Raconteur Press welcomes John Van Stry!

Amazon's #12 best selling scifi author joins the press with his new novel!

Introducing our friend John Van Stry, Baen author and creator of the bestselling Wolfhounds series. John has set the standard for independent authors on Amazon. See for yourself!

John Van Stry has a long and–pun intended–STORIED background.

John went to college for engineering under the influence of Robert A. Heinlein, he told Raconteur Press Saturday. He served in the Air Force as flight crew and later went to work for Grumman Aerospace as a flight test engineer. He worked in different testing roles for many companies and ended up in the medical field before going into consulting.

John also has an array of interesting hobbies. He used to fly and scuba dive (not at the same time), and, as a native New Yorker, has also lived in rural areas. He has a technical background with a lot of “oddball hobbies” he calls them, "like wrenching on cars, motorcycles and blah, blah, blah," he laughed.

His most exotic hobby is that he used to raise and help others raise "big cats,” including mountain lions, snow leopards, African lions, and cheetahs. He had a few of those in that "very expensive hobby," but "no real scars": "I never got mauled," he stated.

(Above and below:) John with his mountain lion, Sheena.

Writing Career

As for writing, John says he's written all his life. “Writing is just something I've always done. I just enjoy it. I started writing short stories for friend’s fanzine," he said.

"A long time ago, I tried once to get published. Then suddenly self-publishing comes out. And in 2011 I had a number of stories. I'd written a couple of novels and other things–mostly written for myself that people had liked. So I put one of them up, and it sold well. That was 'Children of Steel'–my first novel that I ever wrote, my first real novel. [It] sold well. So I started doing more of it.

"I started writing short stories. I would devote one weekend a month to writing a short story. You can turn out 10,000 words easily in a weekend if you thought all day long at work. Plot the whole thing out. And in 2014 I wrote 'Portals of Infinity.' That really took off, and that's why I decided to just go full-time as an author.

"Up to that, I was consulting on and off. I quit. I have a pen name I write stuff under as well [Jan Stryvant], and I've done very successfully with that.

"There was a huge lawsuit thing that I won [Van Stry v. McCrea]. You can look it up–‘IP rights.’ And because of that, Baen Books asked me to write some science fiction for them. I wanted to go back to hard sci-fi, so I wrote ‘Wolfhounds’, and they didn't want it, which surprised me. I was already writing 'Summer's End' and the sequels to that, you know, real hard sci-fi. So okay, fine, I published, and that took off. And then you guys [Raconteur Press] asked me to write something for you, and I'm like, wow, what do I write?"

“What am I gonna do? And I had a lot of thoughts, but I was like, you know, ‘Wolfhounds’ the first series is coming to an end. There's gonna be a second series. But this is a rich world. And there were thoughts for spin-offs that were already kicking around in my head. So I said, ‘You know what? I'm going to write a story about [that] . . .’”

Influences

"I don't read as much now as I used to,” John said. “I used to read voraciously. I like sci-fi. I like hard sci-fi. I like fantasy. I like urban fantasy. I like action/adventure stories.

"There's a lot of authors I have read, and I've read their entire catalog. Roger Zelazny is a big one [influence] on my writing style. When I write first person singular, I am channeling Rogers Zelazny. Third person is a couple of people–Heinlein being one. Heinlein was another big influence early in my life. He's why I became an engineer.

“There's a few other authors I'd have to stop and think about: guys like Alan Dean Foster, who also, I think, I kind of got some of my styling from them.

"Growing up in New York, a lot of the books I got to read were published in England and shipped over or reprinted in the United States, or reprinted in the United States. So there was very much an English flavor to a lot of the stuff–guys like [Brian] Stableford and a few other guys who're English, and were very big here back in the 70s and the 80s."

Question: What do you want your readers to get out of your books?

"I want them to be happy. I want to make them smile. It's easy to depress people. It's easy to write nasty stories, anti-heroes, all that crap, all the things that make people depressed and down. That's not edgy. It's cheap–it's real simple. It's easiest thing in the world to do is to write depressing stories. I don't want them to be really depressed. Now, yes, occasionally there will be some bad things that happen in [my] stories. Sorry, folks. You know, I don't go out and drink and laugh and cheer when I kill off a big character. No, I feel bad about it, too, but you know, that's life, and that's the way stories are.

“Making people smile, making people happy, hooking people, bringing them in, giving them something that when they set it down, they feel good–that's hard, and that's what I want to do, you know? I want people to enjoy my stories, and I want them to feel better when they're done reading them."