You remember how I mentioned about a special interview that I was going to be doing? Well today is that interview! I am so excited about this and I had so much fun writing it up. I actually wanted to do this at the beginning of the year, but after we got sick and everything, I just wasn’t able to do it. Then I forgot about it for awhile, and life happened. This past month, when we got home from vacation, I had a renewed wanting of doing this interview.
I have mentioned many times about my favorite book series, The Lamb Among The Stars, well I really love this series! The final installment came out on June 1st and I have been dying to get it since. I am sure you have already guessed by now what I am going to say… I had the great opportunity to interview the author of this series: Mr. Chris Walley. I got the first book (The Shadow At Evening) for Christmas in 2006. Mama saw it at a Christian bookstore and thought I would like it. I was at first uninterested in it because it was a space type book. If anyone knows me I am totally not into space. Anyway, I ended up starting to read it and the more I read it the more I loved it! I was so happy when the second one (The Power of the Night) came out that as soon as it did, I got it! A couple months later, I heard of a new one by Mr. Walley, The Shadow and The Night, and looked into getting it as I thought it was the next book. Well it wasn’t the third book. Tyndale wanted the books to be bigger, so they redid the series and combined the first two into that The Shadow and The Night which is book 1 now. I was disappointed that it wasn’t the next book, but it wasn’t for long because in the summer the second book (The Dark Foundations) came out! Since then I have been waiting for the third and final installment (The Infinite Day) of the series. Which I now have and am almost finished with!

I had emailed Mr. Walley at the beginning of the year to do an interview, but like I said, I was unable to do it. Two weeks ago, I emailed Mr. Walley and asked if he would still do the interview with me. He said he would love to! So I sent him some questions and he very graciously answered them!
Ok… I think I have explained enough… so without further adieu I present an interview with the well known author, Mr. Chris Walley!

Me: Tell us a little bit about yourself
Mr. Walley: I am a writer who was both born in Wales and now lives there. By trade I’m really a geology lecturer but I happen to like writing. It’s just that at the moment the writing doesn’t pay a salary! I’m fiftish which must make me seem terribly old to you. I’m happy married, we have two sons, one married and one engaged. We keep busy doing lots of things including being very much involved in our local Baptist church.

Me: What is your favorite scripture?
Mr. Walley: That depends on my state of mind! How about Romans 11:36?  ‘For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.’ That’s a great statement that everything: past present and future will be for God’s glory.

Me: What is your favorite book?
Mr. Walley: Again that depends on all sorts of things. If you mean fiction, I guess it would have to be Lord of the Rings simply because you get the sense of being in another world. Outside fiction? Well I’m just reading a thick volume by Thomas Schreiner called New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ and I have to say it’s pretty good.

Me: What was your favorite as a child?
Mr. Walley: There wasn’t really much of a background of reading fiction in our house but I used to like reading encyclopedias and natural history books.

Me: What inspired you to become an author?
Mr. Walley: I used to do a lot of flying around the world for oil companies and I would pick up books in airport bookstores. After a while I thought I could do just as well as some of these guys and sat down at the keyboard and wrote a chapter and my wife said, I want to know what happens next.

Me: How long have you been writing?
Mr. Walley: I started writing in the 1980s and had a couple of novels that did fairly well under the pseudonym of John Haworth.

Me: What do you like best about being an author?
Mr. Walley: I like it when I get nice e-mails from people saying how much they had been helped spiritually by my books.

Me: What are you a professor of?
Mr. Walley: Geology. Rocks, oil, fossils, volcanoes and earthquakes. You know that sort of stuff. And no, I can’t predict when California is going to have the Big One!

Me: What university do you work at?
Mr. Walley: Actually it’s what we call a sixth form college which puts it probably equivalent to your US freshman year. But I used to lecture at the American University of Beirut and I’m technically an adjunct professor of Wheaton College, Illinois which is an amazing place. If I had my time all over again I’d like to go there as a student.

Me: Being a college and a believer in Jesus Christ, how are you able to witness and share your faith with your students and fellow professors?
Mr. Walley: In the UK evangelical Christians are a very small part of the population but it’s quite surprising how open people are to hearing about what you believe. And despite what a lot of people might think, many scientists are open to the idea that there might be something more than just chance behind our universe.

Me: Do you enjoy being a professor, geologist, or an author more?
Mr. Walley: To be honest I rather like the mixture. Although being only human I am slightly envious of those writers who earn enough to manage to live somewhere warm and dry and spend six months a year writing some book and then the rest of the year traveling around apparently enjoying themselves.

