of us in the house. Nice. Outside of writing, I I have a day job. I work for an internet company and I also enjoy I enjoy reading.
Of course. That’s I think you probably
Stephen: get that lot books behind you there.
Gustavo: Yeah. And if you look to the, like to that side, there’s also a little display case with a bunch of models in it, airplanes and cars, which I actually built. I also like to do some art. So the, if you look above the models, lemme see if I can make like right above the models, there’s one draw.
One of my drawings is up there, which actually they were, there was two of them hanging on that wall before I put up the display case. So
Stephen: yeah. Nice. So I think you’re the first South American author I’ve interviewed. Cool.
Gustavo: Great. Great to be the first. Yeah, it’s, a lot of South Americans write science fiction and fantasy.
But not a lot of them speak English or work in the US and the European markets. So it’s not unusual that you might not have run into too many of us.
Stephen: Oh, that’s interesting. I think it’s great cuz I’ve been getting authors, all continents. I think it’s great talking to such a big variety.
Gustavo: Yeah. It’s cool.
Stephen: So you’ve got multiple kids. I know what that’s I’ve had the same how do you find time to write?
Gustavo: So generally I try to find a little bit of time to write when they’re at school. And after that, when they’re watching cartoons in the afternoon, the rest of the time becomes a little bit harder.
But if I have to write during during A fight in the middle of my house, I can actually do that. I’ve done it. So
Stephen: arriving under fire?
Gustavo: Yeah, during the pandemic. The pandemic was actually very good training for that because like they were here all the time and they were small. They were like, one of them was two and the other one was four.
During the pandemic. Oh, wow. They were really needy, really small. And so that was good training, like writing when Yeah, when the world is like coming down around your
Stephen: ears. So I wanna talk about your book Colony but I find it interesting I wanna ask you, there it is. Ask you, you mentioned that a lot of South American authors like to write sci-fi and fantasy which is interesting to me.
Why do you think that is? There’s a tradition
Gustavo: not only of straight science fiction and fantasy in the Asimov vein, but actually science fiction and fantasy in Latin America has been spilling out into every genre. So if you look at the last few greats from Latin America, if you look at Mario Osa, who is Peruvian, or if you look at Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who is.
Who is Colombian or even our own Argentinian superstar who is Borges. That’s basically, you’ll find most of that writing on the shelves titled literature, literary fiction even. But as a subgenre of literary fiction, it’s basically something called magic realism, which is not straight realism. It’s not, it’s very much I.
In touch with the fantastic, with the impossible, with the kind of fantasy that is just just around the corner. So the literary fiction tradition from Latin America, and that’s just touching the, that’s just scratching the surface. If you look at the really big writers from Latin America, they’ve all had some kind of setting in fantasy or magic realism, so that.
Informs everything else. Plus there’s a very healthy straight science fiction community and people who like fantasy and nowadays with all the TV shows we get the same TV shows you do. We have Netflix, we have Amazon Prime, so all of that is, is very much present as well.
Stephen: I love that.
And that’s something I know I’ve heard a little bit about that in certain areas of the world, there are certain genres that are more popular than others. I know a lot of American authors trying get into Europe and England and moving down the coastline there and stuff. If you do fantasy science fiction, maybe South America’s a much better target to go for first.
Gustavo: Not if you intend to make a living because,
Stephen: ok.
Gustavo: Being a smaller, the thing about it’s being a smaller market means that only the very, very top best sellers are actually paid. So it’s it’s much better to actually sell your work into the US and European markets. A lot of Latin American publishing houses view the author by necessity.
Not so much because they’re scammers, but by necessity they view the author as a co-investor. So maybe the author, once the book is approved, needs to, I don’t know, pay for the print run or things like that. So it’s not a great market to work in, but it is a great market for readers. Like even if it’s a, the problem is it’s smaller okay,
Stephen: so they, so we’re.
We’re going backwards here talking some author stuff first, just because it got me interested. So you are with Jump Master Press, that’s from Alabama here in the States. Is that why you chose to go with them?
Gustavo: I chose to go with them because I actually was on a comm panel with them once and they had a they started talking about their business model and I thought, whoa, I would, I have a book that works for them.
