[00:00:01.13] – John Knych
Hello, everyone. This is Ness Brown. Thank you for being here, Ness Brown. Ness is an astrophysicist and also a science fiction writer. And today, we’ll be talking about her debut, The Scourge Between Stars. So my first question for you, Ness. It’s a two-parter. Number one, can you share with us the origin of the book, the idea, how you came to the idea for the story? And then number two, can you share with us a little bit about the publication path? Because I read in the Acknowledgments that you wrote it in a month. And I’m curious to know whether you did that on a deadline with an editor that said, you need to write this fast, or you wrote it and then found a publisher.
[00:00:43.12] – Ness Brown
Thank you so much for the question. I first remember considering this idea all the way back, I believe, at the beginning of my undergrad experience. I was home for the summer, and my father is a huge sci-fi horror nerd. I come by it honestly. And we were rolling through our usual roster of pitch black, Doom, revisiting all of the highlights from my childhood. The worse it performed critically, the better. And I remember briefly flirting with the idea of some scenario, where you have your usual enclosed in a spaceship, something else is on board, the very familiar sci-fi horror scenario. I was curious about adding the element of the hint of cosmic horror, something greater than what we know, something far beyond ourselves, and then the uberhuman element of horror, where we also have just the run-of-the-mill evils, that still, sadly, plague society, and just a story where all of these horrors are competing with each other. And that leads handily into your second question. Excuse me. I did nothing with the idea at the time. I just put it to the side for many years. And then in June of 2020, I found out about an event that Tor Nightfire, the horror imprint, was holding, where they were looking for submissions from Black Indigenous Writers of Colour who did not have representation.
[00:02:40.07] – Ness Brown
So if you didn’t have an agent, you were free to send in any manuscript that you had, and then they would consider it, which is a pretty special opportunity. And the deadline was July of 2020. So I was absolutely staring down the barrel of a really crazy deadline, and I had no book. I just knew I really wanted to try to take advantage of this opportunity. So for four weeks, I essentially wrote for 16 hours a day, just to see if I could meet the deadline, see if I could turn something in. I submitted the story at 3:00 AM, the day that it was due. I just made it. And even though I suspect there are…I think there’s evidence of the fact that it was written in such a short amount of time, but I still dearly, dearly love the book, and I’m so grateful for everything that Scourge has opened, the further doors that it opened up to me. It was a true delight to write.
[00:03:44.24] – John Knych
Wonderful, thank you. Well, there’s definitely an urgency in the story that the reader feels, that when I read the that you read in a month, I was like, oh, yeah, you feel that pull. Thank you. So the format for this Ness is we do just a round table. We go around to each, every one. And if people don’t have questions, I have six questions here, so everyone’s welcome to pass. But we’ll go to Brandon, since you’ve been part of these talks, we’ll go to you for your next question.
[00:04:18.24] – Brandon
Thank you, Jack, for putting together these talks, as always. And thank you, Ness, for being here today. Yeah, I didn’t realize it only took you a month to write. So, you were saying that it seems like you wrote it quickly. I thought there was a lot of world building and backstory, like we don’t see beyond the story. There’s this failed colony, there’s these unknown attacks on the ship. I feel like there’s a lot more world building to it, but maybe there wasn’t. So I guess my question to you is, how much world building did you put into this story? And Is there a lot to it that we don’t see in the story? Or is it just you wrote this as quick as you can, and what we see is what all it is?
[00:05:11.13] – Ness Brown
Thank you very much for this question. This is something that I love to talk about, because I mentioned writing this in four weeks, and I would say that the first week was actually me doing all these calculations to make sure that I got the distances, the speeds, the timing right from here to all à Alpha Centauri. I created names for 300 ships because I was envisioning the original colony effort that went over to Alpha Centauri, was something like 6,000 ships strong, and I wanted to get their structure. I wanted to understand the full detail. I’m not an exoplanetary scientist, specifically, but I did a lot of looking at what have we found out about the surface of Alpha Centauri so far. I would say that there’s definitely a ton of things that I looked at originally. And there were some other elements that had been present in the original draft, such as a little more information about the attempted coup on the ship, and so on and so forth. But part of the publishing process is making sure that on the publishing end, the book fits nicely into not just existing genres, but also existing format, so novella versus novel.
[00:06:33.14] – Ness Brown
I think the original draft was straddling the line between the two, and the publisher was like, Why don’t you slim this down, and we’ll package it that way? I think about 10,000 words got cut in the end, and not everything that I thought about for this world was able to make it on the page.
[00:06:57.08] – Brandon
Thank you.
[00:06:58.24] – John Knych
Thank you, We’ll keep going around the horn. Josh, next question.
