Caye Marsh is joining us today to talk about her novel, Station in the Sky. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Donna, once Peace-in-the-Sky, awakens aboard Station-in-the-Sky and rejoins a society that had been her home for thousands of years before knowing Anissa. But she soon discovers her fellow stationers have lost sight of their original mandate to protect Earth. Instead, their new plans will threaten all of Earth’s inhabitants. As her memories return, she becomes suspicious her head injury was actually an attack by another stationer. Framed as being faulty, Donna must navigate the eccentricities of the other stationers without being caught, and covertly assemble proof of their plans before they realize she will do anything to keep Earth safe from their meddling.
What’s Caye’s favorite bit?
When I embarked on a major re-write of Station In The Sky, I wasn’t waiting for some lightning bolt of inspiration to bring the story together. I was focused on the mystery, working carefully on atmosphere, pacing, and characterization.
But as I struggled to articulate the motivations of some antagonists, I had a real and sudden moment of clarity.
Since the first draft of the story, I had moved to the beautiful island country of New Zealand. I had been traveling to wildlife preserves to see rare native birds like the takahē, a unique reptile called a tuatara, and native plants like the rimu tree. New Zealand’s unique ecosystem supports strange and wild birds and insects found nowhere else, many of which are now extinct. How sad to never see the giant moa, or hear the calls of a pair of huia birds. Island ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to invasive species. Flightless birds, for instance, simply can’t escape mammals like rats and weasels, which were introduced here from other places.
Seeing the heroic conservation efforts in New Zealand is inspirational. There are people fighting so hard to save what is left, and people who are dedicated to restoring native forests. But everywhere I look, I see invasive plants. People fill their gardens with them and farmers grow acres and acres of them. Invaders like these send down their roots, and cast their seeds on the wind, and turn the soil acidic so native plants cannot grow. They crowd out native plants which feed native birds, and so starve local food webs. They line every roadside and insinuate themselves into forests and fields and parks.
To uproot and eradicate them all feels like an impossible task. Once they gain a foothold, it’s hard to see how they could ever be eliminated. And as they march onward, they consume and destroy the native forest so necessary to the survival of all the peculiar and remarkable creatures that evolved here. Evolution is a gradual process which creates animals and plants in balance with one another in a thriving ecosystem. Human mass introduction of new species is like a bomb thrown into the middle of it all.
The main character of Station In The Sky is worried for Earth. She is protective of what is living there. My experiences in my new home country helped me to realize why. I was surprised, and then again not surprised at all, to find that my story had been about ecosystem destruction all along. That was the missing gear I needed to set the whole plot in motion.
Yes, she must solve a mystery, the mystery of her own attempted murder. What starts out as an unsettling worry slowly becomes a fight for her own life. But looming over her, overshadowing her struggle, is the threat of destructive Station plots breaking containment and spreading to Earth. She realizes what havoc an ill-advised mass introduction of new altered species could wreak on the place she loves.
I was able to gift my character the chance to prevent an invasion. A chance to protect an ecosystem instead of trying desperately to restore it after the damage has begun. And the fact that she might very well succeed is definitely my favorite bit.
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BIO:
Caye Marsh is a former biologist writing Sci-Fi and Fantasy. She cherishes the unbroken quiet of wild places and the true dark of night, so please keep it down and remember to extinguish all outdoor lights. Find her at https://cayemarsh.com/.
