URBAN FANTASY AUTHOR A SCIENTIST HERSELF
PhD zoologist Kristi Charish talks science and plots
Author Kristi Charish has written an urban fantasy book called The Voodoo Killings, about a voodoo practitioner living in Seattle with the ghost of a deceased grunge rocker. She is also the author of three other such books, about an archeology grad student turned international antiquities thief. Charish, a scientist with a PhD in zoology from UBC, will do a teen book camp this summer at the Vancouver Public Library, where she was a writer-in-residence. It’s called “Trigger Warnings: how we use sci-fi and fantasy to tackle tough topics in fiction.” She will discuss addiction and harm reduction and how they relate to her novel.
Q Tell us about your book.
A Kincaid Strange isn’t your average voodoo practitioner — for starters she lives in Seattle with the ghost of infamous deceased ’90s grunge rocker Nathan Cade. And they’re broke. With raising zombies outlawed throughout the continental USA, Kincaid and Nate have to eke out a living running seances for university students with more money than sense and desperate for guitar lessons.
The book is the first in my Kincaid Strange series (Random House Canada), and it’s a mix of murder, voodoo, and a large heaping of ghosts, zombies, and the Seattle Underground City. I won’t lie: it’s urban fantasy, but with a modern, mystery twist that I’m hoping will appeal to anyone who’s ever wondered if maybe, just maybe, they really did catch glimpse of a ghost.
Q How does a researcher go from a career in science to writing urban fantasy?
A A lot of scientists are fans of genre fiction — they didn’t come up with the geek culture on the Big Bang theory out of thin air. There’s something about running experiments and science fiction fantasy that goes well together. I read voraciously throughout my university and research career as well. It just never occurred to me to really try my hand at writing until a few years ago (early 2010) — the same time I was writing up my PhD thesis and realizing that, although I loved the experimenting side of science, I wasn’t crazy about the idea of getting off the bench and becoming a professor, the academic career path I was headed down. A friend asked me what career I would love to have, the kind of job where it wouldn’t seem like work — however ridiculous the idea. I said it would be a writer.
While I wrote my thesis I spent an hour on creative ‘fun’ writing and an hour on my thesis. That turned into two hours for every one hour of thesis … then three … you get the picture. By the time I defended I had a novel done — Owl and the Japanese Circus.
Q How does your background in science inform your writing, both in content and style?
A I really take for granted just how much science ends up in my books, partly because I spent so long working in a science environment.
Plotting a novel isn’t that far off from setting up an experiment. In both cases you’re trying to figure out something that is unknown.
When I set out to write a novel, or even a scene, I start off much like I would in an experiment. What would character A do faced with XYZ? Instead of working with test tubes or fruit flies, my scene becomes the hypothesis, and whether it works and draws my readers in becomes the experiment.
Another way science gets into my books is through the material — I never would have come up with some of the zombie symptoms, like short-term memory loss or zombies responding better to light, touch, and loud noises, without having worked with neurobiologists.
Even when you are dealing with magic and fudging the details for fiction, you still can’t completely ignore how things might work. I think that’s why I try to find a logic to everything — whether it be voodoo or zombies or trying to figure out how a ghost works.