[00:07:05.18] – Josh
Hi. Thanks Ness, for joining. It’s really cool. I am equally partial to the failed colony efforts of the futures. So that grabbed me quite quickly in the book. You mentioned about with your dad watching a lot of the… Did you say? The worse it performed, the worse the box office, the better. The three things that came to mind when I was reading was the military-civilian conflict from Stargate Universe, the cosmic horror of Event Horizon, and then a little bit of the colony efforts of Pandora, which I don’t think many people have seen. What were you thinking? Which influences were you drawing on when you were writing this and planning this?
[00:08:08.19] – Ness Brown
First of all, those are great films. I think Pandora is one of my dad’s favorites. One that was really big for me is not a film, but the video game Dead Space.
[00:08:21.06] – Brandon
Oh.
[00:08:22.03] – Ness Brown
Yeah, specifically the original. I love what the remake did, but something about the original really hits I don’t necessarily flatter myself to think I succeeded, but I really was interested in just capturing the feeling of even just walking the corridors is goosebumps-worthy. When I was younger and first starting to play Dead Space, I couldn’t get through 15 minutes playing because my heart was beating really fast. And I guess I the idea of the scenario being so nerve-inducing that… Or I guess what I’m trying to say is, I really like the atmosphere, where nothing necessarily needs to be happening immediately, but you’re in that heightened state. So that was a big influence for me. If I could recapture that feeling in a book, that would be a big milestone as a writer for me. I can’t wait to try again. Were there others? I’m trying to think. Certainly, the generic template of Alien, it’s just so classic and so pervasive, and spaceship horror that you can’t help but elicid the comparison, which is intensely flattering. That’s a great question. I’m certain that there’s a lot floating around there for me. I think the atmosphere of dead space, I think I could feel it in parts with the banging on the wall, and particularly with that bulkhead being where everything comes from and hiding in the walls.
[00:10:18.16] – Josh
So, yeah, I think that worked.
[00:10:20.17] – Ness Brown
Thank you so much. I think on the action side of things, I was also thinking a lot about, in more games, but like Mass Effect. I really love not only Sci-Fi action, but Sci-Fi horror. So I wanted to have a bit of shoot them up in there as well.
[00:10:42.12] – Josh
Good choices.
[00:10:43.03] – Jenn
Hi. Thanks for being here. So you are an astrophysicist, which I think is very cool. How did that inform your writing? It feels very realistic.
[00:11:03.06] – Ness Brown
Did you try to fit in as much scientific accuracy as possible, or did you feel extra pressure if something wasn’t right? Or was it just fun to be able to explore this world with your background ? Definitely a mix of the two, I would say. Thankfully, I had a lot of support in the astro community, from my peers, from professors, from senior scientists, that I knew. And knowing that they would read it, that they meant to support me, was extremely nerve-wracking. But I didn’t necessarily hold myself too stringently, to the need, I guess, to be perfectly scientifically accurate or to represent everything that I know on the page, in part because I’m not always a hard sci-fi fan. Sometimes I really like it. Sometimes I want the former rocket scientist to walk me through the construction of the ship in the story. Sometimes I really want it to be more of what we were speaking of previously, the atmospheric sense. I would say that I don’t think anything that I wrote in the book is anything that a non-scientist, but just really good writer and researcher could write. I think anyone could, but I do think that my expertise helped me do it faster.
[00:12:38.07] – Ness Brown
I think I was able to create this story on the timeline that I did, just because I do have the background. So that was an enormous boom. There were definitely things I was nervous about, on the robotic side, talking technology. I don’t feel the most comfortable in that sense, especially because I’m not even necessarily a theoretical or computational astrophysicist. I’m an observational astrophysicist. So I was dipping my toes in other sub-fields, which ended up being really fun, and I hope to do more of. Cool. Thanks.
[00:13:15.19] – John Knych
Thank you, Jen. We had a… Jen has her child right next to her that just asked a question. Yeah, a baby question. Net, so all right, back to the top. So my question tries to combine all three of Jen, Josh, and Brandon’s comments. We talk a lot about world building with this science fiction reading group, just because sci-fi is just known for it. So you mentioned that in the four weeks of you writing this, the first week was pretty heavy world building. And Josh mentioned that what grabbed him for the book is failed colony effort. For me, it’s arch-ship. I love reading about archips. So what grabbed me for your book was not only the cover, I like novellas, but I just love thinking about how King Mandi could survive on an Ark ship. And I thought you did a great job with sticking with… Not doing too much with details. There’s a line I love, which is, despite ventilation’s best efforts, even though every surface was practically ooozing heat sink paste, it was oppressively hot. I never heard of heat sink paste. My question to you is, in that whirlwind first week of world building, how much did you do of Arc ship research ?
