ALL LIT UP: How would you describe The Library Cosmic to someone picking it up for the first time?
BEN BERMAN GHAN: The best way I can think of to describe the stories in The Library Cosmic is that they’re myths. They are pieces of folklore, they are tales of ghosts, and demons, and giants, except unlike so many myths that reach into our past, these are myths of the future, or a future, at least. Let them carry you.
by Ben Berman Ghan
ALU: The collection brings up a lot of existential questions around collective consciousness, what remains when we die, what it means to be a person. The stories seem interested in what makes a being feel alive. What kinds of questions were you most drawn to when thinking about consciousness or personhood?
BEN: The Library Cosmic is, weirdly, my pandemic novel. Half the stories were originally drafted during the lockdowns, and the other half were drafted and completed, in some cases years later, in reflection of those times. So I was less interested in philosophy or deep criticism when writing these stories, and more interested in the idea of perseverance, of what it means to feel alive and lively in the face of things that are bigger and scarier than we are.
ALU: The love story between Elisha and Lawrence grounds much of the story “The Library Cosmic” which is galactic and flips back and forth in time. It made me emotional! How do you approach writing characters that feel human in speculative stories that traverse time and space?
BEN: There is no difference between writing characters in speculative fiction and realist fiction. But keeping those characters feeling three dimensional and emotional is important! In speculative fiction, particularly the kind I find myself drawn to writing, oftentimes the rules of the universe, of physics, of gravity, of time, might all be a little different and a little stranger, may appear inconsistent or harder to understand. I think in such narratives the consistency and emotional core of the characters is what keeps us rooted, what stops us from floating away to stranger shores where the story might not capture us the same way. Who cares if the universe is ending or planets are exploding, if it doesn’t affect a relationship we care about. Writing across time is funny. Writing across centuries isn’t really different than writing across years, or months. What matters is understanding how your characters have (or have not) changed, and staying true to that.
ALU: There’s this fantastic part in the first story, “Spectres of Bibliotheca” that reads “As human beings boarded the colossal ships to spread outward across other planets, so did their ghosts. Are they still out there? Could one find a diaspora of the dead in the universe if they look closely enough?” I read this as both literal and metaphorical—about memory, history, and what we carry. How did you arrive at this image of the diaspora of the dead? What did you want to explore with this idea?
BEN: Man, I got to say, I love a figure. Initially, he came to me purely as an image—a huge clay creature with little flowers growing out of him, but I came to love him in a way I very rarely love my human characters. There is something, to me, about a more-than-human figure that just lets me cut right through things as a writer, to create something pure. And just as he haunted me while writing all these stories, I wanted him to continue haunting the book after he had passed through it, a long and lingering presence, who will be back for us, one day.
ALU: If you had to pick one story in the collection you would expand into a novel, which one would it be and why?
BEN: That’s an interesting question! A short story is such a fundamentally different thing than a novel for me. The idea of cutting a novel into a short story would just mean losing necessary pieces, and the idea of turning a short story into a novel would mean allowing bloat to get in the way of the story. Every story should be exactly as short as it needs to be. There was a while where I thought the title story of this collection might have been a novel, but around the 20,000 word marker, I had that heavy and inevitable feeling in the tips of my fingers that I was writing very close to the end, and I’ll always be glad that I listened to that feeling. I am very proud of it sitting as a novella here with its companions, which all deepen and complement one another in a single vast continuity of story.
ALU: What do you find most exciting about writing speculative and sci-fi stories? What are some challenges you come up against?
BEN: When I talk to students about SFF, one of the things about genre that always comes up, is how external it can be, how physical it can be in its metaphors and its beauty. If I want to write a story about loneliness, I can spin a tale where the main character is literally the only person on the planet. If I want to write a story about change, characters can transform and mutate into wild new things. In genre we can make subtext into text, and we can make text weird. I think that’s worth something. The challenges are the same as writing any genre of literature—I have to make the words good.
ALU: The stories left me with the impression that we can’t know and maybe shouldn’t know the mysteries of the universe. Elisha says, “There are things in the dark even the oldest and wildest of mystics don’t want us to know.” I’m curious about your thoughts on this. Are there particular books or ideas that inspired you when thinking about this idea of the unknowable?
BEN: Increasingly, I find myself drawn to the weird in genre, the things in between science fiction and fantasy and horror. So I could draw on lots of inspirations. But also, partially, this is because I want the magic of literature to remain, well, magical to me. Don’t explain it. If you can, it won’t be magic anymore.
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Ben Berman Ghan is the author of The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits (Buckrider Books, 2024), as well as Behold the Dead (Anstruther Press, 2025), Visitation Seeds (845 Press, 2020) and What We See in the Smoke (Crowsnest Books, 2019). His prose, poetry, and criticism have previously been published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, The Ex-Puritan and Ancillary Review of Books, and have been reprinted in such anthologies as Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction and Year’s Best Science Fiction on Earth. His work has won the Foreword INDIES Silver Medal for Science Fiction, was longlisted for the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic and has been a semifinalist for the Small Spec Book Award for Science Fiction. He is a grateful recipient of the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity’s Science Fiction Writers’ Residence and is a PhD Candidate in English and creative writing at the University of Calgary, where he lives with his partner and two cats.
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