They’re, They have a military background colony is a colony, is a military sf. It’s right on the verge. It’s not military SF in the traditional sense, but it has some military action in it. And I thought these guys would probably like this. I think they would be able to sell a bunch of copies. I have, I’ve been writing for a lot of years, I have worked with other publishers and.
To a certain degree. Some people are actually gonna say, oh, you have a book at Gustavo. My name’s very easy to remember. So they’ll actually get some sales from that as well. I’m probably the only Gustavo writing in English right now, so
Stephen: it’s Right. Yeah. So you mentioned several other presses you’ve worked with.
So that’s a model that is, something people can do today, not something you could do so easily before that. You could have a book that Penguin Random House picks up, but you could also publish it your, something different yourself and have a publisher here or publisher there. What is it like to work with multiple publishers like that?
Gustavo: It depends which publisher. Some of, most of my experiences have been really positive. I try to make sure that. A publisher that likes a certain kind of book gets first write of refusal for that kind of book. If I happen to write another military science fiction novel, I will ask Guard Bridge if they like it before trying to shop it to anyone else in general the publisher I’ve worked with have been really good.
I work with a couple, which I’m gonna mention, which are, I work with guard rich books in Scotland. And Guard Bridge always goes to every world con and to every English con. So I might arrive and people who will have already seen my book be familiar with the book, some of them will have already read the book, which is always interesting.
I also work with an Australian press, which does really good job online, which is called Severed Press, and they work, I have a series of monster books. They do really well. They do a really good job selling them, which is basically what you wanna press for. If not, as you said, you did self-publish, I would not do a good job selling my books.
So I prefer to have someone who’s an expert at that doing it for me. Plus they do really good. Another thing I always look at is cover design. For example, if you look at Colony, I act, before I sent them anything, I actually, the first thing I do when I’m looking at a press, I might send them something to evaluate, is to check their cover design.
If it looks professional, at least I know that at the end of the day I’m gonna end up with a professional product. How well they sell, how well they don’t sell is hard sometimes to see. Cause sometimes it’s a press, sometimes it’s an author, it’s even King will sell a book if I publish it. So it’s not necessarily the press, but it’s definitely something that I look at.
So when I saw Jump Master’s books, I thought they were really good looking and they did a really good job with Colony. So I’m really happy, and it seems that they’ve been selling quite a few. They go to Cons and after each con they like say, Hey, we sold a bunch of your book, or We sold a few of your book.
Or, Hey, we didn’t sell that many of your books this time. And they have a big table. So yes, it’s always good to know that they’re selling a bunch of mine.
Stephen: Yeah, when I saw them at Scares That Care, they had a huge area with a whole big wall and yeah, it was very impressive looking and really nice guys and everything.
I’ve got several authors coming on here from Jumpmasters. I’ve been telling other authors, Hey, check them out, because I’ve dealt with them directly. I’ve dealt with their authors. Their authors love them. They do a great job at the cons. What there, what more could you really look for?
Cause you know, the, it’s the, those are the things that make the difference. It’s easy to fake it by getting a good cover and getting a printed book. You know that is actually the easier part nowadays.
Gustavo: It is. And books are printed on demands, so I don’t know. I don’t know what Jump Master does with their books, but normally smaller houses will print them on demand.
They’ll have a few, I don’t know, they’ll take 20 or 30 of each book two or whatever number they think is best to a con, but they don’t have a huge investment in a print run. So it’s more important to see them at the cons, to see them like they recommended that I should talk to you. So that’s something that for me is important.
Cause they’re actually doing things for their authors. And they had a bunch of authors at the con you, you weren’t scared to care. They, I dunno if they had authors there, but they def I definitely saw a pick with a bunch of eight authors at a con. So they’re doing the work and that’s hugely important to me.
Yeah
Stephen: it is. They did have a couple authors there. They had Armen Shimmer Man from Deep Space Nine that did the Elyria series. He was there and I believe the one other guy was there, but he was like on offshoot, connected. And then I thought I saw another author too, wandering around at times.
Yeah I was pretty impressed in talking to ’em. They were, Like, they have the cards for the eBooks they were giving out. You buy so much and Yeah. Yeah. And I thought, wow, these guys are really, let’s try this. Let’s do this. And really getting on it. I have talked to was it Jim?
