Pre-order here: https://www.lunapresspublishing.com/novels Out April 15, 2015.
Let’s start from the beginning. Who were the writers who inspired you to become an author?
Wow, there are quite a few, so I’ll focus on a few influences chronologically. Kate Wilhelm’s apocalyptic novels, Where the Late the Sweet Birds Sang and Juniper Time, made a huge impression on me. I still think about the latter and shudder everytime I hear about a drought in the news. I also grew up on the stories in Omni magazine and the Year’s Best anthologies from Daw that introduced me to writers like James Tiptree/Alice Sheldon and Connie Willis. I didn’t start to get serious about writing speculative fiction, however, until later in life, so—to echo a billion other writers--Ted Chiang was definitely an influence, namely Story of Your Life, which had a huge impact on what I knew storytelling was capable of, and Jack Womack’s Random Acts of Senseless Violence, a novel that with its frightening prescience and how it literally makes you fluent in a new dialect in the space of an afternoon turned my brain inside out. It’s an ongoing process though. I’m still learning and almost everything I read makes me want to go write, which makes the struggle just to sit down and read for a few hours all the more daunting.
Incidentally, Kate Wilhelm was kind enough to grant me permission to adapt her short story “Unbirthday Party” into a screenplay when I was in undergrad— a kindness I’ll never forget, especially after I’d written her with a bunch of obnoxious questions about deconstructionism.
What is the very first piece of fiction you ever wrote?
Early Stories: The first stories I wrote were probably comics. I was really into cartooning and comics as a kid, but I also tried to write a sequel to Alien on an old 1912 typewriter, something where Ripley went off to become a hermit scientist on a garden planet and came up with a way to domesticate the aliens. Imagine seeing a xenomorph on your milk carton. In college, I wrote screenplays, a really awful one about a pandemic, and then professionally, a spec adaptation of a Keigo Higashino novel that was being passed around at Paramount for a while, which was fun, a few thankfully trunked novels. I didn’t start working on speculative short stories until later, when I felt the clock was ticking. The first story I got published was a horror story in Allegory called Scratch Paper. It was based on my frustrations with US education and its ongoing attempts to solve its mountain of problems through acronyms and graphic organizers. It meant a lot to get that acceptance, and that kept me at it.
What is the hardest part of writing, in your experience?
My initial drafts are always messy, but I’ve learned to accept that as part of the process. I don’t outline from the beginning. I usually write everything out first and then do a mix of reverse outlining and redrafting. I write in layers, so in that initial phase it’s easy to lose confidence in what I’m doing, and it takes at least two drafts to get to the part where I’m even remotely excited to share it in a critique group. One thing you rarely hear is how nonlinear the process is, and because of that, it can be hard to redirect that critical impulse toward the later drafts where it can be of help. It’s also very easy to dismiss good ideas later in a draft because you think they’re too obvious or easy. That one adjustment that gets the story acceptance never, ever looks like the subconscious result of all the effort you’ve put in up to that point. That’s why I’ve been a bit more diligent about documenting my progress along the way as a means to quell some of the more unproductive self-doubt until I can use it more effectively.
Tell us about If the Stars Are Lit. What was the inspiration behind it?
The inspiration was a fusion of several sources, but a major one was the pandemic. I was isolated from my family and my partner works in another city, so like many people I felt like I was orbiting my old life, and a lot of memories started to rethread themselves. I’d also just returned from Russia before the borders closed where I’d visited Mosfilm Studios and the Museum of Cosmonautics. ITSAL is definitely an homage to Tarkovsky’s Solaris, but inspiration came from other sources too; namely Chiykowski’s microfiction about a reality simulator up against grief, and Jennifer Phang’s brilliant Advantageous, both the short film and the feature. That pathos in having to navigate a sense of self, the way Gwen 2.0 (Freya Adams) must in the film, all the while knowing that her memories come from another person. There’s scene in both versions, where her “daughter” Jules (Samantha Kim), chooses to have a relationship with a what is essentially a stranger containing her dead mother’s memories, not only out of the need to survive, but the empathy her mother once called her strength in a society that devalues it. It’s just gut-wrenching.
