Your Next Favorite Author—Joe Pitkin!

Air Force One meets The Martian—with a dash of Knives Out—in this action-packed sci-fi thriller.

Imperium is the most expensive structure ever created. Once an orbiting laboratory, it is now a space hotel for the fantastically wealthy. But as the station preps for its first group of space tourists, Dr. Chloe Bonilla, Imperium’s resident biophysicist, finds herself questioning whether babysitting a passel of space glampers is worth the distraction from her research.

A private rocket delivers a rogues’ gallery of the world’s elite to Imperium: eccentric billionaires, callow tech bros, a sponsored Instagram influencer, and a seemingly saintly philanthropist. However, posing among the staff are members of a global terrorist group who call themselves the Reckoners, hell bent on upending the economic inequality of twenty-first-century Earth—and they have a bone to pick with these scions of the 1 percent.

As the Reckoners take control of Imperium and demand an $8 billion ransom from their wealthy hostages, it’s up to Dr. Bonilla to save them, and fast. Or the captives will be forced to exit the station—and there’s only one way out.

Joe Pitkin has lived, taught, and studied in England, Hungary, and Mexico and now teaches at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. His short stories have appeared in the Boston Review, Analog, Black Static, Cosmos, and other magazines and podcasts, as well as on his blog, The Subway Test. He lives in Portland, Oregon, in the shadow of a small extinct volcano.

Avis: Welcome to another edition of Your next Favorite Author! Today’s author writes SciFi and has several short stories published in journals and anthologies. I’m excited to introduce Portland writer Joe Pitkin! Thanks for joining us today, Joe! His latest novel Exit Black released February 5, 2024, and it’s one exciting piece of fiction! Welcome Joe! Readers are looking forward to meeting you and getting to know more about you and your writing life! 😊

            Our first question today:

What are common traps for aspiring writers?

Joe: I teach creative writing at a community college, so I meet a lot of aspiring writers. Much of what I end up telling them is some version of “don’t do what I did when I was starting out.” The biggest trap, I think, is to get too attached to the stuff you are writing when you are a beginner. That attachment can make it difficult to finish a draft (because oh, it’s too horrible! I just can’t bear to put more words into this crappy story!), or it can make one resistant to revision (because this draft took me two years to write and how dare you tell me to make my protagonist more relatable?) As I tell my students (a lot), I wrote many crappy pieces before I wrote a single good one, and then I wrote a lot more crappy pieces before I started writing good ones with any regularity. And, for that matter, I still don’t know anyone who writes good pieces all the time.

Avis: LOL! So true! I also teach community college creative writing, and I’m sure students got a lot out of your advice. Now that you have a book out, I’m sure you’ll be in high demand on campus! We always love our latest projects! 😊

            Our next questions is:

Have you ever gotten reader’s block?

Joe: I guess that depends on what you mean by reader’s block. I’ve never had a time when I couldn’t think of a book that I wanted to read. Right now, my TBR pile has 35 books in it, and I’m excited about all of them. Having said that, I have definitely sunk time into a book, found it disappointing, and had a hard time ginning up the energy to finish it. That feeling has certainly slowed me down, and there were times in the past that it really slowed me down because I felt an obligation to finish every book that I started. That’s probably a holdover from my school days and wanting to be a good student; I was probably in my late thirties before I started giving myself permission to abandon a book that I wasn’t enjoying.

Avis: 35?! I have a stack too, though, so I know the feeling. 😊 Reader’s block is kind of a strange idea for an avid reader to ponder, so thanks for your thoughtful response!

            Here’s our next question:

Do you try more to be original or to deliver to readers what they want?

Joe: I have some people-pleasing tendencies, so I bet if I knew what readers wanted from me, I would try to deliver. However, for better and worse (mostly better), I have no idea what readers want from me, so I generally just try to do my own thing in writing and hope for the best. ChatGPT can serve up a competently written story in a few seconds that is exactly what a reader asks for. I’m happy that (until ChatGPT really gets smart, anyway) I can write a more original story than AI is capable of.