I believe gene. Or I did talk to Gene, but I think I, I interviewed one of the other guys. I forget his name off the top of my head. I’m, I apologize. He’s probably listening to this. I dunno,
Gustavo: I don’t know all the writers from Jump Master. I know I, I know a few of them. I know a couple of them by name too, but I don’t know them physically yet because I haven’t been able to get to a con myself.
This year. I did Easter Con a few weeks ago, which I had promised to do before the before Colony even came out. Cause I had a book from Guard Bridge coming out at for Easter Con. But I definitely wanna get to one of the jump master cons. I’ve been talking back and forth to Kyle about when we can both be there at the same time.
So I’ll see. So I’m never in the Southeast really. I generally, when I do go to the us I’m generally either in New York, Chicago, Washington. I don’t necessarily go further south. Maybe Miami if I’m way south. So that might, if there’s a con in Miami, it might work
Stephen: out. Got it. I’m sure there are.
Okay, we, we’ve done some author talk, which is usually what I do at the end and we’ve gotten some good info on presses, so I appreciate that. We’re just totally mixing it up today. Let’s talk about your book Colony. That’s the one from Jump Master Press. You said it’s a sci-fi, so tell us a little bit about the book.
Gustavo: So the setup is the following. There’s a colony ship escaping from A war which is basically humans versus uploaded humans fighting for resources and basically control of a system. And they basically said, okay, this is not for us. They jumped on a holy ship and left right in the middle of the war.
They launched as a actually, as an escape pod cuz humanity was thinking, we’re gonna lose this war. So these guys are in, they head to a completely empty planet, far from everything away from the war where nobody will find them probably. And they set up their colony. The colony is on a very cold planet, it’s not terraformed.
And they set up their colony and within a few months they start realizing they’re not alone. And what the way they realize they’re not alone. Is that an, a slight, an offshoot colony of dissidents actually gets. Completely wiped from the map, and they have no idea who this was. There’s no one on the planet.
It’s a completely empty planet. There’s no life, there’s no signs of anything, no civilization. And yet something has just deleted a colony and they just attacked them and they left no survivors. So why that happened? They have to go find out. And when they, once they do, they have to fight what they find.
So it has, as I said earlier, it has some military elements. But it’s straight science fiction of the kind that you might have seen in the fifties and you might watch on TV today, so Oh, I love that. So it’s action packed. It’s pretty, it’s fun and it has some, in my opinion at least, has some great characters.
So I, I had a lot of fun writing this book too.
Stephen: Oh good. That’s always a good thing. People don’t understand that. Others enjoy writing the books sometimes. Most of the time they should actually. Yeah. Sometimes. Let’s leave it at sometimes let’s leave it at sometimes. There you go. So are all your books sci-fi?
I do
Gustavo: sci-fi, I do fantasy. I have a couple of literary fiction collections from press on the West Coast called creators. Publishing. They’re actually part of the creator syndicate, the comic guys comic and newspaper column syndicate. There’s a couple of collections of linked short stories.
Very literary, very high end, very high brow. Then I also do fantasy. I have a military fantasy set in just before the Romans. So these are the Etruscan fighting off the Romans. And we have, I have a little bit, I also have a comic fantasy novel set in nation, ancient Greece. Then the Monster Books.
I have some monster books from Severed Press and I have some short story collections which have both, mainly reprint collections from magazines and anthologies, which are both nice. Science fiction and fantasy generally mixed together. So I have a little bit of everything I’m on. I’m not as, but I do a lot of fiction.
Stephen: So why did you wanna write this particular science fiction book? I.
Gustavo: Because I’d written the book about the war that actually sent these guys off, and these guys just left and disappeared from the universe completely. And I wanted to know what happened to them. Like, where’d they end up? Why don’t we hear from them again?
So the, so that’s the story I wrote in this one. It’s, I actually do have the book before this one, which is actually, you don’t need to read that one. To enjoy this one. It’s called Siege. It’s from Severed Press, which who are the guys who do my monster books, but they’re no longer doing the science fiction.
So that’s the reason I didn’t offer this one to them.
Stephen: So it’s like a loosely a loose sequel to the other one. It takes place on
Gustavo: the same universe. It’s it’s there was this happened, so I was interested in knowing what happened next. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the other book, other than the fact that this is where they came
Stephen: from.
