Please introduce yourself and tell us about your background as a writer.
I am a Dutch writer, illustrator and sculptor with a preference for leering gargoyles and sea monsters. Writing full time since 1980, I published 125 novels, three of them in English. My most recent English novel is Phaedra: Alastor 824, set in the universe of Jack Vance, with the blessings of his heirs. It is about 20% Jack Vance and 80% Tais Teng. Another novel, Sunrise at Midnight, is doing the rounds. It is set in Africa, in an alternate timeline where both Carthage and Rome are still going strong. My elevator pitch for that one: Prince Mokassim has to flee for his life in a world where Rome still rules and stopped the invading Mongol hordes with a nuclear bomb.

I taught myself English at the age of thirteen because there wasn’t much sf to be found in my own language. Since then I have been writing short stories in both tongues. My English publication list shows now about seventy stories, ranging from Daily Science Fiction to Cirsova.

My legal name is Thijs van Ebbenhorst Tengbergen. A name nobody could remember or pronounce, not even in the Netherlands. As both science fiction and fantasy novels are heavily dependent on the cover picture, a name of that length wouldn’t leave any room for exploding starships or damsels who like to swing their broadswords. I ended up with Tais Teng, which works in most languages, even my own.

I studied biology, which still stands me in good stead when I want to write hard sf or have to draw an anatomically correct dragon or a slavering Shelob. Still, even when I was studying, I already made most of my money writing and drawing posters for anything from jazz festivals to roasted chickens.

Not many are as lucky as me, but I started out as a writer and illustrator at the same time. A Dutch publisher asked me for a collection after I had won both the Dutch and the Belgian science fiction award. I told them that I was a rather good painter, too, and would like to make my own cover. For several years I did their covers, so they must have believed me. This was in a decade long before computers could produce any kind of decent picture, so I learned to paint and airbrush the old-fashioned way.

What are the most prominent influences on your writing? How do you incorporate those influences without being derivative?
I wanted to become Jack Vance when I grew up. A.E. van Vogt and Larry Niven came in as a close second. Jack Vance was very popular in our country, even more so than Asimov or Heinlein.

Now Vance’s style is easy to imitate, and many of my fellow writers tried channeling him in their stories. Somehow it always fell flat, like champagne with only the gold label on the bottle and no bubbles. I wasn’t any more successful than they in masquerading as the grand master. Still, I learned that having a huge treasury room filled with wonderful and flowery phrases really helped. Also, that you should make every new planet deeply strange and that it is the people living there, with their strange customs, that makes the tale, not the monsters in the steaming jungles or those mile-long starships. (Though I still love mile-long spaceships!)

A.E. van Vogt offered me two or three completely original ideas every page and I still like to do that. He also wrote in 800 word tranches which really helped to keep the story flowing. It could become rather tiring in the long run, though, like watching a whole evening of videoclips. Yet it is a good system. The moment I get bogged down, with my heroes insisting on talking about nothing too interesting, I switch into the A.E. van Vogt mode, until the tale is moving again.

Larry Niven had a very clean way of writing and explaining without ever resorting to unseemly info dumps. I try to write as clearly, especially when talking about truly huge constructs hugging far stars. Stephen Baxter does the same thing, but he is too analytic for me. I miss the “gosh, wow” enthusiasm Larry Niven did so well with the Ringworld or The Mote in God’s Eye.

How do I avoid being derivative? Well, I can easily switch styles when the story needs it. From Jack Vance-like flowery discourse when my protagonist is trying to buy a three-headed camel on an Arabian Nights market to idea-dense details in a cyberpunk metropolis. I am told that I have a very distinct style, as I should, after forty years of writing.

With self-publishing easier than ever, there are tons of books being released every day. What makes your work stand out from the crowd? What can readers get out of your work that they can’t from anyone else?
I am completely original, even when I am not original.

Let me explain that: I wrote several stories set in the worlds of older, much admired writers from the past. “Embrace the Night” is set in The Night Lands by William Hope Hodgson, for instance. Or “The Shipwright’s Lover,” set in Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique.

In the Nineties, I was middling famous as a writer of middle grade and YA horror. People still remember me.

Many authors say marketing is one of their biggest challenges. What tactics have you found to be most effective for getting your name out there?
Marketing of your own books is always a bitch. For publishers, you are only as good as your last book and there isn’t any surefire tactic to stay in the limelight. Sorry.

As for self-publishing, I put my novels as e-books on Smashwords and Amazon the moment they are out of print. I would never self-publish a new novel. I want a publisher to do that. Sadly, I have outlived most of my publishers.