[00:14:43.01] – John Knych
Because I’ve tried it, and it’s like an abyss, right? So many things interact with each other, like the ventilation system, the heat, all that, radiation. You just have so many issues. So how much did you do? How much do we not read? And then, do you plan on doing more ARC type books in the future?
[00:15:05.11] – Ness Brown
Wonderful question. I would say that beyond a critical look at the logistics of this, such as… For example, when I was thinking of these ships, I started looking up the schematics of crew-ships, just trying to see what do we have presently, what mass transportation vehicles do we have presently, and what are the considerations there? Because I feel like… I don’t like cruises. So to me, it feels very similar to being enclosed in a space with very limited resources that you’re very aware of all the time. So I would say that I put more effort in on the logistics, trying to understand the numbers, trying to understand the organization. And then, when it came time to write the generational environment, I deliberately wanted to focus more on the psychological social aspects, since that was something that I was more familiar with. At the time, I was teaching an introductory astrobiologie course at University of New York System. One of the things I talked about with my students was the the inherent issues with generation ship travel, a lot of which, beyond just the logistics of food, air, waste, etc, are intensely psychological and social. There just is not a lot of evidence right now that human psychology and human social patterns can withstand our ship travel.
[00:16:52.05] – Ness Brown
And so I wanted to play into that because something that happens on the way to the colony is, everything works à grève. Our jump tech, our work tech, our Hyperspace tech is working fine. We get there in a minimum number of years. It’s within a human lifetime, I think. But then on the way back, is when everything starts to degrade, and we have to confront the reality of this choice, and it’s not looking good. Everything falls apart. I’m sorry if I didn’t answer all of the questions.
[00:17:29.21] – John Knych
I just realized I forgot the second aspect. No, you did. You touched on this in the book, how do you get future generations to care about the mission that their ancestors started? I thought your choice of, like, rebellion, yeah, it’s going to happen. People are going to say, I don’t… And then, tough decisions have to be made. But, yeah, the one part of the question, though… So, when you were more thinking about how will people get stir-crazy rather than how will this event interact with this processor or whatever, that the social issues concerned you more than the actual functioning ?
[00:18:19.13] – Ness Brown
Yeah, I would say so. And I think the times when I do include a little bit of info about actual ship function, like when we look into the techie space or when we go down to engineering and we’re taking a look at the core or things like that, my main concern with those sceNess was, one, communicating, at least what I know of in my life, of the sense of what those spaces really feel like. So, for example, one thing that many people don’t always know about astrophysics and astronomy, is that it’s a lot of typing stuff up, letting it go, and then waiting for hours, and hoping that it works, and that it provides results that are actually worth analysis. And, while you’re doing that, you can be loaded in un office, with a ton of other grads, or you can be shut in in a space that is really hot, because the Supercomputer Cluster is doing this, or even in engineering. I certainly have not been in a spaceship engineering space, but I have definitely been to mirror labs, which are these really, really vast laboratoires, où les différents scientifiques sont créant les murs pour ces grands télescopes, les Next Generation, les étoiles de base de télescopes que nous mettons.
[00:19:40.21] – Ness Brown
À U of University of Arizona, they have a mirror lab underneath their stadium, and I was able to go there. And it was really fascinating just to see that set up. So as maybe lazy or lacking in scientific integrity as it may be, I think my primary concern was the vibes, so to speak.
[00:20:06.21] – John Knych
Thank you. Yes, in a novella, you bog the reader down with a tangent on too much of the mechanics of it. Thank you. Moving on to Brandon.
[00:20:20.19] – Brandon
Yeah, this is a little bit out there. It doesn’t have anything to do with the book, but just since you’re an astrophysicist, and I’m guessing science fiction fan as well. Do you think, and realistically, that a human being will ever leave the solar system, knowing that space travel is as hard as it is ? We’re not really going anywhere with space right now. So do you think we’ll actually ever leave the solar system ? Yeah, it’s an out there question, but…
[00:20:56.24] – Ness Brown
No, I like it. My intuitive answer is no, for a couple of reasons. One, the power draw of interstellar travel is orders of magnitude higher than interplanetary travel. Interplanetary as it is already difficult for us as it is, prohibitively expensive. So we would have to make a genuinely insane leap in technological ability to get beyond the solar system. I’m assuming, in this question that we’re actually trying to get somewhere and we’re not just going to the heliopause and being like, Oh, we touched outside, let’s go back home. If we really had the destination, the technological advancement would have to be vast. The other issue is that, usually, when we conceive of interstellar travel, it’s purely about increasing our speed, to make it to the next star system before our bodies, before our technology fails. You have to do it quickly. But I don’t know… And I guess my caveat would be, I’m not a space scientist or a rocket scientist, but I don’t know if we have really good ideas for shielding when it comes to rocket design. So once you start going at certain percentages, the speed of light, any collision with anything, even if it’s a really, really tiny meteorite or space dust or whatever, to my understanding, that’s going to punch holes in your ship, which is one of the biggest problems of space travel, any breach at all.
