Starstruck: A Cover Reveal

A radish, a fox, and a boulder walk into the world…

They’ve woven together a cozy life organized around welcoming other starstruck beings into the world—plants and animals ensouled by a falling star—but when the stars stop falling, all of that unravels. Prish gives in to Alsing’s longing to move on, and their new path leads them to two unlikely companions: an abandoned human child, and, impossibly, a brand-new starstruck who is neither a plant nor an animal, but rather a chunk of anthropomorphized granite with delusions of destiny.

Aimee Ogden is an American werewolf in the Netherlands. Her debut novella, Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters, was a Nebula Award finalist. Her work has appeared in publications such as Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Strange Horizons, and Clarkesworld, including her Eugie Foster Award finalist story “A Flower Cannot Love the Hand.”

Aimee joined editor E. Catherine Tobler for a few quick questions about her upcoming novella, Starstruck.

Talk to us the genesis of this novella—there you are going through life and then one day “oh hey, a radish and fox are in love and…” Does having a BS in zoology have anything to do with it?

Before I moved away from Madison, Wisconsin, I was a regular visitor at the farmers’ market there, which is where I had the opportunity to become obsessed with watermelon radishes (which is the variety that Prish is). On the outside, they’re a vague yellow-green color, but their insides are a beautiful bright pink. A radish with a rich inner life was the one thing that led to another—if this radish became sentient, how could that have happened? What would she do? Where would she live? Who would she love? We often had a fox visitor outside our house in Madison, too, and she seemed the natural choice to answer that last question—and a much more pleasant option than any of the turkeys we also saw periodically.

If you could be starstruck, would you be?

Oh, I don’t think so—it’s as much magic as I need getting to tell stories every day to myself and anyone else who’d like to listen. I don’t need any more than that, and anyway I think it would be harder to play Frisbee with my team if I had claws, or was made of solid rock.

In this novella, inanimate objects and animals are struck by stars and literally come to life. What do you think happens after death—in our world, or this fictional one?

In my life, I have quite a boringly usual atheist’s eye for the hereafter: I expect when I leave this world, I’ll be well and truly gone. (Which I find pretty upsetting while I’m around to think about, even if I don’t imagine I’ll be bothered afterward, any more than I didn’t like not having been born yet.) If I get to choose an alternative for a world I’ve made up entirely, though, I think those who aren’t ready to be done yet at the end of their lives become new stars, to perhaps get another go at it someday, even if they don’t remember the previous go-arounds.

In the story, young Wick attempts to steal a bicycle, then later confesses he doesn’t know how to ride one. When and how did you learn to ride a bike? (If you did…)

I learned to ride a bicycle as a child, mainly by going in circles on the dead end street by our house. I learned to ride a bicycle well in the first few months of riding around after I’d moved to the Netherlands, and now, if I never have to drive a car again, I’ll be thrilled!

My children, who are a bit younger than Wick, learned how to get around by bike with much greater speed and facility than I did; when I asked them what they would tell a peer who was learning to ride for the first time, they said, “Try not to fall over.” Sound advice.

What was the hardest bit of Starstruck to write and how did you get through it?

I’ll turn this around and say that the easiest part was the ending, which I had a clear image of almost as soon as I had the four characters in mind. Making sure everything else ran inevitably downhill toward that moment, hinting at the destination without, hopefully, giving away too big of a glimpse—all of that was the hard part!

Starstruck is a story of found family, and it’s also kind of a road trip tale. What are your favorite found family stories or road trip stories?

I almost hesitate to list any of these; calling them a “road trip” makes me feel like I’m taking away some of the impact and grand scope of these books! But I always want to include The Spear Cuts Through Water, by Simon Jimenez, on any list of books I love, however tangentially related, and Sarah Tolmie’s All the Horses of Iceland is another wonderful accounting of a long journey. And I’ll add Kate Heartfield’s The Châtelaine as another beloved example—a trip across medieval Flanders in an effort to get the main character’s daughter’s inheritance back from her revenant father, what’s not to love?

As far as found family goes, one of my favorite examples is Zen Cho’s The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water. Recently I’ve also been reading Naomi Novik’s Temeraire books for the first time, and I think those ought to count as a delightful example of both types of story. Sometimes a family can be several dragons, an increasingly less duty-minded British man, a spy, several inadvertently collected children, and a string of lieutenants with spectacularly bad luck.