Me: Have you ever had any other jobs besides being an author, professor, and geologist?
Mr. Walley: Well I’ve been unemployed and I didn’t like it, and I sympathise with anybody in that position. Hang on in there!

Me: You lived for a time in Beirut, Lebanon, what did you do there and how did living in a foreign country affect your life?
Mr. Walley: I’ve lived for a total of eight years in Lebanon lecturing at the American University of Beirut which is a very old English language university with a distinguished history. Part of the time I was there was during the Lebanese civil war and at times that got pretty hair raising. But I love the area and like the people. I really recommend foreign travel because you realise that there are other ways of doing things. It’s also great to meet Christians from other cultures.

Me: For the benefit of my readers, please give us a summary of your series, “The Lamb Among The Stars“.
Mr. Walley: You want a summary? Of nearly three quarters of a million words? You are quite a lady! Well let’s see. Some perfectly respectable Christians hold the belief that, before the Second Coming there will be a great golden age for the church and the human race in which things will be very much better than they are today. I sort of took that idea and boosted it so that by the time the books start this golden age has lasted for 12,000 years and the human race was spread out amongst the stars. But then, quietly, slowly and in strange ways, evil starts to return. In my books it falls to a very ordinary man, a forester on the most distant of the worlds, to lead the battle against evil. One twist is that after so long human beings have forgotten how to fight. And over the course of the three books, as you can probably expect, the battles get bigger, the baddies get worse and the stakes get higher.

Me: Your series, The Lamb Among The Stars, is set in the thousand year reign of Christ, how did you come up with the way the worlds are during that time?
Mr. Walley: That’s an interesting way of putting it. Many Christians see the figure of a thousand years as simply symbolic of a very long time and I’d probably go along with that. And as for it being the reign of Christ; that’s true it but he is still hidden. It is though the time of the triumph of the church when Satan is bound for a little while. So I just imagined a time when sin and evil was greatly reduced, added a little technology (anti-gravity, gateways between worlds) and mixed to taste.

Me: Who did you base your series hero, Merral, on?
Mr. Walley: Merral in his strengths is imaginary. His weaknesses though are all too real: they are mine!

Me: Where did you get the idea to write “The Lamb Among The Stars Series“?
Mr. Walley: Funnily enough from reading theology and thinking about things.

Me: What is your favorite part of the Series?
Mr. Walley: It’s the ending. I’m not going to say anything more than that. But I have had lots of people tell me that they have cried, and not out of sadness, when they have read it.

Me: Since the Series has ended with the latest installment, do you think you will add any to it in the future?
Mr. Walley: I have a folder of notes about a possible spin-off series which as it were is a branch off from the history told in “The Lamb Among The Stars“.

Thank you, Mr. Walley for this interview. I am so honored that you allowed me to do this, and I really appreciate it and enjoyed it!

I hope this interview has sparked an interest in you about the series. I would highly recommend you reading them. This series takes so many things and puts them into perspective and gets you thinking. I have learned a lot from this series and in a way it has helped me in my walk. To see the example of Merral and all the others in this series, is very eye-opening because you see what kind of a Christian you can be when you serve and follow Christ wholly with no interruptions! It is the most God glorifying fiction series I have ever read. Without a doubt!

While the interview is a really great part of this article, I have to let you know that there is an even greater part! I have a copy of The Lamb Among The Stars final book, The Infinite Day to giveaway to one of my readers. Tyndale Publishing was pretty awesome to give me a copy of the book to giveaway to one of my readers. They also sent me a copy to review!
So to enter to win The Infinite Day, you need to do the following:

1.  Leave a comment on my review of The Infinite Day that will be posted on Wednesday. That will be your giveaway entry!
2.  Blog about this giveaway and put the below graphic on your post and sidebar. You can grab the code in my right sidebar.

3.  Make sure to subscribe to my feedburner or bloglines (both are located in my left sidebar), so you know who wins!

I hope you enjoyed this interview and I hope you all join me in this giveaway! I absolutely love this series, and you will too! I hope you will go out to your local bookstore or library and read this series! It is pretty awesome! If you would like to see a review of the first 2 books, I did one: The Lamb Among The Stars Series.

I am so excited about this! I sure hope you enter this super giveaway! I just can’t say enough about these books!
Love, Prayers and Blessings,

Thanks for stopping by “Daily” at the “Planet”!!
©AmandaDixon2008

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Tags: author, books, Chris Walley, Christian fiction, English author, giveaway, interview, literature, News from Farholme, reading, Review, science, space, The Dark Foundations, The Infinite Day, The Lamb Among The Stars Series, The Shadow and The Night

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