time and, since then, has had stories published in Interzone and Clarkesworld.
Ester's new novel is The Ganymedan.
My Q&A with the author:
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit R.T. Ester's website.
I think it belongs to the same naming convention as titles like The Martian and The Bear where there's an ironic layer to it. It's a reference to the main character, but the story itself ends up complicating that connection, and the character you may have assumed would be a typical Martian or bear is revealed to be the outlier in some profound sense. If you're already sort of aware of this convention, I would say the title does a lot. It tells you the protagonist will not be your typical Ganymedan, but an outlier. Briefly, before googling it and seeing that the title already belonged to an excellent short story by the scifi author Derek Kunsken, I considered Ghosts of Ganymede. Parts of the story revolve around a dissident group with chapters that all use the word ghost in their names. One of them had a significant influence on the protagonist growing up and their anti-AI ethos comes back to haunt him at pivotal moments throughout the book.
What's in a name?
I'm a pantser most of the time, so when I name a character, it's often a very in-the-moment placeholder name, but then the character becomes the person with that name, the more I write them. With The Ganymedan, I actually had an outline before I started writing and I was already thinking about who all these characters were. For V-Dot, or Verden Dotnet, I think I knew early on that I wanted to explore a connection between the corrupting influence his employer LP has on him and the devastation his homeworld endured during a war that was also started by LP. Dotnet is a silly name I came up with early on, but to me it made sense to just leave it alone. Old internet term have lost their original meaning here. By contrast, Verden bring
s the word verdant and the color green to mind, which I wanted to reinforce as who V-Dot was before coming in contact with LP.
How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?
I think he would probably wonder if I was pulling a prank on him. I wasn't much of a reader back then, but I did write a lot of compulsive nonsense that will never see the light of day. Also, it just never occurred to me that I would pursuewriting the way I have over the last eight years or so. I think my teenage self would be very pleasantly surprised.
Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?
I always knew I wanted The Ganymedan to begin with V-Dot wanting to go home again. Early on, the idea was that the encounter he has with the officers at the spaceport would be a sort of in media res introduction to the story's world, but also it would quickly connect readers to V-Dot as just someone being harassed for no apparent reason. I ended up preempting all of that with parts of the story's original ending because I think it eventually made more sense to lean into the structure the story now has where it first tells you what happened, then it tells you how it happened. All that to say, I probably struggle a little more with beginnings than I think I do with endings.
What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?
I come from a design background, so first, I would say some of the principles I employ in my day job as a designer make it into my writing in some way. These are principles that primarily concern how information is presented and made consumable for a specific audience. I don't know if my stories always excel at both but I think a background in design generally means the writer who has it will be experimenting with structure a lot.
Writers Read: R.T. Ester.
The Page 69 Test: The Ganymedan.
--Marshal Zeringue