Our Own Ghosts Among Us
R.M. Olson is one of my favorite people to chat with about stories and storytelling. They have a gift for taking familiar tropes and spinning them new dimensions through deep character work, quick pacing, and deeply, thoroughly considered universes. And they make it seem effortless.
The Dark Between Stars series–set in the same universe as their The Dead and the Dark military sci fi series (maybe best described as Master and Commander meets Treasure Island... with murder lesbians)–is sci fi horror with a found family of disaster queers tracking down terrors of human and inhuman origins. It has a constant simmering background dread that never lets you forget that as much as you might like these people–as endearing as they may be– they are each carrying big, probably deadly secrets.
It is series sci fi that pokes at dark corners of human behavior while exploring the vastness of space and returns, again and again, to the central truth that we are all connected to and responsible for one another. We are the only ones who can save us.
I love it so much.
LZ: You have one of the most detailed and thorough planning processes that I have seen involving character analysis and scene by scene planning and beat sheets and extensive references. It’s brilliant; I’m in awe, and absolutely unable to use it. I don’t know where I’m going until i get there and that’s usually around draft 3. And yet—your books have a natural pace and momentum to them that feels organic and confident; they don’t feel over-constructed. It’s a carefully developed voice that carries across series. Do you think that’s helped by the planning process, or is it something you need to watch for in drafting and edits?
RMO: Honestly, the worry about losing character voice or forcing emotions was something that kept me from plotting for a long time. Usually, before I write the first word in the first book of a series, I’ve been living with these characters in my head for months or years, so character authenticity is really important to me. So it wasn’t until I finally realized that I write better when I have a plan that I developed the planning structure that I use now. But I think the reason it doesn’t ruin the authenticity of the characters like I once worried it would is that I tend to plan events more than emotions. So before I start a series, I think about what that series is about and what I’m trying to explore by writing it. Then I think about the characters and how I want each of them to have changed and developed by the end of the series, and then I use that to decide what I want each book in the series to be about. But once I kind of know what I want the series to be about and what I want the overarching character arcs to look like, I just try to plan the books around basically poking the characters with sticks until they emotionally develop in the way I want them to. So in my plotting process, I know where I want the characters to be emotionally by the end of the book, and the planning is about putting them in situations that I think will get them there.
It doesn’t always work out, so I often (always?) have to adjust on the fly. So, for example, maybe I have in my chapter notes, “X character is furious about what Y character did and goes storming out. When she’s outside trying to walk it off, she see footprints in the dirt.” And then I get to that point in the story and realize that what Y did wouldn’t make X react like that. So then I either change what happens (X and Y have a heart-to-heart instead and they find out about the intruders some other way) or I keep what happened but change why (change what happens to make X angry, or have her go outside for some fresh air or something). When character voice and authenticity conflicts with my outline, I will always abandon the outline rather than the authenticity. Having an outline just gives me a path to get back to when I don’t know where to go next and a destination to aim for when I’m thinking through story decisions (although I don’t always arrive at the destination—I’ve definitely had ending points change on me when my characters react to a foundational event in the book in a way I didn’t expect).
And also, I tend to put all my purple prose and over-emoting into my first draft. So I know exactly what every character is feeling at any given moment because they go on about it for pages and pages, and then I pare it down ruthlessly when I go through for first-round cleanup edits. I mean, I’m being a bit facetious—overwriting a scene where I’m not totally sure how a character would feel or react helps me feel it out and figure out what’s going on in their heads. But it is still overwriting, and I still cut it ruthlessly because it definitely does not need to see the light of day outside of my own computer screen.
LZ: I have been waiting YEARS to ask this, and I promise we can edit out spoilers, but: the GHOSTS. I cannot think of another concept in sff that I have been so simultaneously awed by and jealous of. I don't often wish I'd thought of something first, but I covet the ghosts in this universe. I would be thinking "how do I get a ghost in here" in every single scene. (Obviously I could not be trusted with the ghosts.) Can you tell us (everything) where they came from, how you developed the idea, where they fit into your extensive planning?
RMO: So when I was wrapping up my Singularity series, I was trying to figure out where to go next with my writing. I had three potential series in mind: the first one was a space-naval series that would be something like the Napoleonic Wars but in space about a pirate captain and an admiral playing out their blood-feud on an interstellar scale and a young naval captain who gets caught up as a pawn in their machinations. The second was a light, funny little adventure series about a group of hapless medics who were a sort of space-Doctors Without Borders, and they were going to be dropped into planets who needed help and be chased by things and have fun, heartwarming little adventures. The third was a really heavy series about trauma and loss, and it was going to be about a group of outcasts whose job was to go into haunted spaceships to clear out the ghosts.
