THREE QUESTIONS: Don Webb

“Pollution,” by Don Webb, is a tale of exclusion and loneliness, lived out in the heart of a near-future Japan.  All Billy has ever wanted since he was a teenager was to be Japanese. He knows the language, studies the culture incessantly, and now lives in Nagoya as an English teacher. He does everything he can to fit in, to become what he was not born, but all his work seems in vain. But when he encounters an American kyonshi, a mechanically rehabilitated corpse used in the service industry, he gets a chance to glimpse into the hierarchy society in a way he never considered before.

Thoughtful and restrained, “Pollution” will linger in your quiet thoughts long after you’ve set the book aside.

Prepare yourself for the coming apocalypse and save yourself a copy of Zombies: More Recent Dead before it’s released in September! You can pre-order a copy from Barnes & Noble, Powell’s Books, IndieBound, or Amazon.

1. The Writing Question: What is the best or worst piece of writing advice you’ve received?

All writing (even far-out writing) is autobiographical in some sense.  All autobiography is far out fantasy in some sense.  I learned this from Zulfikar Ghose.

2. The Zombie Question: What part of the zombie trope do you find yourself most drawn to or most irritated by?

The mindlessness of the zombie gives me little room for dialectic.  The living may discover some of their own darkness, what does the zombie learn?

3. The Random Question: What other projects do you have forthcoming that you’d like to share with us?

Hippocampus Press is releasing (August 2014) a thirty year retrospective of my Lovecraftian fiction Through Dark Angles.

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Don Webb has been published in every major SF/F/H magazine in the English- speaking world from Analog to Weird Tales. He teaches “Writing the Science Fiction Novel” at UCLA extension. He lives with has a beautiful wife and two tuxedo cats in Austin, Texas, where he has been a guest at the four local SF conventions for over twenty years.