m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

At io9, interviews with four authors who may or may not have left the genre. Most notable of the bunch was Mary Doria Russell, whose next novel will be a Western—pretty much the only genre with less demographic appeal than science fiction, so maybe it will drive her back into the fold.

This new book is in some ways a classical Western about Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, but I see John Henry Holliday as a heartbreaking figure: born in the antebellum South, educated in the North for a professional life in the East, trying not to die on the rawest frontier of the West. Doc might as well have been THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH: frail, lonely and desperately homesick, surrounded by people who are not nearly as sophisticated or educated as he was. At the same time, this story is a murder mystery set in Dodge City in 1878.