Which meant, of course, that I had to come up with a reason as to why there would be ghosts on a spaceship, and that, combined with the fact that I wanted there to be FTL travel, gave me the idea of FTL travel causing cellular degradation that would lead to ghosts. I desperately wanted to do all three series and kept bouncing back and forth until one of my author friends who I was complaining to said, why don’t you just combine the three ideas and put them all in the same world? I needed something specific to tie them together, and while I was stewing on it, I came up with the idea of Our Lady of the Ghosts—a goddess that the outcasts and sailors and pirates prayed to and who would be the goddess who was over ghosts and everything about them. That was sort of my eureka moment, when everything sort of slotted itself into place and the ghosts (and Our Lady of the Ghosts) began to sort of embody the central themes of all three series.
They evolved as I started to flesh out the stories, but a lot of their evolution also came from a very personal place. In this world, ghosts need two things to be able to form: the first is, the person needs to have traveled faster than light. The second is, the person has to have suffered some horrific trauma—like, something that would cause PTSD. I was a few years out of a divorce from an abusive marriage and it was starting to sink in how much that had taken from me, and how that had played out for many of my friends—how the abusers’ bad behaviour tends to have consequences that are felt by their kids and their ex partners, but not them. How I had struggled so hard to keep my kids safe and happy and with a roof over their heads and how so many people looked at me with suspicion and the automatic assumption that I must have done something wrong as a divorced single mom, especially in my former religious community. And my situation was far from the worst I’d seen over the years with my friends.
I was thinking about how abusers can so often get away having people believe that they’re the good guys and their ex partners are crazy or unfit, and how often people who are being abused (whether that’s domestic abuse or societal abuse like racism, homophobia, sexism, etc.) end up having mental health issues, substance abuse issues, or physical health issues brought on by the very abuser who is now using that to paint them as unfit or crazy, and how general society, religious communities, and the legal system all seem to so happily and easily believe them.
I very deliberately wanted the ghosts to portray both the crushing unfairness of the societal consequences of abuse falling on the person who was abused rather than on the abuser, and also a way (albeit a desperate one) for the people who were victimized and made powerless by society to take back a little power and make the people who hurt them afraid. Because these ghosts are scary, and no matter how powerful or wealthy or protected you are, you can’t escape them if you get too close. So in my stories, you’ll often see the powerless segments of society use ghosts (sometimes their own) as a way to fight back—Gracie from The Devil and the Dark is an obvious example, but also it’s not uncommon for pirates who’ve been attacked by a naval ship and know they can’t win to essentially fall on their swords hoping that they’ll turn ghost and at the very least, be able to take revenge on the naval sailors as a ghost.
That’s why, in this world, Our Lady of the Ghosts is so beloved by pirates and the underclass—she’s not a god of making everything turn out alright. She’s the god of making sure that the people who hurt you will feel every drop of your suffering and then some. She’s the goddess of both vengeance and justice. And sure, it’s nice to talk about forgiveness and grace, but so often how that plays out is in allowing powerful people to skate by with an apology while the injured person has to live with the fallout for the rest of their lives. Our Lady of the Ghosts is the opposite. And sometimes in a world that feels so desperately unfair and where you’re rendered so utterly powerless, the last hope that you can cling to is that at least the people who put you there will one day feel the pain they’re so blithely inflicting on everyone else for their own convenience and pleasure.
So ghosts are both the consequences of a society that doesn’t value lives of people who it considers disposable, and also the punishment for it. But, like most societies, the consequences are felt disproportionately by the underprivileged. In this world, that plays out because first, it’s usually the lower class who end up getting jobs on the merchant ships or signing up with the navy as a sailor (not an officer), but also because the upper-class Level, which is a place where many of its upper class do go into the navy as officers and therefore have the chance of turning ghost, vent the ghosts of their own who die in the hospitals down to the Stacks, the lower-class settlement below the Level. The Stacks can’t survive without oxygen vented down from the Level, and so the people in power in the Level consider it a fair exchange—they get rid of their ghosts in exchange for giving oxygen to the Stacks. And, of course, just like in real life, the fact that there are people forced to live in a settlement that can’t produce its own oxygen is the Level’s fault (it began as a temporary settlement for the labourers who actually constructed the Level) doesn’t come into the consideration at all.
