Stephen Dedman is the author of the novels The Art of Arrow Cutting, Shadows Bite. Immunity, three Shadowrun novels (with more to come), and more than 120 short stories published in an eclectic range of magazines and anthologies and widely translated.
His work has been shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, the Seiun Award, the Sidewise Award, and the Spectrum Award.
He has written material for role-playing games, co-owned a science fiction bookshop, served on the committees of innumerable science fiction conventions and the magazines Eidolon and Borderlands, worked as an experimental subject, and taught creative writing at the University of Western Australia and the Forensic Science Centre (where they taught him how to collect maggots and plant fingerprints at crime scenes).
He lives in Australia, and likes cats, travel, and startling people.
If you had to choose between being a mermaid or a dragon, which would you pick and why?
A dragon, because I always wanted to be a movie or TV star.
I’ve never imagined myself as a mermaid. I like sashimi, but I prefer more variety in my diet. Besides, I’m a lousy swimmer, and being a mermaid would require gender reassignment, and I don’t want to have to give up 20% of my income.
If you could time travel to any point in history, which era would you choose, and why?
History? I’d take a cunningly disguised go-pro to Elizabethan England to get pictures of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Maybe the Dark Lady too, if I’m lucky. And Will’s autographs sell for a fortune.
If prehistory is an option, late Cretaceous, but not TOO late. Say 67 mya.
If you could swap lives with any character from one of your books for a day, who would it be and what would you do?
Mage, from The Art of Arrow Cutting and Shadows Bite. He can teleport to anywhere he can see in a photograph, so I’d get some decent breathing gear and visit the moon, and Mars, and collect some souvenirs, then change my clothes and have dinner in New Orleans.
If you could choose any real-life celebrity to make a cameo appearance in one of your books, who would it be and why?
Elvira. There’s a scene in The Art of Arrow Cutting where Mage and Takumo are watching her show, so having her appear in person would be perfect. I still hope to meet her someday.
A young Clint Eastwood makes a cameo appearance in my story ‘Depth of Field’, along with Ed Wood and James Clavell. Oscar Wilde, a celebrity in his day, appears in ‘The Great Forest Lawn Clearance Sale – Hurry Last Days!’, my story in The Last Dangerous Visions.
If you could travel to any alternate universe where a different version of yourself exists, what do you think your other self would be like?
If there are alternative universes, I’d like to go to the one where my mother didn’t talk me out of becoming a palaeontologist when I was 7. I’m not sure I could have turned it into a career, but it might have been fun to try. I sometimes suspect that in another alternative universe I accepted that scholarship to a private school and became a lawyer, and possibly there’s another where I ended up teaching English in Japan.
If you were a character in a fantasy RPG, what character class and abilities would you have and how would you level up?
Magician. Even a first level Wizard can have Sleep and Charm Person spells. I could make a good living and gain some interesting experiences without needing to go dungeon crawling, and level up by studying grimoires until I had enough hit points to go outside. (Though mostly I played clerics in D&D, because they’re more versatile in low level games.)
If you had to choose between being a time traveler or a space explorer, which would you pick and why?
Even if the spaceship was extremely fast and comfortable – say the NCC-1701-D, going to a different Earthlike planet nearly every week – I’d still pick time travel. There are so many things I want to see (and photograph) in the past, and while I’m not entirely optimistic about the future, I’m curious about it. But I’m even less optimistic about us ever reaching another planet that we can make habitable without terraforming or sealed habitats, and I don’t have any skills that would be particularly useful on a long space voyage, or even a short one.
If you could have any magical power, but the catch was that you had to perform a ridiculous dance every time you used it, what power would you choose and what would your dance look like?
Healing spells, including a cancer cure and rejuvenation. The dance would be the Time Warp, mainly because it’s the only one I remember how to do. My Frank N. Furtering days are long behind me, but I can still manage the pelvic thrust.
If you could have any sci-fi gadget in real life, what would it be and what practical uses would you have for it?
A TARDIS. Quite apart from traveling in space and time, so no more commuting or worrying about deadlines, it has excellent translation software, so no more language problems when I travel. I could go back in time to rescue breeding pairs of extinct animals for zoos, from dodos to dinosaurs, and borrow books from the Library of Alexandria. It would enable me to live anywhere where I could find a square metre of space, and I could even rent out some of the rooms!
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Stephen Dedman will be attending Worldcon in Glasgow and DragonCon in Atlanta. His latest books are his short story collection (mostly science fiction), Charm, Strangeness, Mass and Spin, and his Shadowrun novel Dragonbones. Details of his other books can be found on his website, www.stephendedman.com
