SPSFC 3 Author Interview - Guerric Hache

1.       What inspired the world, characters, or core concepts of your story? Was it a particular event, piece of media, or a speculative scientific idea?

A Slice of Mars was inspired by a lot of things, but three specific inspirations stand out. The first was the Covid pandemic. I spent a lot of time indoors alone, and cooking became something of an obsession; as a result, I spent a lot of time thinking about food and community.

The second big influence was the sheer volume and variety of scientific developments we’re seeing, particularly in the realms of biology but also in sociology, computing, materials science, and other fields. I read a lot of science news, and I’m always excited to imagine the centuries-long implications of new tools or theories.

The third big motivator for me was that I was excited by the thought of challenging myself as a writer. To me, that meant around almost everything from my previous series, Digitesque. That series was an action-adventure story set in a dangerous, post-apocalyptic future and intensely focused on two characters who spent a lot of time alone. So for A Slice of Mars, from the very start I explicitly set out to write something low-stakes, set in a world that’s mostly pleasant and forward-looking, and with a stronger emphasis on friend groups and interpersonal relationships.

2.       How did you approach the creation of your main characters? Were they modeled after real-life figures, or did they evolve organically as you explored the world of your story?

There are four perspective characters in A Slice of Mars, and all four of them started from different inclinations, flaws, or passions I found within myself; I felt that was a helpful way to stay grounded while writing them. From those four different starting points, I also allowed each of them to deviate off in other directions.

I also spent some time planning out how their different personalities and concerns would interact with each other. It was really important for me that each pair of characters had the potential for both friendship and conflict, so some of who they are developed as a result of how they were going to interact with the other characters around them.

3.       Science fiction often delves into questions of ethics, technology, and humanity. What central theme or moral question does your story grapple with, and why did you feel it was essential to explore?

A Slice of Mars includes a lot of topics and technologies that would usually be of science fictional concern, including post-capitalism, digital communications, genetic technology, human longevity, advanced robotics, climate change, and space colonialism; but for the most part those are either historical facts or integrated cultural practices. The characters navigate established social and cultural norms about those topics, rather than encountering them as new phenomena that need to be grappled with.

To me, the most important big picture task I set for myself with A Slice of Mars was to imagine a society that has democratically and thoughtfully made a serious effort to build a better world for all its inhabitants, and to conscientiously incorporate technology into their lives. No dark underbelly or secret sacrifices; just a centuries-long, error-laden process of communities looking at the lives they are living and the tools at their disposal, and being willing to make big structural changes in their attempts (successful or not) to address the root causes of the problems they’re facing.

And I think it’s critically important for us to imagine better futures; futures that may be different and strange to us, but whose inhabitants could look back on our own times and feel happy with where they’ve ended up. A lot of dystopian fiction provides us with valuable cautions, warnings, and critiques of modern society, and I feel the flip side of fiction that prompts us to wonder how things might be better is equally important.

4.       How did you approach the integration of futuristic technology or scientific concepts in your story? Did you base them on existing theories or let your imagination run wild?

Almost all the futuristic elements in A Slice of Mars are directly informed by science and technology news from the last decade or so – and I mean science in its fullest sense, including not only biology and physics but also sociology, psychology, linguistics, computing, and other areas of human knowledge and endeavour. For a while I even considered publishing the book with a list of citations and references; I still have many of those references in a file.

In many cases I’ve stretched the future implications of technologies or theories beyond what seems economically or pragmatically likely, but I’ve tried to stay within the realm of what seemed to be at least technically plausible.

5.       The sci-fi genre provides a canvas to depict diverse cultures, species, and worlds. How have you incorporated representation and diversity in your work, and why do you think it's vital for the future of science fiction?

The setting of a far-future Martian colony was interesting for this reason. Mars belongs to nobody, after all, so as a writer you’re inevitably making some kind of call about who might end up there and how their descendants will feel about their Earth-bound ancestors hundreds of years down the line. At first, I spent a bit of time at first trying to imagine different histories that might have led to various cultural compositions of that world.

In the end, though, I decided I wanted to write something that reflected the diversity of the community I live in; I wanted this world to feel both alien and familiar to readers at once, and drawing from real lived experience in a real place, then adding a layer of fudging to account for many centuries of cultural and linguistic drift, felt like a good way to do that.

So I did my best to reflect the diversity I observe in my everyday life in the Metro Vancouver area, from its patchwork of cultural and linguistic communities, to its vibrant queer community, all the way to specific Canadianisms I either embraced when I noticed them or deliberately threw in. These characters are mostly disconnected from Earth cultures by several generations and centuries, but it was important to me that this be a society where their ancestors came a variety of places, and whose present-day members feel free to express a wide variety of identities and lifestyles.

6.       Every author has a unique writing process. Can you share a bit about yours? How do you manage world-building, plot progression, and character dynamics in such a complex genre?

I’ve tried many times to carefully plan out my writing, and it never seems to work; either I get hung up on resolving tangles in the plan before I’ve started writing, or I struggle to imagine how to fill the gaps between the main points I want to hit. I find I write best when I sit down and start throwing words into a document without much of an outline at all. Somehow I almost always end up where I wanted to go, and solving the various twists and turns along the way is a lot of fun and helps keep me motivated.

That said, before I even start writing I generally spend a lot of time thinking about the world in which the story takes place, and often keeping quite a lot of notes on it. Knowing the world I’m working with helps constrain what happens and also helps provide solutions or options when I reach some kind of junction in the story.

Characters, meanwhile, are something I’ve approach differently with each story I’ve written; I’ve always put some of myself in my POV characters as a way to connect with them emotionally, but their development and their specific personalities are sometimes led by their circumstances, other times by the relationships I want to explore, and other times still by some internal struggle I want to get across.

7.       What's next for you after SPSFC? Are there any upcoming projects you can share with us?

 I’ve started writing a few exploratory drafts for next books, but my mind hasn’t quite settled on one specific project yet. I’d like to lean more into the fantasy side of SFF for my next book, but for now I can’t say more than that!