And then there’s the part where the ghosts are mostly preventable: just like PTSD, if a person has counseling and therapy and care post-trauma, or if the experiences that cause trauma are cut down, people can either heal from PTSD or not get it in the first place. But the Level’s dirty secret is, if there are people who have trauma that will allow employers to discriminate against them (because who wants to take the chance that someone working for them will go ghost if they die and kill everyone around them?), it means bodies signing on to the navy (which doesn’t discriminate because everyone in the navy might turn ghost, so they take precautions), and it means a cheap and easily exploited work force. So rather than try to solve the problem of ghosts, it utilizes it as an economic benefit without any consideration of the human cost, both of the people who are traumatized and the people who are killed by the ghosts.
And also, just like not every person who suffers trauma gets PTSD, not every person who fits into those categories will become a ghost. And I wanted that uncertainty in there because first, it makes it more scary when you don’t know what’s going to happen, but second, I wanted the realism of the fact that trauma and abuse affects people differently (some will turn ghost and others won’t) but regardless, people will often treat you differently after trauma just because they don’t know if you’ll “go crazy” or they fear your anger or lashing out, or else tell you that if you don’t do that, the abuse must not have been all that bad, so then you’re suspect in a different way. So you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
And similarly, in this world, if you’ve traveled faster than light or suffered trauma, people in this world will always look at you with fear and suspicion. So I guess the TL;DR version is, ghosts are essentially my way of exploring exploitation, trauma, the methods people in power use to keep people oppressed, and the ways powerless people find to fight back. And also because I thought the idea of ghosts in space would be cool af.
As far as where they fit in my planning, I love ghosts because they make every death in the story have much more weight. I hate action novels where people just shoot random bystanders and bad guys and people dying is just a flippant, easily ignored thing as long as the good guys are ok. And in some ways, that’s what people reading space opera and military sci-fi expect. I love having something that forces both me and my readers to think about every death and make every one important, because one ghost can take down an entire ship. They’re also a great way to throw in a wildcard—you can’t predict what a ghost will do or who they will kill, and they are a way to even out the odds so that even someone with disproportionately less power still has a chance to win. So they are a great way to add a tension and uncertainty into the story, give the powerless people in the story a chance to fight back, and to keep things from getting stale or boring.
LZ: The ghosts are a quiet background fear in the first few books of the horror series, which is a fascinating choice considering how scary they are. But readers who’ve read the military/pirates series know what they mean, so the fear of them is there anyway. And we know from the start that the crew is probably all traumatized and so a risk—but they don’t necessarily know that about each other. And for a series where the character growth depends on them learning to trust and depend on one another whatever happens…that’s a huge source of tension and conflict to mine. It’s just so good. And yet—the cast at the center of the horror series are so relatable and lovable and their books are full of lighter moments—some comic relief but much more genuine feeling. And I feel like this is also part of the commentary on trauma and oppression and struggle?
RMO: I mean, it absolutely is. The thing about living with trauma is that you learn how to navigate the messy, scary, ugly parts of life in a way you don’t necessarily have to when you’re able to avoid the stigma of trauma and abuse. People on the Level who are the most terrified of ghosts are the people who never have and likely never will have to face them. People who have grown up in the Stacks or the resource planets or worked on ships are afraid of ghosts, yes, but also have learned to navigate that fear and to form friendships and relationships despite it. Who I am now is someone who I’d have been terrified of as a teenager who was raised in a religion that taught us to be afraid of anything and anyone that didn’t conform. All of my friends and I have suffered trauma to one degree or another and most of us face mental health issues, physical health issues, and/or other consequences of trauma and abuse.
And those things can be scary—mental health issues can be scary, physical health issues can be scary, addiction and desperation and poverty and oppression can be scary. But when you’ve dealt with or are dealing with some of those issues yourself and so are people you love, you have to learn how to navigate the scary parts and love people (and yourself) anyway in all their messy, imperfect beauty. You have to learn to find the humour and the fun and the joy in the middle of the scary, hard things, because you don’t have the option of waiting until everything is good and easy and perfect. And you have to learn to balance the tension of things that are genuinely hard and scary with the fact that you can’t avoid risk without giving up on love and friendship and closeness. And I think that sort of get-your-hands-dirty love and understanding and forgiveness and acceptance builds relationships that are so much stronger and so much more real than relationships built on fear and purity tests and everyone hiding all the scary, imperfect things about themselves can ever be.