Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer with over four hundred stories published in fifteen countries, in seven languages. He is a member of Codex and a Full Member of SFWA. He has published six science fiction novels including one trilogy, four monster books, a dark military fantasy and a thriller. His short fiction is collected in Pale Reflection (2020), Off the Beaten Path (2019), Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places (2010) and Virtuoso and Other Stories (2011).
In 2019, Gustavo was awarded second place in the Jim Baen Memorial Contest and in 2018 he received a Judges Commendation (and second place) in The James White Award. He was also a 2019 finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest.
His website is at www.gustavobondoni.com
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If you had to choose one of your own fictional worlds to live in, which one would it be, and why?
One of the non-grim ones… So many of my worlds are either difficult to survive in (interstellar war tends to generate severe wear and tear on the people in the way of it) or have such serious underlying social issues that it might be best to avoid them! I’d likely choose Cassius Station from my Outside Trilogy. It’s edgy enough to be interesting, but civilized enough to be livable (and besides, if I find I can’t make it there, the nearby idyllic and utterly safe (albeit boring) world of Tau Ceti II is a couple of shuttle jumps away.
If you were transported into one of your books as a character, what kind of character would you be and what kind of adventures would you have?
I would strongly prefer to be one of the genetically modified and well-armed ones. Those have a higher life expectancy but, to be completely honest, I’m not exactly cut out for hyper-structured military life, so I’d probably be one of the people who get dragged along without adequate training or preparation and my adventures would consist of me either learning to survive and becoming a true badass or getting blown to bits for humorous (or educational) effect a quarter of the way through the book. The second option seems a bit more likely.
Define “Science Fiction” as Damon Knight did (“What we’re pointing to when we say ‘Science Fiction'”), but without using your finger.
I think science fiction is the intersection of the worlds we dream of seeing (oooh, flying cars!) with the world we’re afraid will come to pass (Skynet feeding us Soylent Green).
If you could have dinner with any fictional character from any sci-fi book or movie, who would it be, what would you talk about, and where what restaurant would you choose.
So many to choose from! But I’ll go the obvious route: I’ll choose Lord Vetinari from the Discworld books. I would let him talk about his strategies for ruling a city, and then I’d ask him for career advice. It isn’t every day you have access to your own personal Machiavelli! What? That isn’t obvious? I can’t understand it.
If you had to choose between fighting 100 duck-sized robots or one robot-sized duck, which would you pick and why?
I’ll take the robot-sized duck because if I win, I can barbecue the sucker and invite a bunch of my friends over (except the ones that just sat around watching and not helping, while placing bets. I’d especially leave out those who put their money on the duck).
Name the strangest/weirdest place you’ve ever written. What made it so odd?
I’ve written some wildly, extremely weird sh… er… stuff. But I’m going to go low-key on this one, because people seem to appreciate (for some reason known only to those who go to panels at cons) the fact that I once wrote a story about an island in the tropics with a lagoon on it. Inside the lagoon, there lives a forest of sentient seaweed that leads people to their drowned doom by giving them an overwhelming sense of telepathic peace.
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Gustavo’s latest SF book is a collection SFF crime stories entitled Thin Air. It’s available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
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