Marianne de Pierres is the author of the multi award-nominated Parrish Plessis and Sentients of Orion series. The Parrish Plessis series has been translated into eight languages and adapted into a Role Playing Game. She is currently collaborating on a film project called Stalking Daylight. Visit her website Marianne de Pierres
Hi Marianne. Thanks for taking the time out to answer a few questions. For those not familiar with your work, can you give us a quick rundown of how you became involved in the writing/publishing industry?
I sold my first series to Orbit Books (Little Brown) in about 2001. It’s a racy, cyberpunk action adventure set in Australia. The sale came after years of doing my apprenticeship as a writer, subbing and being rejected, building up a collection of short story credits etc. After I finished the Parrish Plessis series, I wanted to (encouraged by my publisher) branch out, try some different things. So my next series turned into a sweeping socio-political space opera that asks some of the BIG questions like ‘where is our place in the universe?’.
I’m halfway through the Sentients series now but have a couple of other things happening, including a teen dark fantasy.
How did your writing life change after publication of the Parrish Plessis books?
I think most writers go through a stage at the beginning of their career when they think their friends and family don’t take their writing seriously. The thing that changed for me after selling the Parrish series was validation. I felt I could now justify all that time spent glued to the keyboard. It’s silly really – you’re a writer if you write, it’s as simple as that. But nothing helps you scale the self- doubt-hump like selling a novel. Of course that’s when you learn you’ve only just begun and that there is a whole desert of sand dunes ahead for you to climb.
Did you at any time experience pressure from agents or publishers to set your fiction on more familiar territory than that of a futuristic Australia?
Not really. In fact I think that was one of the things that appealed to both Orbit and my agent.
Are there very specific differences, perhaps thematically or in terms of style between southern and northern hemisphere speculative fiction?
I don’t know if you can discern differences between hemispheres but I do think that humour doesn’t always translate well across cultures. I had one English reviewer state that I’d attempted a Douglas Adams style of humour with one of my main characters in the Sentients of Orion series. Jo-Jo Rasterovich (my character) and Arthur Dent couldn’t be more different – nor could the humour. I showed this comment to a few Australians and they thought the comparison ... funny.
Congratulations on having Dark Space short-listed for a Ditmar and an Aurealis Award. Does being nominated for an award ever change your perception of something you're written?
Not really. I think when you write a story you have a sense of where it fits in relation to everything else you’ve written and, to a degree, other stories you’ve read. So having it nominated is sometimes not so much a surprise that changes the way you look at it, but a sense of satisfaction. It means you’ve been able to share your vision adequately.
Read more about Marianne de Pierres views on Genetics, E.T and returning to The Tert, here.