[00:22:39.06] – Ness Brown
I think the technological and the design aspects are too tough, and then add on to some of the psychological social aspects that we talked about before. Maybe that’s too negative, but I guess with my 2025 understanding of where we’re at and where we can go, I think it’s for me.
[00:23:01.08] – Brandon
Thank you for that. I have the same feelings that you do. So thank you.
[00:23:10.01] – John Knych
Thank you, Brandon. Moving on to Josh, or you can pass it off.
[00:23:15.07] – Josh
Between two questions, I think I’ll go with… I might be getting the name wrong. Is it Watson is the Android ? It was Watson. Watson is interesting in that he, she, it… Almost comes across as gaining sentience. Is that part of the point where you were like, I’m a little bit uncomfortable with this, or Was there more research into that ? Because it seemed like he was limited to his own computing power. And given what we’re seeing with AI or LLMs and stuff at the moment, going back to that vast amount of power required, I wondered where that fell on the hard, soft, sci-fi scale.
[00:24:27.12] – Ness Brown
This is another great question. I definitely wanted Watson to continue the underlying conversation in the book about resources. The entire reason we’re heading to Alpha Centauri is because extremely inefficient stratified and corrupt use of resources here on Earth. The cosmic punishment for that is getting to Alpha Centauri and having the situation flipped, where now we’re in a world unlike Earth, which has abundant resources. This is a planet that is nearly ressourceless. Coming from the decadence and the abundance of Earth. We’re completely unsuited, we can’t survive. Watson, I think, to me, was an extension of this conversation on how do we utilize these resources and how does the corruption that we had in resource use on Earth continue to manifest. I didn’t consider Watson as fully sentient because I personally don’t understand what an actual artificial intelligence, a sentient artificial intelligence would look like. I’m only familiar with the most basic entry-level, like neural network, version of artificial intelligence, which I don’t think it necessarily counts. But I did want to showcase a machine whose capabilities are so robust that it does look like sentience, and have that be a really uncomfortable sticking point for the other characters in the novella.
[00:26:14.00] – Ness Brown
I had Watson’s owner, Otto, literally abusing those resources. And in Jack’s case, Watson representing a reconciliation with the idea of resources. So I think maybe similar to the ARC design, I didn’t want to stress necessarily over the technology aspect, because I think we have a lot of projections and predictions about where AI will take us, or what it could look like. And that’s super hairy, and I didn’t want to get caught in the mess. So I definitely wanted to keep it down so I could explore, maybe, more of the philosophical implications of Watson’s presence on board.
[00:27:08.09] – Josh
That makes sense. That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought of it in that term of resources. Yeah, interesting. Thank you.
[00:27:20.06] – John Knych
Thank you, Josh. Moving on to Jen, if you have a question.
[00:27:25.02] – Ness Brown
No, I’m just going to pass it along.
[00:27:30.06] – John Knych
Thank you, because I just had one that popped in my head. This is question/comment in that… And that’s another reason why I’m grateful that you’re here, and that I reached out, is we’ve had a lot of old-school sci-fi authors already on this chat, and I wanted us to talk with someone who’s like, It’s your début, right ? And we could talk about this in the last 10 minutes, but I’m sure you’re working on and dreaming of other projects. But what you just said there, and Jos’ question about knowing your limitation of knowledge with AI and with our chips, and trying to respect that, it’s very different. We talked with Peter Watts and Alastair Reynolds, and both of them came from a time, like the beginning of the Internet, where they could read all the sci-fi books that were available and really get a taste of all the different science. Now, C’est impossible. As a sci-fi auteur, you have to really… Because we progress so much in the last 20 years, if you try to step too far, your ignorance vous apportera. Donc, comment vous… Il me semble que vous avez a conscious effort of being like, I don’t know a lot about that.
[00:28:48.11] – John Knych
I know a little bit. I’m going to not go too far down the sentient conscience. That was just a me ranting comment. But my question to you, this is going down different path, creative process. In the beginning, I wrote down, Father, sister, mother, not present for the protagonist. We don’t see the father until near the end. Did you know, right in the beginning, that you wanted Jack, to just be alone, in a sense? Or did you work on the story and realize, yeah, he has nobody? That decision to not have her family members, how did that play out in your creation of the story?
