My Favorite Things with Gerald Brandt

They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, the weekly column where we grab someone in speculative circles to gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we sit down with Gerald Brandt, who is the author of the San Angeles series. His latest, The Rebel, was released by DAW Books last November!

What does Gerald love when he’s not writing about cyberpunkian futures featuring a kick-ass heroine? Spoiler alert: the first book that made him say “Wow!”, an on-screen transformation that never fails to enthrall, an alternative to Microsoft Word, a gritty science fiction show that’s got realism on its side, and an arcade game that lets you fly an ostrich. Intrigued? Read on to learn more!

Thank you for having me. I think I’ve managed to narrow the list of my favorite things down a little bit. There were a couple more items I could have thrown on, but they weren’t speculative in nature, and maybe I pushed the envelope a bit with the last item. With that said, let’s get started.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

I had to start here. Snow Crash brought me to cyberpunk back in the early nineties like no other novel. Sure, I’d read other novels that had the cyberpunk feel to them, but Neal Stephenson was the first where I sat back and said, “WOW!”

I don’t normally read books more than once or twice, but my first copy of Snow Crash literally fell apart in my hands. I now own a copy that was reprinted in 2003, and even though I haven’t looked at it in a year or so, it too is showing signs of wear. There will always be a copy of this in my house somewhere.

Blade Runner

Staying in the cyberpunk theme, though of a different sort than Snow Crash, Blade Runner has become one of my all time favorites. Though Harrison Ford does a more than admirable job as Decker in the movie, for me the star of the show was Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty. His transformation on screen from a fugitive replicant to a feeling — and forgiving — person is a journey that never fails to pull me in.

The movies follow-up, Blade Runner 2049, had me scared. I wasn’t sure if they could pull off the feeling and texture of the original, but it exceeded my expectations admirably. Don’t get me wrong, it had its drawbacks in casting diversity and story line, but it nevertheless was a worthy successor.

I had a tough time not putting the original Matrix movie in here as well, but perhaps that’s a post for another time.

WordStar

To veer off the path completely, I’m throwing a word processor in here. I’ve been using computers for a long time, and throughout I’ve moved from simple text editors to massive word processors like Microsoft Word (many iterations) and LibreOffice. Though those programs have their place in the writing/editing cycle of all of my books, I always use WordStar (or more specifically, the clone I wrote WordTsar) to do all but the final iterations of my novels.

WordStar is fast and small, and it is really geared towards writers more than Microsoft Word is. For example, the simple task of marking a block of text is vastly different between WordStar and Word. In Word, I need to do something with that block of text almost right away, or it becomes un-marked. In WordStar, I can mark the block, edit the text for half and hour, and then paste the marked text where I think it needs to be. It works more like the way I think.

One other feature that I use all the time is bookmarks. I can have up to ten bookmarks anywhere in the document and flip between them at any point in time. What a boon!

The Expanse

Time to leave the old stuff behind, though we’ll get back to it in the next segment. I can’t create a list of favorites without putting The Expanse television show in it. I haven’t read the books by James S.A. Corey (actually two authors that collaborate on the series — Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) yet, but the TV show is phenomenal.

Sure, there’s some hand-wavey stuff with traveling through space, but even with that, it is amazingly realistic. G-Forces from acceleration and deceleration are very real, having to turn your ship around and using the main engines for deceleration is a thing. Weird how space faring vehicles don’t have brakes that just let them stop.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation (the others as well, just not as much), but the grittiness and reality of The Expanse will pull me in every time.

Joust

I’ve played many a video game over my time on this little blue marble of ours, but the first one that pulled me in and made me spend my hard earned quarters was Joust. In the game, you’re a knight riding a flying ostrich defeating the villainous knights and collecting eggs. Be careful though, if you leave an egg just lying around, it will hatch into a new evil knight and attack you.

I spent so much time in the arcade playing this game that there’s a chance I may have missed a fair amount of school. Okay, more than a chance. If you want to see what it was like, there’s a version you can play here.

I really got hooked on Berserker! as well, but Joust was in a whole different league.

Gerald Brandt is an International Bestselling Author of Science Fiction and Fantasy. He is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. His current novel is The Rebel — A San Angeles Novel, published by DAW Books. His first novel, The Courier, also in the San Angeles series was listed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as one of the 10 Canadian science fiction books you need to read and was a finalist for the prestigious  Aurora Award. Both The Courier and its sequel, The Operative, appeared on the Locus Bestsellers List. By day, Gerald is an IT professional specializing in virtualisation. In his limited spare time, he enjoys riding his motorcycle, rock climbing, camping, and spending time with his family. He lives in Winnipeg with his wife Marnie, and their two sons Jared and Ryan. You can find Gerald online at http://www.geraldbrandt.com, on Facebook as Gerald Brandt — Author, and on Twitter @geraldbrandt.

Author Photo by Ian McCausland Photography

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