Our featured author today is cgerrib!
Let’s give him a warm welcome! Or, to be more accurate, a warm welcome back.
Hallelujah we’re back!
I’m glad to see that Balloon Juice has arisen from the dead of Not-Quite 365 Data Centers. It was looking dicey for a while there.
My name is Chris Gerrib, and I’ve been reading Balloon Juice since John Cole was complaining about how we were in the process of hosing up the occupation of Iraq. When I comment (very occasionally now) it’s under the nym of cgerrib. (Yeah, original).
Around this time last year, I was on the site to talk about my science fiction novel Pirates of Mars. I’m back here now to talk about my latest book, One of Our Spaceships is Missing. It’s newly-released into the world and I think the title says everything you need to know about the book. Instead, I’d like to talk about how the book came to be.
This novel is my fourth and comes out four years after my last novel. (No, didn’t plan it that way – that’s just how the cookie crumbled.) I got my previous publishing contracts the old-fashioned way, namely by sending in blind queries and hoping to get back something other than a form rejection email. This book took a different path.
In December 2021 I attended the World Science Fiction Convention, which was held at the Omni Shoreham in Washington DC. The Omni is an old hotel from the 1930s with a large back patio area. That plus beautiful weather plus whatever variant of COVID that was going around at the time meant a lot of people were hanging out on the patio between events.
One such afternoon on the patio I ran into Bill Tracy. We had met previously at other writing events and got to talking. He told me he was founding a publishing company focusing on science fiction and fantasy with queer characters. I said “gee, I’ve got a novel on my hard drive with a gay FBI agent.” He said send it and I did.
As it happens, I’d always struggled with the beginning of this book, and had been shopping it around with two different first chapters. After Bill read the book, we had a Zoom call, which ended with me writing an entirely new Chapter 1 and re-writing half of Chapter 2. These changes percolated through the book in interesting ways.
Now, normally authors are told to start their story “in medias res” – in the middle of things. But this novel is a heist story, and heist stories require some setup. You need to either know what’s going to be heisted or who’s doing the heist and preferably both. The new opening of the book answers those questions. So about the gay FBI agent? Well, heist stories are thrillers. Standard Thriller Subplot #3 is this – hunky, honest and not-terribly bright man is paired with sexy, mysterious and smart (oh, and did I say she was sexy?) woman and asked to investigate something. Whenever the author needs to pad their wordcount, the two characters have hot sex until the requisite wordcount is reached. I’ve seen a lot of that in literature and film, so I decided to stand it on its ear. You’ll have to read the book to find out how.
There’s some salty language and violence, so the book is not for little kids, but Juicers and high schoolers should be able to handle it. I hope the gang here finds it to their liking. You can visit my website to buy it and my other books via Amazon or Indiebound.
Thanks to John Cole and Watergirl for this opportunity and keep up the faith!
If you would like your talents featured in the Artists in Our Midst series – or your work as an author featured in our Authors in Our Midst series – please send me an email message.
cgerrib
First, thanks again for the opportunity! Second, my very first novel, The Mars Run, is on sale for 99 cents (ebook).
Expletive Deleted
Nice! Will Space Wizard have a presence at Chicon this year?
cgerrib
@Expletive Deleted: Bill Tracy and I will be there. Bill’s not getting a booth in the dealer’s room – it’s kinda pricy (like everything else in downtown Chicago).
Expletive Deleted
@cgerrib: Makes sense, I’ll be in the art show – and happy to be back at an in-person Worldcon.
Will also be helping run the fanzine lounge, so feel free to swing by and say howdy.
Baud
Not the first time we’ve been compared.
Congrats!
kalakal
Thanks for doing the post. As an SF addict I’ll be giving this a try.
Ivan X
Awesome!
Dorothy A. Winsor
Hey, I enjoyed Pirates of Mars. I’ll have to take a look at this one too.
Scout211
Congratulations on your new release. I don’t usually read science fiction but since your book is being released on kindle unlimited, I’ll download it and give it a read.
The pre-release reader reviews are really positive.
WaterGirl
Chris, please accept a belated welcome from me!
About a minute after I pressed PUBLISH, I had an unexpected (but welcome!) visitor.
Sometimes the Author and Artist posts have a slow start, and I imagine things will pick up a bit throughout the afternoon.
cgerrib
@WaterGirl: No problem – I’m just glad to be here.
gwangung
Well, another book for the TBRead pile….