[00:29:35.20] – Ness Brown
For me, that was deliberate for two reasons. The first was that I definitely wanted the to feel haunted in the sense of there are many ghosts here. And that’s because, just inherently, the idea of trying to establish an exo-colony, it means leaving countless people behind. I definitely wanted the Calypso and the entire Exo Colony fleet to feel haunted by everyone left behind. In my opinion, people who are in Jack’s position, where you understand exactly where the mission is, and it’s not looking hot, I wanted those people to be plagued by this knowledge that they were chosen They were among the privileged few who got to go on this journey. Obviously, they weren’t the oNess literally flying off Earth, but they’re the chosen privileged few on this journey, and they’ve mucked it up, patently, profoundly. Jack, experiencing all of her closest relationships in memory, to me, I really wanted that to evoke this sense of That’s just where everyone is now. Everyone’s a memory. And what you do now has to be for them or in spite of them. And I wanted Jack’s journey from feeling incredibly insecure and feeling incredibly haunted, to feeling like her own person, and like she’s brushed off the ghosts a little bit.
[00:31:22.07] – Ness Brown
That’s the feeling that I wanted to evoke.
[00:31:27.08] – John Knych
Thank you. Thank you. Now, that’s what I’d say. I was wondering how your motivations for just… To me, I just thought like, yeah, it’s a ghost town. It’s a ghost town, emotionally and surrounding. Thank you. On to Brandon. Back to Brandon, if you have a question.
[00:31:45.18] – Brandon
Yeah, sure. You said you wrote this in four weeks and then you submitted it. Can you tell us about your experience from the time you submitted it to when it got published? What was the experience like of actually getting the book published? Did you have to do edits? Was there drafts? How did the cover artwork get done? What was your whole experience of all of that process?
[00:32:14.18] – Ness Brown
Yeah, I love talking about this because it was so magical. I definitely feel incredibly lucky to have been chosen for an opportunity like this. I don’t know how many people also submitted their manuscripts, but it felt amazing to be selected and experience everything that’s happened since. So the deadline for the submission de la lettre de la lettre de mai 2020, je l’ai entendu en septembre 2020. I heard back, December 20. So it’s not a… Well, maybe for some people, that was a very quick timeline. But for me, who had never done anything in publishing before, it was quite a wait, and I was very nervous. But they reached out to me, December of the same year, and then I spent the next something week, some number of weeks, looking for representation. And that was much easier for me than I know it is for other début authors, because when you don’t have representation, you have to shop your book around. For some people, that process will take years. But fortunately, because I already had the book deal in hand, I definitely had more people interested in representing me, and it wasn’t as much of an uphill slog as I’ve heard that it can be.
[00:33:35.23] – Ness Brown
So I was extremely privileged in that sense. The next two years were a combination, first of editing. So what happens is I accepted, had my representation, I signed all these contracts, and then I ended up working with an editor. My editor is Kristen Temple at TOR, Kristen is an amazing human being, definitely go read, essentially, any other person represented by Kristen. She finds incredible talent, and they do amazing things together. For me, I was told that my original manuscript was quite clean, especially for being written in a short period of time, so I didn’t have back and forth edits. It was one big chop, essentially, and then I was mostly good to go from there. Once the draft is ready, that’s when we start bringing in the other specialists, like typesetters. We bring in people. Speaking of the cover, that was one of the most magical parts of the process, because I was asked, do I have anything in mind ? I sent over some pictures, and then I found out that they had gotten Chris McGrath to do the cover, which was insane because I’ve since moved, but I used to have my office where all my books were behind me.
[00:34:57.03] – Ness Brown
And you could see five or six books just right behind in my head that he had done covers for that were in my library. Chris is just a phenomenal artist, incredible at what he does. And that was a highlight for me, for sure. I was definitely fanning out a bit. And then, yeah, leading up to the actual publication, I had someone at TOR, essentially… The word’s coming out of my head. Marketing ?
[00:35:30.00] – John Knych
Publicis, maybe.
[00:35:30.22] – Ness Brown
Publicis. Oh, goodNess. Thank you. I’m a writer, I swear. Yeah, so the Publicis took over and was able to set up exactly events like these, where I had the immense honor and pleasure of talking to other book clubs, talking to podcasters, talking to magaziNess. It was awesome. It was really, really great. And then publication was incredible. They essentially asked me, Are there local bookstores that I like ? I told them the bookstores that I patronize, and one of them, Historia Books in Queens. Since I was living in NYC at the time, they hosted my début. So it was incredible. And now that I actually have other projects that are on the timeline to being published, I’m really excited to do the circuit again.
