Today, I am hosting
Bill & William Vitka
Kulture Vultures
& The Plot To Steal The Universe
I have asked William to write a guest post about how Kulture Vulture came about. You will find his answer to my question below.
It is a funny tale, I hope you enjoy his answer!
Carolyn
Blurb:
A
sinister fleet with a monster at the helm is moving among the stars. The
Combine demands absolute obedience or it deals death and
destruction. Ruled by a cold-blooded dinosaur with genius IQ, the Combine
has enough firepower to crack open a planet like breaking an egg.
Its
deadliest weapon is the media.
Against
all odds, mutiny has erupted and the seed of the insurrection is Earth.
Rebellion
marks Earth as the Combine’s next target. A deadly attack is imminent.
There
are five guys who can save the world. Save the world and everything else.
The
only problem is they’re dead.
Kulture
Vultures: Oh, God. Where Did This Thing Come From?
Kulture
Vultures. The Greatest Science Fiction tale ever told.* The epic story of an
intergalactic cab driver and his mission to save Earth from a megacorporation
run by a tyrant lizard. The sordid tale of that same tyrant lizard trying
really hard to masturbate and only kind of succeeding.
Many
contemporary scholars have been asking: Where did it come from?
The
short answer is: Whiskey.
The
slightly longer answer is: Drinking with my dad and mumbling, "We should
write a book we actually like."
The
even slightly longer answer is: All of the above – then letting our
imaginations run utterly wild and psychotic without a helmet on.
We
were bored with the books and movies that were streaming out of the shitpile in
Big Publishing and Hollywood. It's all terrible. Twilight and then Twilight
slash-fiction like 50 Shades of Grey. Or, hey, endless remakes and prequels
that don't need to exist.
We
decided to make something new. And insane. And silly. And yet has some science
in it. And also has genuine heart.
Something
that wasn't a cash-grab.
Something
new that paid its respects to the old.
This
is a close approximation of the back and forth with my dad:
What
was the threat? Well, the bad guys could try to blow up the Earth. But that's
old. So what's a new twist on it? Earth is the only planet in the galaxy that's
producing original culture. Oh, that's not bad. See what I did there? I do, and
there's some kind of media conglomerate that's keeping all the other planets
under its thumb and the only way to get that Earth culture is through pirate
networks. The media conglomerate is run by a tyrant dinosaur!
Of
course it's ruled by a tyrant dinosaur.
(My dad and I are both basically 12.)
We
discussed what kind of heroes we wanted and what our minds' eyes saw in them.
Both being New Yorkers, the yellow cab seemed perfectly emblematic. So we
settled on an intergalactic taxi driver named Zel who has a Phil Dickian mystique
in an X-rated Doug Adams kind of universe. His sidekick needed to be strange
and crude and silly. Enter Sprosty, the blue, four-armed pervert.
Great.
They
still needed an Earth connection.
Hmm.
Who are the great culture-guardians on Earth?
Independent
bookstore owners.
Nice.
Now,
who are the great minds best-suited to think of a way to stop an alien menace
from destroying the world?
The
guys who wrote about it all their lives. Duh.
I
can name a few of them. But they're dead.
That's
not going to be a problem.
William Vitka is a
journalist and author and native New Yorker/Pennsylvanian. He’s written for
CBSNews.com, Stuff Magazine, GameSpy, On Spec Magazine and The Red Penny Papers
to name a few.
His debut novel, INFECTED, was published, kicking and
screaming and bloody, in late 2012. His anthology of short stories, THE SPACE WHISKEY DEATH CHRONICLES,
was published at the crack of 2013 by Curiosity Quills. EMERGENCE, a
prequel to INFECTED, will knock your socks off. His latest book is the alien
invasion tale STRANDED.
Find him
online at:
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who posted comments on my blog as part of DL Hammonds 'Blog Blitz'!
