What drives your art? What forces you, rides you, hustles you, controls you until its latest needs have been met? What really drives you to create speculative fiction art, be it words or images?

What drives me is the vision that I see in my head. That and looking at the great fantasy artists. I can’t look at a Frank Frazetta, a Greg or Tim Hildebrandt, Boris Vallejo, or Virgil Finlay painting or drawing without being filled with a burning desire to go and do likewise. Really good fantasy art catches my enthusiasm and makes me want to dive in and play.

If there was the possibility of becoming any speculative fiction character ever created (except your own), would you? Who? Why?

There’s only one character who I’d like to actually “be” and that’s Doctor Who. The ability to travel through time and space at a whim… well, who wouldn’t?

If you could only take one author’s works compressed on an e-book reader on a “one-bag-only” one-way trip to another galaxy, whose works would it be and why?

This is a tough question and I believe that asking it is in contravention of several statutes of the Geneva Convention. Nevertheless if I had to choose just one it would probably be Tolkien. His prose is so rich and dense and evocative it stands up under many many readings over many many years.

In the privacy of your favorite artistic nook, do you act out your protagonist’s actions? Do you know how to use his/her weapons? Do you wear her clothes? Do you talk like him?

As an artist, if I’m not doing it myself I’m usually forcing somebody else to so I can sketch them.

Quick: List your first thought as your answers to these questions about the future of genre fiction:

Printing Methods: Offset or Print-on-Demand?

Offset, but I’ve worked in the printing industry most of my adult life and I am a traditionalist.

Reading Formats: Electronic or Print?

Again, print. Reading is a tactile and nasal experience, not just a sight/intellect one. The smell and feel of books is intoxicating – old or new. (The smell of old pulps is even more so).

Book Tours: Physical or Virtual?

I’d love to do a physical book tour. It’d be much more fun that a virtual one, which have the very great benefit of being cost effective. If I could afford it I’d go in person, but that’s the romantic in me.

Reading Habits: Dead, Dying, Alive, Growing?

Getting easier now that I have reading glasses (Us 40 somethings have notoriously inflexible optical lenses).

Length: Flash, Short, Novella, 1970’s novel (60k), 1980’s novel (80k), 1990’s novel (120k), 2000’s novel (150k)

Any length as long as it’s good, but I do love the old 60 k books. They ripped along at a breathless pace with just enough detail to make them interesting.

Robert E. Howard, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, Fritz Leiber, Karl Edward Wagner, Louis L’Amour, Frederick Faust, Ian Fleming, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rafael Sabatini . . . the list could go on. Some lived long lives, some flared and burned out young. All lived life hard. All wrote pulse-pounding action-adventure, often dipping into the many different genres they share, yet each eventually establishing their name within a specific one. What do you believe you have in common with these authors, and what makes you so sure speculative fiction – heroic fantasy fiction to be precise – is your genre? Or is it?

All those fellows were my surrogate parents and childhood companions. They taught me about life and gave me the images that crowd my head today. Although nowhere near their stature, I listened and I learned and I am now one of their company.

Thank you for your answers and art, Mike.

Mike Jackson is the artist of the illustration for the RotS Editor’s Choice tale, “The Last Scream of Carnage”. He also just so happens to be the creator of the RBE logo image – the S&S warrior Kaimer. You can see more of Mike’s work at http://mdjackson.deviantart.com.

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