[00:36:25.17] – John Knych
Thank you so much. C’est awesome.
[00:36:26.24] – Brandon
Yeah. Thank you.
[00:36:28.12] – John Knych
The publishing industry is opaque, hearing you describe that whole process, I’ve never heard that before. So thank you. That was great. Josh, I have a couple questions, but we got to respect the roundtable. On to you.
[00:36:44.22] – Josh
I just have a quick follow up then to that last point about the… Particularly with the marketing. My understanding from other people in the industry been basically that once they got the book out the door, that was it, you’re on your own. So it sounds like they actually gave you quite a lot of support in terms of marketing and publicity. I don’t know that you’d necessarily have anything to compare it with, but is that, in your experience, standard ? Or was it because of this competition or open submission period, that you’d that they were doing that ? Was it related to that, that they were pushing it, or was it just standard, I guess ? If you were able to answer that, I don’t know.
[00:37:42.14] – Ness Brown
I think the things that immediately pop into my mind are that, one, I was getting published, ultimately, under the umbrella of Tor, which is such a huge publisher. They have incredible resources. I think they could afford to do that. I think that people that are getting published at maybe smaller houses, it might look very different, which was something I was aware of at the time, because my thought process, not to be self-déplicating or anything, but my thought process was… This is a lot of attention. I don’t think the book… Yes, I’m really proud of what I did, and I love Scourge, and I’m so grateful for everything it did for me, but I don’t think it’s… It’s not revolutionary. I think it was part and parcel of just being with a bigger publishing house. Then, two, to my understanding, the Imprint Nightfire was relatively new at the time that I was joining them. I think that they were interested in just getting the word out, letting people know that this horror imprint was really taking off. And at the time, if I remember, there was one other space horror book. So I think, jointly, we were two of the books that were coming out, that they were using to represent, here’s our space here’s our folk horror.
[00:39:01.12] – Ness Brown
We ended up being représentatives of that push. I can’t say, maybe, for certain. I don’t have a strong answer to your question, but I think those were factors.
[00:39:13.06] – Josh
That makes a little sense. Yeah, that’s cool.
[00:39:17.15] – John Knych
Thank you, Josh. Ken, you want to pass it off ? Got a question ?
[00:39:26.22] – Ness Brown
It’s all you.
[00:39:27.23] – John Knych
Thanks, Jen. To continue down this path of pretty interesting publishing path for this book, Ness, I know there are a couple readers who aren’t here today that are striving to publish in sci-fi, so I’ll tell them about this talk and that they should listen to this part. But you mentioned that, and this is true, to get an agent using an uphill battle. But for you, it was downhill. And my question is, to me, it seems like it should even be easier than a downhill, because you’re reaching out to agents and being like, I already have a publisher. That’s so rare. It’s basically saying, I want to give you money if you represent me. So my question is, wouldn’t the chips be on… Usually, you’re reaching out to an agent, Hey, I have this idea, but you have a publisher. Were you able to pick and choose your agent ? Or did they try and reach out to you and say, No, look, I’ll do this for you, I’ll do this for you ? What was the agent conversations like ?
[00:40:39.12] – Ness Brown
Yeah, it wasn’t quite a pick and choose situation, largely because agents are also limited resources. I did come across people who, I think, were interested in my project and very, very interested in the fact that it had sold itself. But they already had a lot of clients. Their client list was full, or they were currently representing a sci-fi horreur, and they were like, I am not in a position to double-dip at this time. And that happened to me with an agent that I really wanted to work with because, again, I had so many of her clients’ work on my book shelf, but she was really swamped, obviously. She was a very prolific agent, but she ended up me off to a junior agent at the same agency. And ultimately, it came down between this junior agent at this agency, whose clientèle list included a ton of the people I read, versus a really well-established agent at a super famous agency, lots of big names, like R. A. Salvatore and everything. And I actually ended up going with the junior agent à l’agence plus parce que je sentais que j’avais tellement de choses à l’agence, le travail de ma vie en personne.
[00:42:05.01] – Ness Brown
C’était la chose que j’aime. On a eu une bonne conversation, l’agent et moi. Et j’ai fini par rester à l’agence depuis plusieurs ans. Donc, It was the stuff I really liked. We had a good conversation, the agent and I, and I ended up staying at that agency for several years. So ultimately, it was the right choice for me. But yeah, I would say that it was a little shocking that even after having all the… Everything in my pocket, it still was a little bit of a ordeal.
[00:42:31.04] – John Knych
Thank you. Brandon, back to you.
