How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit R.T. Ester's website.
I think it belongs to the same naming convention as titles like The Martian and The Bear where there's an ironic layer to it. It's a reference to the main character, but the story itself ends up complicating that connection, and the character you may have assumed would be a typical Martian or bear is revealed to be the outlier in some profound sense. If you're already sort of aware of this convention, I would say the title does a lot. It tells you the protagonist will not be your typical Ganymedan, but an outlier. Briefly, before googling it and seeing that the title already belonged to an excellent short story by the scifi author Derek Kunsken, I considered Ghosts of Ganymede. Parts of the story revolve around a dissident group with chapters that all use the word ghost in their names. One of them had a significant influence on the protagonist growing up and their anti-AI ethos comes back to haunt him at...[read on]
Writers Read: R.T. Ester.
The Page 69 Test: The Ganymedan.
Q&A with R.T. Ester.
--Marshal Zeringue
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