How much do your audience’s expectations factor in to what you write? Does this ever cause you to hold back from experimenting?
I write what I want to write. I have discovered that is the best way to sell a story by far. Sometimes I start a story that fits into a theme of a magazine, especially if it is an unusually challenging one.

A very interesting theme came up for the collection Battling in All Her Finery: write a story about a heroic woman which must be told in first person by another woman who is asexual, an ace. Give biographies of both the heroine and her chronicler. I let the chronicler tell the tale of the queen to her adopted daughter, and wrote biographies for all three. The title became: “Why we are standing on this broken wall, clutching swords too rusty to take an edge.” Which is what she is telling her young daughter.

Have you had any new stories published recently? Are you currently working on any?
Let me look into my bookcase, at the shelf with recent arrivals: “The Scorpion and the Plum Tree Blossom” in Strange Aeon: 2022, “Free Diving for Leviathan Eggs” in Sword & Sorceries 5, “Moon Magic and the Art of Fencing Doubtful Jewels” in Cirsova #13. I see now that all are Sword & Sorcery, while most of what I write in my own language is horror or science fiction. This year, about a dozen of Dutch stories appeared in diverse collections and magazines.  

Right now, I am writing more Zothique stories.

My Dutch publisher has recently published a collection of my alternate Arabian Nights tales: Welkom, Mijn Prooi (Be my prey). I am hoping he will do the same for my Zothique stories once I have translated them into Dutch. Like the Vance novel and the Night Land stories, they are 80% Tais Teng, with me going boldly into their countries, but seeking my own routes. One of my Alternate Arabian nights stories, “True Silk” can be read online. 

You’ve done quite a few collaborations. Tell us about your process for working with other writers.
I love writing with others, in newly invented or shared worlds. I must have written at least three dozen stories and one novel with other writers. For a collaboration to work, you have to surrender your ego completely to the tale. If one of the other writers has a clearly better idea, you have to agree, without any rearguard action to save your own text.

Right now I have three writing partners, Jaap Boekestein, Roderick Leeuwenhart and Roelof Goudriaan. I started out with another writer, Paul Harland. But… his sentences started to get longer and longer, with scenes that became more like elegiac prose poems than part of a story, while mine were getting shorter and shorter. I wanted to write noir, or information dense cyberpunk, while he aimed for Paradise Lost.

This is the system with my present partners:
1. We construct our world and time.
2. Next comes the tale and the protagonists.
3. We write a very tentative outline.
4. We parcel out the different scenes.
5. We start working in google.docs. It is very nice to see the other cursors move, leaving text in their wake. The cursors sometimes jump to your part of the screen to remove a redundant adjective or add a missing article. Less nice is seeing a beautiful description of the alien city vanish until only two sentences are left. But, well, it was perhaps a bit wordy…
6. Anybody can change your text, as you’re allowed to do with his. If there arrives a part you don’t like to write, you put a short description in parentheses. The other will take over. With Jaap Boekestein, I usually do the first meetings and falling-in-love scenes, while he moves in the moment the bedroom door closes.
7. You can change also your scene if you have a better idea, but please try to keep the scene of the next writer intact.
8. In the end, everybody goes through the text with a fine-toothed comb to streamline the story. Right then you are allowed to put back your remorselessly killed darlings, but not too many of them. Jaap Boekestein always describes the kind of outfit the hero and all other players are wearing, in gruesome detail. I invariably remove most of them, until only two scarfs or hats are left, or perhaps a broadsword incised with glowing runes that describe the best way to roast a cockatrice.
9. Someone else, not one of the writers, corrects the text and, hopefully, warns us when a scene isn’t logical or just plain ugly.

Name one newer and one older book you have read and enjoyed recently. (“Newer” meaning from the past year or so, and “older” meaning written before 1980.)
I just reread Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. It is the most inventive science fiction novel ever written, with vistas stretching from the very beginning to the end of time.

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993) by Michael Swanwick is my all-time favorite, though. The wondrous strange idea of having Fairy in the throes of an industrial revolution, with the dragons reimagined as sentient jets, bombing the golden towers of Avalon.

Book of Night by Holly Black was one of the more recent novels I read. Her kind of storytelling, her voice, comes close to my own.

Any final words?
Well, I am always willing to keep on talking, but I’ll leave you with this: Don’t forget to pack your broadsword when you take a trip to Alpha Centauri.

Finding me online:
Art: https://www.deviantart.com/taisteng
Writing: http://taisteng.atspace.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tais.teng.7