[00:42:35.15] – Brandon
So I’m a pretty big fan of sci-fi horror, but I feel like as far as books go, there aren’t… It’s been getting better recently, but there’s not a whole lot of sci-fi horror out there. And you mentioned you have a lot of movies you like. Are there any books out there, sci-fi horreur books, that you enjoy and can recommend ?
[00:43:02.09] – Ness Brown
Excuse me. I always give a shout-out to my former agency mate, SA BarNess.
[00:43:11.07] – Brandon
I’ve read hers. Yeah, she’s good.
[00:43:13.22] – Ness Brown
Definitely a good time. I’m sorry, not agency mate, publishing me. Darcy Coates, very famous. I like Sue Burke, the Sémiosis trilogy. I love. Caitlin Starling, I like. Did you read The Luminous Dead ? I like that one because it combiNess space horror with cave horror. Cave horror is so much worse to me. So scary. So that was definitely a really nice space psychological horror. I’m trying to envision what’s on my book shelf right now because it’s not behind me anymore. Definitely those names. I’m also thinking of Casey JoNess, Another publishing mate of mine, I think his debut was Black Tide, which I think is about… It’s Earth-based, but it’s an alien invasion, if I am remembering that correctly. Those are the things that come up right now. I would have to do a little book search.
[00:44:18.17] – Brandon
Thank you. Yeah, I was glad to see that your book came out, and I really enjoyed it. So it was a solid addition to the sci-fi horror genre..
[00:44:32.01] – John Knych
Thank you, Rant. Thank you. And shout out to Sue Burke. She was one of the first speakers we’ve had for this group. She was super kind and interesting. And she told us all about how she came, the origin of the Plant of Simeosis. She saw her plant in her apartment, like attacking another plant, and that was the seed, no pun intended, of the idea.
[00:44:56.20] – Ness Brown
Amazing.
[00:44:57.22] – John Knych
Yeah, she’s a great book. Josh, on to you.
[00:45:03.05] – Josh
I’ll pass. I don’t have anything else on my question list, so go ahead.
[00:45:08.24] – John Knych
All right. I assume, Jen, you’re passing again, unless you… All right, good. You mentioned earlier in this talk, and we’ll wrap it up in the next 5, 5, 10 minutes, you mentioned that your dad is a big sci-fi fan, and that he… I guess I’ll pass that on to you. My two questions: one, did he read your book, and what did he think about it ? And two, did he comment on the fact that your protagonist has this pretty conflicted… Well, so spoiler alert, if anybody is watching, I mean, it’s… Yeah, it’s a rough father-daughter relationship. So can you comment on your dad’s opinion of this, if you read it, and your decision in the book to have what happened ?
[00:45:58.08] – Ness Brown
Yeah, I am I’m really lucky that both of my parents were so supportive. They were with me with every step. As soon as I messaged my dad, we got on FaceTime. He gathered all my siblings and my stepmom, we got on FaceTime, and we talked about the entire process. And then, even my mom, she started handing out the manuscripts just to anyone that came through her office. But you’re right, I was a little nervous to have my dad read it because I didn’t want him assume anything. But I don’t even think he waited for the official draft. I think he was like, Can you just send it to me ? So I sent him my word doc, and he printed it out. He sent me pictures of himself reading through it. And the one time he referenced the Jack and Noah dynamic, he was like, Does this mean anything ? I was like, No, of course not. And then we just proceeded to talk about the story, and he gave me his thoughts, which were invaluable. It was really, really lovely to talk through it with him.
[00:47:05.23] – John Knych
And does he read sci-fi horror as much as you, or is he all sci-fi ? What’s his reading taste, I guess ?
[00:47:21.00] – Ness Brown
I read way more than him, just period. He’s more of a movies guy, 100 pour cent, but he loves all horror. It happens to be that space horror is his favorite. So he was delighted and astonished when I was able to come to him with the news. But I have found that really helpful because I, especially once I went to grad school, was not in a position to really be keeping up with all of the sci-fi horror, or even juste horror en général, that I used to when I was much younger. And my dad periodically texting me, being like, You should watch this. You should check this out. That has really helped me keep pace with the genre, which has been invaluable for storywriting.
[00:48:10.09] – John Knych
Excellent. Thank you. Why am I final wrap question. Anyone else ? Brandon, Josh, Jen, anything else you want to ask Ness ?
[00:48:23.11] – Brandon
Yeah, I mean, I guess I would ask what you’re working on next. I saw you have a fantasy novel coming out ?
[00:48:33.07] – Ness Brown
I do.
[00:48:33.22] – Brandon
Are you making a shift to fantasy or are you going to go back to sci-fi ? What are your future plans ?