And you said it’s got some really great characters. I think that’s something else that people who don’t write don’t quite get sometimes that they’ll say how do you think of this and stuff. It’s my characters told me what the story was. They start writing the story on their own.
Gustavo: Exactly. You know how certain characters are gonna react to certain in certain moments, and that’s it. That’s what they do. So there’s one character who is very cautious and one character who is I have a there’s one character who just writes herself. She’s a doctor, a surgeon, and she is the only character in the novel, which actually swears, and she swears that everyone, because she’s she’s had it with everyone.
Like she’s one of those doctors that says, don’t bring me your crisis. I have to operate on someone’s brain now. All your things are not your stress isn’t really stress. So that’s where, so she writes herself and she’s very memorable. And there are a couple of others who are in that vein.
So it’s a character driven novel, even though it has a lot of plot in it, but the characters do push it forward.
Stephen: Okay. And do you have any plans for a third book in this set?
Gustavo: I would love to, I have to get down. I really want to talk to Kyle and Jean about what they, how they see it.
They’re, and I want to get down to a con and see how people are receiving it as well. Because if there’s interest, I can definitely write another book in this series because there’s definitely material to
Stephen: play with here. Okay. And what about your other stuff, your fantasy and that, do you have any plans for any books there?
Gustavo: Yeah, I’m finishing off a book about a private, it’s a Norish private detective on a space station, but not a little space station like the IS ss. This is a space station in orbit around a colony, around ta. It’s basically, I have, I need to get another 20,000 words in it. So about a quarter of the, I’m about three quarters to four fifths of the way through the book.
That one is earmarked for an attempt at a major publisher okay. So yeah, that one that I’ve had some success going through the slush at one of the major publishers, and they still, they have a couple of my books in their slush. One of them has Advanced. So I send them everything that I’m doing that might fit their needs first.
I can’t talk about the one that’s advanced, so I can’t talk about any of them really. Cause they told me not to say anything yet. So this one seems to fit their list. So that’s going there. It’s good. And if it doesn’t work there, it’s a book that I believe in. I think it’s gonna, I think it’s fun.
It’s distinctive enough that it can fit pretty much. Anywhere science fiction books are sold so we’ll
see
Stephen: where, yeah. Yeah. Your colony books specifically, but all your other books, what type of feedback are you getting from readers?
Gustavo: I get generally positive feedback.
It’s people enjoy them. People enjoy them. They’re, they try to the feedback I get that seems to be the one that, that people seem to agree on is, This is like golden era science fiction, but with good characterization and high quality modern writing. So the theme, nice. I love that. And ideas and the kind of feel of the book is golden age science fiction.
It’s actually technology positive generally, although the risks of technology are there too. At the same time it’s problem solution a lot of the times. But my influences have all been modern writers, so I don’t necessarily write in the same way that Hein line would’ve been writing in 45 or whatever so it’s it’s golden hsf with modern writing and sensibilities.
Stephen: Okay. I love that. And I love science fiction from the fifties and, forties, sixties, that era, the thin books, at least here in the States, they were like thin books and, those are some of my favorites. I’ve got a nice collection of that type of sci-fi yeah.
All right. Oh, I’m sorry. We got a bit of a lag. I apologize.
Gustavo: No, it’s fine. Me too. I was just gonna say Me too. I love science fiction from the Golden era. I have not only just I actually have some decent editions, some Eastern press stuff, some Library of America stuff from that era. Nice from, it’s modern, but it’s worked from that era.
So it’s, yeah, I think you can probably see some of it behind me. There’s a big, there’s a big dune right there underneath a car that’s over my. My right shoulder. Your, you guys are on the left
Stephen: yeah. Which the sec second movie’s coming out soon. Yep. I
Gustavo: saw a trailer the other day, so
Stephen: Yeah, I know it’s out.
I haven’t seen it. So speaking of movies or tv which would you like to have colony turned into if you had a choice?
Gustavo: I personally, I like watching movies as a viewer. I prefer movies, the series. But I think Colony would probably make a really good series more than it would make a really good movie. Because it has, especially once they understand what they’re, once they find out that they have to deal with something, it has an episodic nature to it.
