Acclaimed New York Times bestselling sci-fi author, Richard K. Morgan, spoke with me from overseas about his winding journey from English tutor to bestseller, having his novel adapted for the small screen, what it’s like to write for Marvel comics, and his unique take on creativity and the writing life.

Richard is best known as the award-winning author of the noir sci-fi novel Altered Carbon (Amazon), a New York Times Notable and Philip K. Dick Award winner, that was recently turned into a hit Netflix series.

[Beware: Some ‘explicit’ language.]

The author of the hard-boiled, “carbon-black,” futuristic thriller series, the Takeshi Kovacs novels (including Altered Carbon), also writes the dark fantasy series A Land Fit for Heroes (The Steel Remains, The Cold Commands, and The Dark Defiles).

His award-winning novels also include stand-alones Market Forces (also optioned for film) and Thirteen, and he’s the author of two volumes of Black Widow comics for Marvel, as well as the Crysis 2 and Syndicate computer games.

His latest novel, Thin Air, is described as “an atmospheric tale of corruption and abduction set on Mars” and it’s a return to his signature hardboiled sci-fi that The New York Times Book Review called, “Ferociously readable.”

Join us for this two-part interview.

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In Part One of the file Richard K. Morgan and I discussed:

• His American literary doppelganger
• The door that finally opened and dumped him onto the red carpet
• How The Sopranos helped change the zeitgeist toward darker fiction
• Why luck plays such a big part in success for writers
• The author’s hallucinatory visit to the set of the Altered Carbon Netflix series
• The two distinct DNA types of writers and the fallacy of block 

The Show Notes:

• How Bestselling Sci-Fi Author Richard K. Morgan Writes: Part Two

Thin Air: A Novel – Richard K. Morgan (Amazon)

RichardKMorgan.com

Fragments of a Jet-lagged Dream – Richard K. Morgan

Richard K. Morgan on Twitter

Kelton Reid on Twitter

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