We chat with author Jack Campbell about his pulse-pounding science fiction adventure In Our Stars, which follows Lieutenant Selene Genji who has one last chance to save the Earth from destruction.
Hi, Jack! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
I’m a retired US Navy officer who was a ship driver and also worked intelligence and other things. I write SF, Science Fantasy, Fantasy, Alternate History, History, Humor, and any other things that my Muse throws at me. Right now I have over forty books print which have been published in fifteen languages worldwide. Because my father was also in the Navy, I grew up all over the place, including a great couple of years on Midway Island. My wife and our three kids and I live in Maryland.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
When I was a kid. I read everything I could in elementary school, and made attempts at writing by high school. Those first attempts were pretty bad. Very bad, really. Hopefully all copies have been destroyed. I made tries at writing again sporadically over the next twenty years, but work kept me very busy while also teaching me a lot about many different things, places, and peoples, as well as about writing. The whole time I was reading a great deal of history and fiction in just about every genre. When I retired from the Navy I decided to really give writing a serious try. So, I discovered my love for it all really early, and have yearned to write my own stories pretty much all of my life, even though I wasn’t published until the 1990s.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: I don’t know the title. It was about a kitten who wanted to be different from the other kittens, and bad things happened to him because he wanted to be different, and at the end the kitten resolved to be like all the other kittens. I really hated that book. That’s why I remember it.
- The one that made you want to become an author: Probably The Master Mind of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I was in fifth grade, and had read a whole lot of history and a lot of mythology, when I stumbled across that book. What a revelation! Someone could make up their own history and mythology and write stories about it! That’s what set me on the path, I think.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: Just ONE? There are dozens. But, maybe, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain. It was the last book he published, after years of research, and one he called a labor of love. This isn’t the tired, bitter near the end of his life Mark Twain that we’ve been told about. This is a Mark Twain writing as only he could about someone he immensely admired. At a time when the truth of Joan of Arc has been obscured by bad movies, it shows what history really tells us about her. Which is, frankly, inspiring. As is seeing how Twain could still find things to believe in toward the end of his life.
Your latest novel, In Our Stars, is out May 21st! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Can Genji change Earth’s fate?
What can readers expect?
Character-driven adventure, very high stakes (the fate of the Earth itself), a lot of action, and two people who have been battered by fate but refuse to give up or lose their belief that some things are worth fighting for. In Japan, In Our Stars would be called an Isekai, because Selene Genji finds herself in a world unlike her own and must fight to survive and learn the rules of the strange to her reality forty years in the past. In a way, Karl Owen also finds himself in a different world when he discovers that beneath the official reality of his time there are hidden forces at play which will someday help create the awful future that Genji is seeking to change.
Where did the inspiration for In Our Stars come from?
Partly from a long interest in good stories about time travel, notably character-driven ones such as The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Your Name. Partly from thinking about an old novel by Andre Norton (Secret of the Lost Race), and how she might write it today, and how I would write about a theme such as that. Partly from what is going on in the world around us and my experiences in life. And partly (like all stories) from who knows where.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I really liked writing about and discovering who Selene Genji was. She surprised me with her admiration for Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, using them as a guide in a world that never wanted her to exist. And she surprised me with her inner strength, never giving up, and somehow dealing with the real possibility that her actions in the past might cause her to cease to have ever existed.
I enjoyed showing Kayl’s growing understanding of just who Genji really is, what she had experienced, and why she reacted to him the ways she did.
Writing about the alien species, the Tramontine, was fun, presenting how they think, and why humans had trouble understanding them.
One of my favorite scenes to write takes place early on, when Kayl is first speaking to Selene. He, in a time when peace is common, thinks he’s getting a statement from the victim of an accident. She, not yet realizing she is now forty years in the past and having experienced the multiple conflicts on Earth and in space which would be named the Universal War, thinks she’s being interrogated by an enemy. In that first meeting, they can’t understand each other because they’re the products of different times. They both think the other is either crazy or trying to manipulate them somehow.
What’s next for you?
My next book will be Destiny’s Way, the sequel to In Our Stars. It’s a two-book series, so Destiny’s Way will bring the story to a conclusion.
Lastly, are there any book releases that you’re looking forward to picking up this year?
Ribbon dance by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, the latest book in their Liaden universe.
Jack Campell said that Mark Twain’s “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc” tells the true history, contrasting it against “bad movies”. In relative terms that’s certainly true since the movies are almost entirely fabricated nonsense; but Twain’s novel also had its share of errors such as portraying her as the commander-in-chief which she basically denied at her trial and the eyewitness accounts make it clear that there was always a nobleman in direct command. Joan of Arc was a religious visionary who gave advice to the commanders when they were willing to listen, but they made the decisions except in a few cases where she bypassed them, such as at the siege of Troyes.