PAM Dirac
I enjoy a lot of science fiction, but I always thought what gets called science fiction was a little strange. It seems that you can write any kind of story; western, murder mystery, love story, etc. and add “in space” and it becomes science fiction. I’ve always wondered if moving the setting of a story into space helps with the writing of the story. Do you (and other science fiction writers you know) generally start with thinking about space and what can happen in space or do you start with a story idea and realize that if you set in space you have what you need to tell the story the way you want to tell it?
cgerrib
@PAM Dirac: Well, I’ve read (and enjoyed) more than a few “X but in SPAACCE! books. Not a book, but what immediately comes to mind is the TV series Firefly which is a Western set in space.
In the case of my books, I would argue that you need to be in space for them to work. My Pirates trilogy is really the story of how a space-based military would come to be. You can’t really tell that on Earth.
For this story, you can’t really make an ocean liner or an airplane disappear for days unless you sink / crash it. So in this case, the “A” plot (where’d the ship go?) had to be in space.
Even the “X in space” stories, when done right, gain something from being in space (or the future). Gender and race roles can be different, for one, without the author having to do a lot of handwaving.
WaterGirl
@PAM Dirac: Really interesting question!
WaterGirl
@cgerrib: Interesting answer, too!
PAM Dirac
@cgerrib: Thanks that is an interesting answer. I guess space can stand for unknown, unsettled, “all bets are off” territory, so that kind of primes the audience to expect that gender, race, and other norms of their known world might not apply. I have to get back into the reading habit.
eachother
As far as talent, I can lift one eyebrow independent of the other.
Congratulations on the new book cgerrib.
Love the cover.
Ruckus
@cgerrib:
This is a great answer.
And it shows that if the sum of the atmosphere is not known the book can easily cross boundaries of writing with little question. The who, what, how and when can be pretty much anything the writer wants. It’s a fantasy world, in this case a more adult fantasy world, and it’s reality has far less restrictions.
WaterGirl
I am curious, who did the artwork for the cover?
CarolPW
@eachother: And I can move my baby toes independently of the others (accomplished because I had the measles. We weren’t supposed to read while having the measles and I had nothing else to do).
On topic, I just picked up The Mars Run. BJ authors have consistently produced books I have enjoyed.
Steeplejack
@PAM Dirac:
Science fiction can provide a convenient way to bring things into apposition that might otherwise require some heavy lifting. Want white people to really see the horrors of slavery? Have some aliens enslave the puny earthlings. Better yet, start your novel three generations into the conquest. Water scarcity might be an issue looming on the horizon? Dune. Feeling a little nervous about this whole totalitarian thing in the media age? 1984. Etc.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Once at a workshop, the leader said SF can literalize a metaphor too. The example she gave was Bujold’s Ethan of Athos, who lived in a literal man’s world. There were no women. They bought eggs and hatched them in an artificial uterus. Bujold does a lot of experimenting with SF about reproduction. The genre can be a way to think about things like that
ETA: I guess SF is often a thought experiment. What would happen if circumstances were like this rather than lie that.
cgerrib
@WaterGirl: My publisher said he got it through MoorBooks.
twbrandt (formerly tom)
@cgerrib: that’s a great answer. Looking forward to reading the book (gay FBI agent in space is intriguing)
gwangung
Ah. The Vulcan smirk.
WaterGirl
@CarolPW: With 3 girls in our family, when we were sick we got little embroidery hoops and a needle and thread and we did cross stitch.
WaterGirl
@cgerrib: So as the author you do you not have much control or input on the artwork?
Cgerrib
@WaterGirl: well I had input but the final call was my editor. Only fair since he wrote the check! ;-)
WaterGirl
@Cgerrib: It’s a good cover and I like it. But I’m thinking that it would be distressing as an author if your book had a cover you didn’t like!
CarolPW
@WaterGirl: Too much like reading – no close work because somehow we would go blind.
JeanneT
OK, this isn’t a busy conversation, but it was enough to make me want to read the book!
When I was a young reader, I found that one of the ways I decided to keep a physical sci-fi book for my own collection was how well the cover art and back of the book blurb sync with the actual characters, plot and setting. It really irritates me how often slick cover has all the details wrong or focuses on things like explosions in space that have little to do with the story. Seems to me that illustration choices have improved over the decades, but I still judge a book by the cover.
Cgerrib
@WaterGirl: I know several authors who had covers they didn’t like but the books sold, an authors with covers they loved and the book bombed. Ya gotta trust the marketing department.
MazeDancer
Outstanding title!
Matt McIrvin
@Steeplejack: It’s a double-edged sword, though: the same fabulation that can get a metaphor for some real-world thing past the reader’s defenses can also weaken its connection to reality. The reader could end up understanding the absurdity of green people persecuting purple people on Planet X but still decide that it’s totally different from the prejudices operating in everyday life (and when the stories get too on-the-nose, complain that the story suddenly “got political”).
Steeplejack
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s true.