What is your take on social media, when it comes to being an author? Do you think that an author should have at least one channel of communication with the readers?
Social media is tricky. Plenty of successful writers in traditional publishing don’t seem to need it, and I think it can be a time suck if you’re not careful. That said, I enjoy it. It’s fun to talk with other creatives, and it’s where I get some of my best recommendations for books and stories and films, so from this reader’s perspective, it works. I do wish there was an option for interaction closer to the Ao3 model than Goodreads, which isn’t to say that I’m averse to criticism, bring it on, but there’s a magic back-and-forth that happens between readers and writers on the former that feels like sharing. It would be nice to have both.
What are you working on at the moment?
I’m working on two projects, at the moment. A lighter detective novella, loosely based on the travesty otherwise known as the Star Wars hotel and dealing with the enshittification and increasing economic disparity. I’m also working on something darker, closer to fantasy, set in a universe of old-time radio and the heyday of daytime soap operas. Right now I’m describing it as Pleasantville with monsters.
Pre-order If the Stars Are Lit, the SF debut novel of Sara K Ellis, out April 15, 2025 and launched at Eastercon Belfast.
Cover art is by Tara Bush, an incredibly talented British artist and regular artist in the Luna world.
If the Stars Are Lit is a speculative mystery dealing with the implications of AI, memory, and loss. When the starship ferrying her to Earth is gutted by an explosion, Joss Carsten, a seasoned crisis negotiator, is left adrift in deep space. Injured and desperate, she struggles to restore the ship’s communication system and reestablish contact with humanity, but her judgement and health are fading fast and her isolation is triggering painful flashbacks. In an act of self-preservation, the ship’s onboard system creates a gemel—a fully sentient holographic AI, generated from her consciousness—to keep Joss company. The catch? This one is a ringer for Alice, Joss’s ex-wife who left her due to Joss’s unwillingness to share her past. Now, trapped with an "Alice" who knows everything about her, Joss must confront her old ghosts and learn to trust again as the two race against time to unravel the mystery behind the ship’s destruction.
Sara on If the Stars Are Lit:
If the Stars Are Lit was a child of the pandemic, when so many of us were set adrift or quarantined inside our own spaceships. I spent a lot of time going for walks along the moat of an old castle—the stones of which had been appropriately repurposed as park benches—and revisiting memories. I was struck by how those recollections became more vivid but also less recognizable the further they drew from the source. I’m a big fan of Solaris, both the novel and Tarkovsky’s beautiful and frustrating adaptation, and it was around that time that I also read a line in one of Peter Chiykowski’s microfictions that just gutted me. “My reality simulator got most of you right…” but “Grief is a stickler for detail.”
It led me to wonder about those details. What if, unlike Kris from Solaris, that ghost generated from your grief had access to all your memories? Which details would make a simulation more or less true? And thus was born the Gemel.
While I was writing, my family was also experiencing a crisis, and I was reading about how the brain processes grief as counterfactuals and is trapped, to paraphrase psychologist Mary Frances O’Connor, in a state of “would’ve, should’ve, could’ve” with no prospect of answering those questions. In a sense, Gemel Alice is a projection of that. Ethically, she’s unwilling to fill in Joss’s past for her. She can only offer carefully chosen details that serve as avenues for reinterpretation and possibly healing. It’s still up to Joss to determine how she’ll move forward.
About the Author:
Sara Kate Ellis is a Lambda Emerging Writers Fellow and attended the Milford Science Fiction Workshop in 2017 and 2022. Her stories have appeared in Analog, Fusion Fragment, Shoreline of Infinity, and are forthcoming in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She is currently an assistant professor at Meiji University in Tokyo, where she lives with her partner and two ornery street cats. She occasionally writes academic-ish things about American comics and manga.
Socials: BlueSky: Skateellis.bsky.social
X: @skellis13
Instagram: sarakatellis
If the Stars Are Lit will be released at Eastercon 2025, in Belfast.
Pre-order now!
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