[00:48:42.09] – Ness Brown
Yeah, thank you. So in the first place, I am also, simultaneously, one of the great delights of my life at this time, I have been able to write a few pieces for Warhammer 40,000. So very grim dark sci-fi. It’s been so awesome, because this is a franchise that, just being mindful of time, when I got published, I turned to my husband and I said, If I could write for these three franchises, Life Complete. And then a couple of months later, Warhammer reached out and they were like, Are you interested ? I was like, Yes. So certainly not done with sci-fi, or sci-fi horror, or sci-fi, anything grim-dark in that realm. And I have two sci-fi horreur projects on my laptop right now, so I’m definitely coming back. But certainly, I think in all of my projects, space will play some element, because even in the fantasy that’s coming out, hopefully next year, that is actually about an astrologer, which I know that sounds funny for an astrophysicist to be writing about, but an astrologer who works his very corrupt master, essentially, tries to sabotage his master, and ends up unleashing something onto their plane that has been chained away for a long time, and he has to figure out how to clean up his mess.
[00:50:14.10] – Ness Brown
So whatever I write, there will probably always be some element of stars in space there.
[00:50:20.18] – Brandon
Awesome.
[00:50:22.14] – John Knych
Thank you, Brandon. Is there a title yet for that book, or a date, or no ? Is it still too far in the distance for title or date ?
[00:50:32.07] – Ness Brown
The title is The Astrologer’s Demon. It was slated to come out fall 26, but those dates often get moved around. But probably in that area.
[00:50:49.03] – John Knych
Thank you. Brandon asked the what are you working on now question. But my last question to you, Ness, and this has already been touched upon in this talk a little bit, your work as an astrophysicist, is it… Do you get… Because obviously, if you’re in the sci-fi world, And it’s just so cool to have someone who’s a saffer writer and an astrophysicist. Do you get ideas from your work, or do you, in your mind, have a partition, where it’s like, here’s the scientific grind, here’s the imaginary, creativity ? Do you get ideas from your work, or do you really divide the two ?
[00:51:44.04] – Ness Brown
I get ideas all the time. And in fact, I was at my program, because I am getting my doctorate currently. I was at my program’s Friday Lunch seminar a couple of weeks ago, and I saw something in a presentation, and I ran up to the presenter afterwards, and I was like, Can you tell me Can you show me what papers there are about that ? And that was a really productive convo. And I immediately started adding it to one of the story ideas that I have buried pretty deep. So, yeah, I would say the overlap of art and science, and this is something I’m deeply passionate about putting forth in my outreach efforts and in my inclusion efforts, even at my school and through my grad work, the overlap between art and science is way more prominent than people think. And I I think that if we were able to spread that idea broadly, I think a lot of people would find that they have a lot of the scientists and the artists in themselves as well.
[00:52:42.17] – John Knych
That’s a great positive note to end on. You mentioned authors. So we often ask, who should we talk to next ? The authors you listed, like S. A. BarNess, Darcy. What was Darcy’s last name ? Hoots.
[00:53:00.21] – Ness Brown
Hoots.
[00:53:01.12] – John Knych
Would you recommend them as authors that should be getting more attention and be read more ? Who would you… Who would you recommend them as authors that.
[00:53:16.22] – Ness Brown
Definitely those two. Definitely, Caitlin Starling. I think, I mean, obviously, Delilah Dawson is not unknown by any means, but Delilah Dawson is awesome. If you like other types of horreur, Scott Leeds, also at Night Fire, is awesome. Really, really great people that I think you would have super stimulating convos with.
[00:53:41.01] – John Knych
Excellent. Well, thank you very much, Ness. It’s been a pleasure. Great, great meeting you. I’ll send you an email when the video has been uploaded, and I’ll share it with our group.
[00:53:53.06] – Ness Brown
Yeah, thank you so much for inviting me. Thank you so much for the time.
[00:53:57.06] – John Knych
And best of luck in your future projects, Je vous remercie. Je vous remercie. C’était un plaisir. Je vous remercie. C’était un plaisir. Je vous remercie. Je vous remercie. Merci beaucoup. Merci beaucoup. C’était un plaisir. Bon rendez-vous. Je vous envoie votre email quand le vidéo a été publiée et je le partagerai avec notre groupe. Merci beaucoup. Merci beaucoup d’inviter. Merci beaucoup pour votre temps. Bon courage et bon courage à vos projets, le horror, la fantaisie et l’astrophysique.
[00:54:03.18] – Ness Brown
Bye.
[00:54:04.23] – John Knych
Bye. Have a good afternoon.
[00:54:06.09] – Ness Brown
Bye. Thank you.