Booked brings you another in our series of three author interviews.

This one is a gigantic, just under two hour monster featuring Andrez Bergen, Jason Donnelly and returning for his third appearance, J David Osborne. So much masturbation is discussed, it’s almost shocking. It’s a great collection of discussions about recent or upcoming books, many of which we now really want to review for the podcast.

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“To further the world-building exercise, there’s a new anthology coming out in September through Another Sky Press. This one’s called The Tobacco-Stained Sky, and is basically a fresh look at our near-future, post-apocalyptic and hardboiled Melbourne through the eyes of a whole crew of other writers and comic book artists. I also contributed stories there, further fleshing out characters from Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, something I continued in the short-story collection The Condimental Op that was published in July via Perfect Edge Books.”

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“A couple of years ago, I read Andrez Bergen’s excellent post-apocalyptic sci-noir novel Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat and began a correspondence with the author, interviewing him for The Velvet and keeping in touch all friendly-like, as we do. A few books later, he re-approached Goat‘s publisher, Another Sky Press, about releasing an anthology of stories by other authors that he compiled (along with co-editor Guy Salvidge), all set within the well-developed universe of that first novel. I immediately jumped on board as a contributor, taking it as a challenge to write my very first story in that genre.”
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Welcome back, everyone, for the 14th installment of my Atomic Interview series. If you’re a regular reader of the Anxiety, you know I’m taking a break from writing reviews for the time being but I’m trying to make up for it with more interviews and some original fiction. I can’t promise any of this will be the best thing you’ve ever read, but I can promise it’s better than listening to the guy in the next cubicle explain how he spent $15 emptying the snack machine of Combos just to make Roy from the IT Department angry.

This time around I’m happy to welcome Andrez Bergen to the Anxiety. Andrez is the author of THE CONDIMENTAL OP (available here), 100 YEARS OF VICISSITUDE, TOBACCO-STAINED MOUNTAIN GOAT, and this fall will see the release of WHO IS KILLING THE GREAT CAPES OF HEROPA?. You can check out all of Andrez’s available works at his Amazon author’s page.
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“Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat was my first novel, published in April last year through Another Sky Press in Portland in the U.S. It’s a mixture of noir detective story with dystopian sci-fi, as much influenced by Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick as it is by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The thing took half my life to cobble together, and I’m not kidding here.”
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“In the first-person narrative of his first novel, his character struggles to fit the black fedora of Harry Lime, of Graham Greene’s The Third Man. And while the narrator nervously tries to describe himself through the movie’s black-and-white images, he jells into shape through his street-smart voice, describing the skank-life in Melbourne’s far off rotting future.”
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“I first wrote Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat as a 4-page short story when I was in my early 20s, and writing was my single passion. Then I kind of got diverted and spread-out with the asides you just mentioned. In 1992 and again in 2001 I fleshed out the story to manuscript form, and then shelved it on both occasions to collect dust. Somehow I dragged it back out in 2007, wiped it down, and began writing Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, the novel, with great help from my editor Kristopher Young at Another Sky Press — who decided to publish it.”
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INTERVIEW: JUNE 2012

Atheist’s Point of View (APOV): When did your love of all-things noir start?

Bergen: I grew up on the cinematic version of the genre. My parents and their friends were always watching it, and I think I saw The Third Man for the first time when I was in primary school. Reading-wise, I really started to enjoy books by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in my 20s, which was the time I explored a more international take on noir by filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa. I’ve always had this affinity. I think I’ve seen the Humphrey Bogart version of The Maltese Falcon at least a hundred times. Really.

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“Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat is sci-fi-lite, at least according to one of my mates — which surprised me since I believed it safely slotted into the sci-fi genre and I didn’t know there was a style called sci-fi-lite. Probably he was making it up.

“Most people are now telling that TSMG is far more oriented toward noir than science fiction, which I guess is Read more…

“I’m chuffed you like that angle, since it came later on in the development of the story. Floyd, for me, always was a bit of a cynical last-hero-standing, a kind of Charlton Heston type circa Planet of the Apes or The Omega Man. Read more…