We’re so happy to have “Sensor Ghosts” as one of the science fiction stories for this month. Can you tell us about what inspired you to write this story?

I absolutely love Titan as setting. A few years ago, I wrote a story called “The Djinn of Titan’s Dunes” (Cossmass Infinities #2, May 1, 2020, for anyone interested) in which a pair of researchers stationed on the moon, well, one thinks he’s found life, and he wants to protect it from a grabby Earth. Turns out he and his colleague were infected with a prion disease that led them to see visions; his paranoia leads him to attack her, she flees the habitat, and I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s a SF/psychological horror story. I was sort of reflecting on that past story, and I wasn’t done with the setting, and this one, which is far less bleak, came out of those ruminations.

Do you believe in ghosts?

Most of the time, the answer to that question is “no.” But . . . my dad passed away in ’07. It was two a.m. or so when my mom, uncle, and I got back from the hospital to the house my dad and my mom had shared for thirty-some years, the house I’d grown up in. I went to the spare room, which was decorated with shelves full of my mom’s doodads, and I remember blankly staring at a set of dolls on one of the shelves. Grandma and Grandpa dolls, seated in their rocking chairs. Set at a forty-five-degree angle towards each other, one foot resting on each other’s toes. Cute, I thought, and did my best to go to sleep, which was not at all easy. Got up a couple times to sit with my mom while she cried. Got up properly when it was light out, looked at the shelf . . . and the dolls were no longer seated at a forty-five-degree angle. They were both facing forward, their feet no longer touching. The symbolism was overpowering.

There were no pets in the house. An earthquake might have dislodged the feet, but the chair angle would have stayed consistent. No one went into that room but me. I didn’t touch the damn dolls.

When I mentioned it to my mom, she went white and said that she and my dad had always suspected there was a “presence” in the house, which they’d never mentioned to me growing up. (I had enough trouble sleeping as a kid without that, so that’s probably for the best.)

I don’t generally believe in ghosts . . . but I have no rational explanation for that moment in my life.

This story is a wonderful mix of classic horror/suspense, SF, and romance. What drew you to mashing these genres together?

I don’t sit down with a deliberate plan to mash genres together. The story develops as I write it. I am a mix of the plotter and the pantser . . . I have a general idea of what’s going to happen, I might have a couple of bullet points, and then, very often, the characters tell me what they want to do as I write. I listen; they’re often smarter than I am!

Do you think it is possible that we will one day discover life on other planets/moons? What do you think our reaction to such a discovery would be?

I think it’s absolutely possible, and there will be a lot of sniping back and forth between the people who doubt everything on principle and those who accept rigorous scientific evidence.

I think that finding sapient life—life that can communicate with us in a meaningful way—would set off a firestorm of religious backlash. There will be questions of “do aliens have souls?” “Can they be ‘saved’?” and so on, and fundamentalists will have a very hard time with the fact that, for those aliens, there is no inherent meaning to our belief systems. Heh. I kind of want to live to see it, honestly.

Is there a project you are currently working on? And if not are there any themes, objects, or news that might be tickling your fingers?

I usually have several going at once. I need to get back to and finish my most recent novel trilogy. I’m hoping to get that accomplished soon; books one and two are done, but the ending for three is fighting me.