Like something happens, they respond, something happens. They respond until they can actually get ahead of stuff. Because at the beginning they’re just reacting cause they have no clue what’s going on. And that would work really well for a TV show. More than it would for a movie. Okay. It could be made a movie but I think a TV show would actually work for this
Stephen: one.
You, you wouldn’t turn down either one. Of course not.
Gustavo: If they wanna make it a play I’ll sign on the dotted line as well.
Stephen: Yeah. I.
Gustavo: They pay, they get it.
Stephen: Yes, exactly. I mean, apple TV just turned foundation into a show. Yeah, I know. Anything can go if they can do a good job with Foundation.
Cause that’s a rough one. That, that I was like, man, I don’t know how they would are gonna do that.
Gustavo: I haven’t seen that one. Is it out yet?
Stephen: It’s on Apple tv.
Gustavo: I haven’t seen it yet. It’s, it doesn’t sound like something that would necessarily be. Straight up. Highly interesting viewing, unless they made some serious modifications.
It’s very talky. Yeah, but I mean up for it. I’m up for it. It’s, I love foundation. It’s one of the, it’s one of the books, the first science fiction books I ever did read back when I was a kid. So yeah, as a mom’s always been one of my favorites. So I
Stephen: have to he wrote a couple things for you to choose from to read.
Just one or two? Yeah. Yeah. One or two things. Alright. Do you have a website, Gustavo? Yes. It’s
Gustavo: gustavo boni.com.
Stephen: No, I’ll make sure and put links so people don’t to necessarily hopefully, get the right one. There’s probably five of you somewhere, I’m sure, right? No,
Gustavo: actually there isn’t because my name is weird because, He, it is one of those immigrant things, so if you ever see someone with an Italian first name or last name, and a first name or last name from somewhere else in Europe combined with that, so Gustavos and Spanish first name and Bondon is an Italian last name.
When you combine them, he’s from Argentina, so my best friend has the same thing, but his is even more funny because he’s called Federico Schleman. Okay. He’s actually related to the schleman who found fro the father of modern archeology oh, wow. So he was he went to school with me, high school with me here in Argentina.
And then he went to, he went to college in Arizona at the U of A, and one of his professors said, okay. Italian first name, German last name. You’re from Argentina. That’s basically how I’ve defined it since, and there aren’t very many bands in Argentina, so I’m actually the only one. It’s, I’m easy to find.
Stephen: So nice. Nice. Yeah. My, both my kids have Irish names, first and middle. Okay. And neither my me nor their mother are Irish at all. Whatever the last name is German. So you got Irish and German for them. All right. Gustavo, tell, I haven’t heard anybody from this, so do you have any favorite bookstores down in around you in the area?
I
Gustavo: do actually, a couple of blocks from my house there, there’s a, there’s one chain of English language bookstores in Argentina, which is called Kel, K e l. These guys have a store a couple of blocks from my house. Actually, one of the guys who works there actually went to high school with me, so it’s, and they already all know me.
I walk in there, I go with my daughters. They tear the place up, but it’s all good. Nice. It’s a chain. They have, they probably have 10, 12 stores scattered mostly within the Bueno IRAs area, but other places in the country as well. And their main business, they have a lot of fiction. They have some good stuff, but their main business is the, is to.
Is to take care of the bilingual schools. So most of the really good schools here in Argentina are bilingual. Not all of them, but most of them are bilingual. So you have English and Spanish. And it can be mixed. So like the school I went to can be, you could have maths in English and geography and Spanish or vice versa, depending on who the teacher was and what they were feeling like that year.
And they had, so they, so you have about half of the stuff is in English half could be in Spanish. So they, they have a bunch of books and in it for the, basically for lesson plans. Nice. Where I live, there’s a bunch of English schools, like right around this bookstore. There’s just, there’s a bunch of schools.
So these guys have a ready-made audience and they sell a bunch.
Stephen: That’s awesome. I, that’s one thing I wish they did a little bit more here in the States was other languages a bit more. They wait till high school and then all, everyone’s just taking it to pass. You don’t really learn it so much.