Avis: You had to go there! I can honestly say that anything you write is going to be hands down better than a ChatGPT version! I think that writing the story you write is the best approach to take, and then readers can go on your journey and see the world in a different way! Great answer!

            Our next question is:

What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer?

Joe: About half of the English department at my college is made up of creative writers—there is a line in Richard Russo’s Straight Man that goes something like “Every English teacher in America has an unpublished novel sitting in a desk drawer.” My best writing friends are my colleagues: about 7 or 8 of us have a writing group that gets together at a bar once a month to talk about one another’s work. None of us is a big name; it’s wonderful to come together as equals and encourage one another and provide a sounding board for people’s ideas. As English teachers, we’re all professional readers, so when one of them says “I like this; this is good,” that’s very encouraging.

Avis: That sounds like an amazing environment for you and your writing! English Instructors will see what’s working and what’s not. It sounds like the perfect critique group!

            Our final question is one I’m always interested in:

Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book?

Joe: My first novel, Stranger Bird, was conceived as the beginning of a series. But after years of trying unsuccessfully to get it picked up, I moved on to other things in my writing, and since then I have generally kept to standalone works. I do have a short story cycle that I keep coming back to, stories that I imagine linking together after the manner of Edwige Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, but otherwise everything I’ve done over the last 15 years has been a one-shot deal.

Avis: I love the title Stranger Bird! I’m going to look for that one now. Short stories as a series count! I enjoyed reading Exit Black. I hope you have another one in the works!

            For more about Joe, see his social links below, and check out his websites! Please scroll down to read my review of Exit Black. It’s a fast-paced read that will make you think about space travel in a whole new light! Thanks, Joe! And we’ll see you all next time. 😊

social media links:

Instagram: @joepitkint 

LinkedIn: Joe Pitkin

web site link: 

Thesubwaytest.com

-or-

 Joepitkin.com

Review by Avis M. Adams

Joe Pitkin’s debut novel Exit Black is a Sci-Fi rollercoaster of space adventure and solar eclipsing survival. Pitkin takes a luxury space expedition with a cast of billionaires, a crew, and the scientist who finds her bean sprouts grown in zero-gravity more interesting than her CEO boyfriend and sets a scene of stellar beauty as the backdrop for Exit Black.

Dr. Chloe Bonilla, a scientist abord the Imperium, a space station, awaits a CisLunar rocket filled with the first guests of a luxury two-week holiday in space with annoyance. The price tag of 89 thousand a mere drop in the bucket for most of them, she dreads having to entertain this group of people she shares nothing in common. 

Chloe refers to the guests as glampers, and their first outing a carefully supervised spacewalk. When the power goes out and the guests panic, Chloe and Dion are forced to pull them all into the airlock by hand. This is our first taste of what might go wrong on this expedition with non-trained space-travelers. 

Pitkin introduces each guest in a manner that brings them all to life, and as the story evolves and the opening gala unfolds, the guests display their party-animal selves, and we see them in all their decadent glory.

Orbital Ventures Corporation funds the project, and Tirzah Fowler is the manager of the hotel aspect of the space station. Chloe represents OSU in her scientific capacity, and she interfaces with the crew of Imperium, as well as the hotel staff. The guests arrive one at a time, and Pitkin enthralls us with the workings of the Chloe’s world enthralling us with his masterful world building.

His keen eye for detail is crucial, because, as Robert Burns notes, “The best laid schemes of Mice and Men . . ..” He builds a world that soon turns into a nightmare scenario in space, one that I hadn’t thought of, but one Pitkin mines for all the rich terror and gruesome delight that Sci-Fi fans and anyone who love a great story will engage with.

I don’t want to give too much away, but I do want to say that this story will enthrall you. Chloe’s resilience and determination strikes a huge note for strong woman protagonists in the genre of Sci-Fi/Horror. I’m thinking Aliens, but in Exit Black the monsters are human.

Joe Pitkin’s Exit Black will sweep you off your feet and keep you reading into the night. I couldn’t put this book down! Five-Stars.