If you didn’t show up for the Tobias Buckell event in Metaplace, you missed out. We had a great hour-long conversation, along the lines of “Inside the Actor’s Studio” only with a writer. The full chatlog is up on Posterous, but here’s a sample:

Sunchaser: You were born in the Caribbean, and now live in the US. How does your childhood in the Caribbean influence your story telling?

tobiasbuckell: Well, one thing I didn’t find much of in the science fiction I was reading were positive portrayels (sp?) of people from the developing world
tobiasbuckell: so I set out to bring more of that
tobiasbuckell: the Cyberpunk writers really inspired me to feel comfortable about being an SF/F author, as Bruce Sterling set 1/3 of a book of his
tobiasbuckell: in Grenada, where I grew up
tobiasbuckell: so I wanted to infuse my SF/F, a genre I adored, and add this aspect to it
tobiasbuckell: a lot of people act as if multiculturalism is a burden or ‘PC’ thing, but it seemed to me that the future is cosmopolitan and aried and mixed, so I wanted to see more of that

Sunchaser: I’m sure you get this question all the time, but what led you to science fiction in the first place?

tobiasbuckell: SF/F became my love when I started reading very young, I remember reading Clarke’s Childhood’s End at 6 or 7
tobiasbuckell: blew my little mind
tobiasbuckell: so I wanted to recapture more of that, and looked for that genre after a while

Sunchaser: I felt that way the first time I read about the red planet

tobiasbuckell: it’s the heroin addiction theory of Literature

We’re running this Creative Series biweekly, so stay tuned for more…