And I think that’s a downfall. Yeah,
Gustavo: that’s true. It’s never bad to learn another language, but the reason everyone here learns English is that English is the language we need to actually work at any, like we have the same companies you guys do, like we have the European companies, the American compensation, you wanna get a job at an American company.
It’s very good. It’s a good idea to know English if you wanna get a job at a European company as well, because those guys use English as their lingua franca. So I actually learned English, cause I lived in the US for a while but most of my friends went to a bilingual school, went to, and ended up working at major multinationals.
Stephen: I, we’re bordered, we’ve got can Canada above us and they speak a lot of French and we’ve got South America the lowest that speak Spanish, but we hardly, I was terrible at Spanish in high school. But I think if we start earlier, It’d be a lot easier for the kids to understand and pick up some of their languages.
Gustavo: Well, a lot of states in the southern US actually have a majority of Hispanics now. So I know New Mexico is more Hispanic than and anything else really? The 51, they went over 51%. I think Arizona as well. California was on the way and I don’t know Florida’s in Miami. It’s.
There’s, unless you’re like really obviously blonde-haired, blue-eyed, like Ameri, very American in, in Miami, they will just talk to you in Spanish straight up. So you go to a restaurant in Miami and the waiter will ask you what you want to eat in Spanish. Yep. Which is fine. I lived in Miami.
Yeah. It was really small. It was still an American city back then and never spoke English. But now it’s like part of Latin America basically.
Stephen: Yeah, and we’ve got a lot more of that. Again, I wish, they pushed the languages a little more. But like you said, on the flip side, English seems to be the business world, right?
More than any other language, just about every country uses English as their common language, right? Yeah, exactly.
Do you have, we talked about books. You’ve got a ton behind you besides Asimov and a few, do you have any other favorite books and authors?
Gustavo: My absolute favorite author is Douglas Adams hitch, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of the few books I read in reread all the time. I haven’t reread in five years, so I’m have to sit down and get a new one.
I wore out the original paperbacks from the eighties. Then I. I got the Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide and wore that one out. And then there was mostly harmless, so I had to get the more than Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide and I wore that one out. And now I have one of those Barnes and Noble leather bound edition, which looks really nice on the shelf and it seems to be a little sturdier.
So that one seems to be holding up better.
Stephen: Nice. Have you heard the original BBC radio production?
Gustavo: I’ve heard the radio production, I’ve seen the original BBC show, and I actually have the script, the radio scripts up there somewhere. I actually have a signed copy of the radio scripts up there, which everyone says, Ooh, you have a third copy.
And as I as Douglas Adams says, in an introduction to a different book, there are much, much more copies of the radio script that are actually signed. Unsigned. So
Stephen: that’s funny. Not actually, it’s not something that’s worth anything. I actually was introduced to Hitchhikers through the radio program before the books.
Wow. But I devoured the books just absolutely love them.
Gustavo: Yeah, I do. I love them. I came to them as a kid in the eighties. I was living in Cincinnati back then. Like everywhere. Oh my
Stephen: gosh, that’s right. South of me. It’s where I’m just a little ways north. I’m up by Kent State. Oh wow.
Gustavo: Okay. So I lived in Cincinnati from 8 85 to about 88 when I came back to Argentina.
I’ve been living in Argentina since 88. I actually lived in Mexico for a while in the middle there too. But I’m mostly in Argentina. And I was living in Cincinnati and like this, I’m talking mid eighties, mid to late eighties. Every kid. Between the ages of 11 and 13 was reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide and I had no clue what it was, but everyone was reading it.
So I picked it up, read the first page and said, oh my God, this is for me. So I really love fan funny science fiction and fantasy like I, have you heard of Robert Asprin? Yes. Yeah. He was the first guy I was reading, which was funny. And then I’ve read everything Pratchett ever wrote. And I even as far as Glen Cook’s Garrett series.
I don’t know if oh, that one. I don’t know. Oh, sorry. That was cool. It’s like a detective in a fantasy city. It’s very much with the no sensibilities, but going through the humor side, not so much for the series and this guy, it’s really fun. It’s really fun. So if it’s humor, I like it.
Stephen: And then there’s the Zant series based down in Florida.
I remember reading those. Good. Nice. Alright.
