Release Date April 15, 2025.
Cover Art by Tara Bush.
Paperback Edition (Hardback and Ebook also available).
 
If the Stars Are Lit is a speculative mystery exploring the implications of AI, memory, and loss.
 
When the starship ferrying her to Earth is gutted by an explosion, Joss Carsten is left alone and adrift,
struggling to reestablish communication with humanity. But her health is fading fast, and her isolation
is triggering painful hallucinations of Alice, her long-estranged wife.
 
In an act of self-preservation, the ship’s onboard system generates a gemel – a sentient holographic AI, born from Joss’s own psyche. The catch? This one is a ringer for Alice.
 
Now, trapped with an “Alice” who knows all her secrets, Joss must confront her old ghosts as they race
to unravel the mystery behind the ship’s destruction.
 
Sara on the novel:
 
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.