Hello, and welcome to our latest series of author
interviews.
The long anticipated
anthology "Altered Europa" will be coming out on April 2, 2017 (
ORDER IT HERE)!
In preparation for this grand release we'll be
running interviews of various contributors.
Today I'm interviewing Bruno Lombardi, who contributed The
Battle of Tim Hortons (co written with Ben Prewitt), and also co-wrote N'oublions
Jamais with Tom Anderson.
MTI: We've done a few interviews over the years,
but believe it or not there are still people who don't know who you are. Why not tell our new readers a little bit
about yourself?
BL: I work as a civil servant for the Canadian
government by day and am a writer by night. While I’ve been writing fictional
short stories for seemingly forever and regaling friends and family with my
many misadventures that often sounds
comically fictional, it’s only been the last five or six years or so that I’ve
actually become published. My writing career seems to have taken off quite a
bit since then, with one published novel and over a dozen published short
stories since then.
MTI: Now for Altered Europa, you co-authored two
stories. The first one that appears is N'oublions
Jamais,. which you wrote with Tom Anderson.
Tell us a little bit more about this contribution, particularly, how
does it deviate from known history?
BL: Not to give too much away from the plot, as
some of the joy of the story is the realization of just how and why everything
deviated, the basic idea is a World War One with wildly different and
surprising alliances.
MTI: Tell us a little bit about your other
contribution, The Battle of Tim Hortons. What's
the story behind it?
BL: It’s the late 1980’s, the Soviets have
finally decided to take a roll of the dice and start a land invasion of Western
Europe and we follow the (mis)adventures of a group of Canadian soldiers in a
mechanized infantry unit.
Yes, Ben and I somehow managed
to make a comedy out of a WWIII scenario…
MTI: How much fun is it to co-write with fellow authors? How did your collaborations with Ben Prewitt
and Tom Anderson come about?
BL: The backstory of how The Battle of Tim
Hortons got written, first off, had a truly hilarious genesis to it. I know
Ben from various discussion boards and he knew I was a budding writer. So one
day, pretty much out of the blue about 8 years ago or so, he threw me a small
snippet of the story.
I laughed my butt off! Ben’s
ex-military, so one definitely gets the impression that some of the stuff is,
if not based on actual real events and people, is certainly both plausible and
familiar to those in the service. I
asked him for more of the story and was annoyed he didn’t have more, so
together we fleshed it out into a full length story.
As for Tom, we’ve been
collaborating on various projects for years, so when he asked me if I wanted to
be co-writer on his story, I jumped at the chance. The fun part of the story
was that it was written ‘round-robin’ style, which each of us writing several
hundred words, then e-mailing it to the other to do the same and then back
again. I think we managed to write the entire story in just under a week.
MTI: If you could go back to any point in time and
change any historical event to create an "altered" world, what would
you choose to change?
BL: I’ve read – and written! –
enough stories like this to worry about the ramifications of the butterfly
effect but if I had to pick one event, it’s be the events leading up to WW1.
There were so many ‘Almost WW1’ events and crises that, nevertheless, had
cooler heads prevail in the end that one can argue that 1914 could have been
avoided as well.
MTI: For further pondering, if a wormhole leading
to an alternate reality suddenly appeared in front of you, would you dare to
take the plunge and discover what awaits on the other side?
BL: Oh tempting! Very tempting! Do I get to come
back or is this strictly one way? If I can get back, I’ll only hesitate long
enough to pack a lunch. Otherwise, I’ll think I’ll take a pass on it.
MTI: Shifting back to your writing, can you tell
us a little about what you're working on right now?
BL: A few projects here and there that I hope to
submit to various anthologies in the next six months. One is dieselpunk version
of the Rapunzel fairy tale, a second is the adventures of a New York Subway
technician having to deal with a most unusual problem and a third deals with a
perennial favorite topic of mine – time travel.
MTI: Other than your work appearing in Altered
Europa, do you have any other stories being published in the near future?
BL: By the time this interview sees print, a short
story of mine – ‘Devil in the City of Lights’ – will be published in Occult Defective Quarterly #2.
MTI: On a lighter note, have you watched any good
tv lately?
BL: I’ve become absolutely enamored with the show
Legends of Tomorrow. It’s an
absolutely bonkers show that not only has fully embraced its silly premise but
has decided to just drive off into the sunset with it as well.
MTI: How about music?
BL: Always have been and always will be a fan of
blues and jazz and I’ve been enjoying tracking down all kinds of independent
labels showcasing different takes on the genre, including multicultural
versions.
MTI: Can you name 3 good movies you've seen in the
past year?
BL: Rogue One,
like for many people, made me feel like a kid again. Alas, I haven’t seen much
lately that I enjoyed but hope springs eternal this summer.
MTI: Readers love samples. Do you happen to have a story excerpt you'd
like to share with us today?
BL: This is a snippet from that dieselpunk story
I was mentioning earlier:
She runs across cobblestones
stained by a century of smoke and sewage and sediment, the moonlight reflected
on scum-encrusted puddles of fluids best not looked at carefully.
There is, however, no danger of
that happening at the moment, as more pertinent thoughts are foremost on her
mind.
The main one being, quite
simply, survival.
For the sixth – or perhaps
seventh? – time in as many minutes, Valeria looks around the dark streets
looking for a sign – any sign – of help or assistance or succor. And for the
sixth – or perhaps seventh? – time, she is disappointed.
The streets are empty of human
life at this time of night and now the domain of cats, dogs and rodents. The streetlights
– those few and far between that are still functional – are haloed by the
ever-present haze of smoke and fog that hangs as a shroud over the city.
For a moment – for a brief
moment – she snickers. For a City That Never Sleeps, it certainly seems to be
napping very hard at the moment.
And then her mind snaps back
into the here and now. She takes another long breath and ignores the burning
sensation of her overtaxed lungs being forced to go beyond their limits once
more. Her leather boots – thankfully chosen for functionality rather than
fashion – pound against the ground. She catches a glimpse of her shadow on a
brick wall and a small part of her mind notes – with bemused satisfaction
incongruous with her present situation – that her flapping overcoat brings
forth the image of a giant bat flying through an ancient canyon.
A silhouette appears in the haze
a street ahead, an ogre of old carrying a giant crossbow. The haze clears
somewhat and the image resolves itself into that of a large man instead. The
crossbow weapon resolves into an angry looking large revolver with an equally
large rotating machine-gun-like cylinder attached to it.
Even now, Valeria finds her
scientific mind analyzing the gun as the man – a gold tooth glinting in the
darkness – advances forth.
A Manville Gas Gun? 37 mm, if
I’m not mistaken. Twelve rounds. Designed to carry flare, smoke, sleep or tear
gas canisters. Rather poor design – kept jamming up on troops during the Battle
of Lake Superior last year.
Valeria twists to her left and
down a hidden alleyway, her passage leaving twisting vortexes in the fog in her
wake. She had grown up in this part of New York City a lifetime ago and knows these half-formed and unmapped
alleys the same way she knew a Coffman engine starter; like the back of her
hand.
She has just dodged around a
cumbersome pile of crates and was just about to leap over a fence when the man
with the Manville Gas Gun appears out of the shadows.
“I grew up in this neighbourhood
too,” says the man.
And then he fires the gun.
MTI: A tempting
tidbit! Thanks for another great
interview, Bruno. Those who wish to read
his alternate history stories can pick up Altered Europa.