Gustavo: Top shelf. I haven’t touched those in years. I’m waiting for my daughters to get old enough to read them. My daughter’s working. She’s six. She’s working her way through the Wizard of Oz, the first five Wizard of Oz books. Beautiful. Yep. So she’s there. She’s gonna be seven now in June, and she’s a voracious reader.
My other daughter is probably gonna be more of a. A sports slash jock style. I don’t see her as a voracious reader, but this one is, and she’s making her way through the Wizard of Oz books and when she gets those first five, which are all in one volume, I’m gonna see if I start off on Harry Potter and once she’s on Harry Potter, that’s it.
She’s Asimov and the rest can
Stephen: come. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. The gateway drugs. And I love that she’s reading The Wizard of Oz because it’s vastly different than the movie, and I think not enough kids have read Wizard of Oz in today’s world.
Gustavo: The problem I have with her is that, Getting books for her age.
It’s not, I can’t just walk down to the Barnes and Noble cause they don’t have the Kell guys have books, but they don’t have the selection. So she’s reading Owl Diaries and Isadora Moon and the Princess and Black, which are age appropriate. Yep. And I basically, the only kids stuff that I had in my library as well, I have the Lloyd Alexander books, which are a little, he’s still a little young.
And the let’s try this. And she’s working her way through. It’s not like other books, like she inhales the Princess in Black, give it to her. 40 minutes later it’s done. And you have to wait for now book depositories closed, so you have to wait for someone else to deliver the next one.
So in the meantime, I try to give her like slightly tougher stuff to read so she’s not just rereading the same stuff all the time. And the OZ books, she’s enjoying them. She is finding them a little harder going. They were written like in the early 19 hundreds, so that’s not surprising. And after she gets through with the Oz books, I think she’s ready for Harry Potter.
Stephen: That’s her. Yeah. I remember reading Harry Potter and my kids and I was halfway through book four, reading it to ’em at night and they said, daddy, just stop. Said, we both finished it on our own. We’re both on book five now. They were just listening to me to be nice. And I’m like, okay. Then I had to go finish ’em.
I’m like give them to me when you’re done.
Gustavo: Yeah. That’s cool. And so once she gets, like a couple of years from now, the books are still there. They’re gathering dust right now. Because they’re, I liked them when I was a kid. I don’t know how well they’d hold up as an adult. I haven’t been brave enough to try them in the last, I have the first 30 or so.
Stephen: Yeah, they’re up. Yeah. And I haven’t, I did go back 15 years or so. I did go back and read them and as an adult, I didn’t think they held up quite as well, but my seven-year-old self would probably still enjoy ’em.
Gustavo: Exactly. I read them as a pre-teen and as a teen. So I’m giving her a couple more years, but she’s, I think she’s a little ahead of where I was at her age to start with, she reads in two languages.
When I was a kid, I was in, I was Argentina, I was in. I was in the US and in Europe, so I was only reading in English. I really had a tough time learning to read and write in Spanish when I got back to the point where I still write in English. So like I can write an email in Spanish and it’s grammatically fine, but I can’t write literature in Spanish.
It sounds terrible. Like the rhythm, the flow, the just, they’re there, they make sense. They tell a story. But it’s not literature, it’s just someone telling a story. It’s very different. I have a very different feel for the language, which the language I used when I was a kid was English. So here I that’s what I write in, which actually helps me out a bit.
Cause as I said, the market’s much bigger, but it’s, but my, my, my eldest daughter reads in both languages, so she’s gonna have a head start.
Stephen: That’s great. I love that. All right. Gustavo, this has been really enjoyable talking to you. I love it. So before we go though, if somebody came up to you on the street and said, Hey, I heard you wrote a science fiction book.
Why should I get your book and read it? What would you tell ’em?
Gustavo: Because it’s fun, because you’re gonna enjoy it. Cause you’re gonna forget about everything that’s going on around you. And be, and if it’s colony, if you pick up colony, you’re gonna be on a different planet with completely different problems and you’re gonna forget about the mortgage and the boss and the clients for a few hours and that’s always cool.
Stephen: Nice. Okay. And there you go. And it’s from an author who likes Douglas Adams. So he is got a good foundation. That’s cool. All right. Thank you for being on today. I really love talking
Gustavo: to you. Thank you so much for having me. Great to here.