My latest novel, St. Martin’s Moon, is a werewolf adventure set on a lunar colony. When I originally came up with the idea, the notion that it was a haunted lunar colony had not yet occurred to me.

The book started with the main character, Joseph Marquand, on his way to the moon, to investigate a werewolf attack. On the Moon. It turned out to be haunted when he got there. Back when I got the idea for a haunted lunar colony I turned to my friend Kfir Luzzatto, who had a book out called Crossing the Meadow. The Meadow was the border between this life and someplace else. I needed imagery for the afterlife, so I asked him if I could borrow his meadow. It amused me at the time, the idea of a green and grassy sward superimposed over the Moon’s desolation.

It’s less amusing now.

Science Fiction and ghosts don’t really go well together. Science usually tries to relegate ghosts and psychic powers to the realm of brain waves and similar electromagnetic phenomena. I once read a Star Trek novel that had an alien boot Kirk’s spirit from his body and take possession for a bit, but I wouldn’t call Star Trek the epitome of scientific fiction.

Ghosts are the unquantifiable, ghosts are poetry. Science doesn’t accept ghosts, but the ghosts don’t care. Science fiction cares. SF, like science itself, is constantly trying to turn more of what is unknown into what is known, usually by means of concepts like hyperspace or psionics, which it then tries to measure. Warp drive isn’t quite the cheat that turning vampires into sexy demi-gods is, but it’s pretty close. It’s just a device to make it easier to tell the story, and I can live with that. Stories are about characters, not devices. This is one of the reasons I prefer to call my book’s genre futuristic paranormal rather than SF. Or perhaps Gothic SF. (Are there any others? I don’t know.)

I don’t cheat. My ghosts are ghosts, just as my werewolves are werewolves, although it takes a near-death experience (and a healthy dose of Shakespeare) to convince my hero of that fact. As the story progressed, I ran into a place where there was no logical next step. I asked my daughter what she thought I should do, and she said, “Throw in a ghost.” And there I was with a ghost that was just sort of hanging around being ghostly. And there I was with a meadow, a borderland to the undiscovered country that had no other side. I changed that, breaking a genre in order to stay true to the characters.

Have you ever done that?


About the Author:
Like many writers, I started when a story came along and decided that I should write it. Don’t ask me why. Others followed, until now I’m afraid to go out of the house with a recorder or notebook in my hand. But I show them, I refuse to write the same story twice!

For more information about Marc Vun Kannon visit www.marcvunkannon.com. Also, check out some of Marc’s other books: Ex Libris and Steampunk Santa.