Interview with Ray Nayler

I've become a big fan of SF author Ray Nayler since reading his first novel, The Mountain in the Sea. It's a near-future thriller about first contact with an alien species: octopuses. It's one of the best SF novels I've read in the last few years and a far more polished work than you'd expect for a first novel. 

Since then I've read several short stories by him and two longer works, the novella, The Tusks of Extinction and a novel, Where the Axe Is Buried. Both are excellent. 

I haven't been able to find out much about Nayler until recently, when I read a long interview with him published in Andrew Liptak's Transfer Orbit blog. Nayler has an unusual and interesting background and the interview is quite fascinating. 

When I was going to university, I thought I was going to be a writer. I was then rejected from the creative writing program and went into the straight literature program. The process of trying to get published over the next 10 or 15 years, I think killed any idea that I was going to be able to be a writer as a profession. But that didn't affect my desire to continue to write and publish. So I just got up in the morning and then wrote, then went to to whatever job I had and I never stopped thinking of myself as a writer, but I did stop thinking of it as a career.

I also saw what writers did in general, that a great number of them taught at universities. I have no interest in doing that. That a lot of people have MFAs, which I had no interest in getting. That they treated writing as a group activity, which I had no interest in. You know, there were there was really very little attraction to the other things around writing that typically constitute what being a professional writer is.

And so once I became a Foreign Service officer, I had a fascinating job that was really interesting to me, where I got to learn new things every couple of years. And, I was constantly moving from one place to another and learning a lot, and I felt that it was really also feeding my writing very well with new information and new ideas and, and so I thought "well, this is, good. I can continue to just be a Foreign Service officer and write on the side and publish in Asimovs and Clarkesworld and get some nice feedback from my work and talk about the things I'm interested in, but I don't have to worry about making money on it." And so that's been good.

His new novel, Palaces of the Crow, has just been published. It's a bit different from his other books, being set in World War II, but has a speculative element.