Reality TV show on Mars inspired sci-fi exploration

Jewish Telegraph, June 2021

AUTHOR David Ebenbach was a fan of sci-fi and fantasy in his youth. But his writing took him in totally different directions.
Philadelphia-born David has written a number of short story and poetry anthologies, as well as non-fiction book The Artist’s Torah.
David’s latest novel How To Mars (Tachyon Publications) sees him finally turn his hand to sci-fi.
“I was inspired to write How To Mars because of a — possibly fraudulent — real-world project called Mars One that actually claimed they were going to send about a dozen people on a one-way trip to Mars, funded by a reality TV show, and with one rule: no sex on Mars.
“Despite how ridiculous this whole idea was, lots of people applied. Lots!
“I was drawn to this story not because it was science fiction, but because it was so bonkers. Who were these people offering to send people to Mars forever?
“Who would want to go? What would it be like to be cut off from everything and everyone you ever knew? My questions were really about people, not about Mars itself; Mars was just an interesting place to study people.
“But, as I realised after a while, writing about Mars meant that I was, by default, writing science fiction.”
The 49-year-old, who teaches creative writing at Georgetown University in Washington DC, revealed that in his teenage years, all he wrote was sci-fi and fantasy.
“For no particularly good reason, I got away from those genres for a long, long time and wrote pretty much exclusively literary fiction,” he explained.
“Of course, the lines separating genres are fuzzy and arbitrary, and along the way I definitely wrote magic realism and other kinds of fiction that tested the limits of everyday reality. And now I’m really getting into that.”
It was while at high school and college that David “discovered some of the great authors who folks call ‘literary’.
“In particular, John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Salman Rushdie took over my life.
“Since that time I’ve mostly devoted my reading to literary fiction, but some of my favourite authors regularly break boundaries between genres. I’m thinking of Kazuo Ishiguro, Aimee Bender, Michael Chabon, Emily Mitchell, Joseph Bates — and Salman Rushdie again.
“And lately I’ve been discovering fantastic writers like Mohsin Hamid, Charles Yu, Abbey Mei Otis, Colson Whitehead, and Ted Chiang. So the boundaries have really started to fall apart for me. And that’s a great thing.”
In 2005, David published the anthology Between Camelots. But he had already written “seven bad, thankfully unpublished novels”.
He added: “Some of them were ruined by being idea-driven rather than character-driven or story-driven, and others were ruined when I took what should have been a short story and blew it all out of proportion to make it novel length.
“I had such a hard time with novels that, after those seven failures, I decided that I just wasn’t cut out for them, and determined to stick with short stories and poems from then on.
“And then I started a short story called Miss Portland, and it kept getting longer — not because I was blowing it out of proportion but because it needed to be longer in order for the story to fully make sense and complete itself — and ultimately turned into Miss Portland, my first novel.
“From this experience I’ve learned a couple of things: as soon as you think you know what kind of writer you are, you’ll turn out to be wrong, and you have to follow the material wherever it wants to go, whether that means that you end up with a haiku, an eight-novel series or a stage play.”
Before publishing Miss Portland in 2017, David published two other short story anthologies — Into the Wilderness and The Guy We Didn’t Invite to the Orgy.
Of How To Mars, David said: “I was interested in the ludicrousness of reality TV, certainly, but also the role of sensationalism in the funding of science, the ridiculously grandiose ideas we sometimes have about resettling on Mars, and the surprising way that people try to escape their pasts, forgetting that it always comes with them.
“There’s so much ludicrousness in the world. And most of it has something to teach us about the tender and complicated human experience. I’m interested in that.”
Space travel does interest David — although he has a few caveats.
“If I could do it safely — and if I could come back to my family, unlike the Marsonauts in my book — I’d be very interested,” said David, who is married to Rabbi Rachel Gartner.
“What could be more amazing? But of course it’s enormously expensive — which is why Jeff Bezos gets to go and we don’t — and not entirely safe and it raises some questions, too.
“For example, as I recently explored in a piece for the Jewish Book Council’s Paper Brigade Daily blog, how would one, in space, engage in a time-bound and place-bound religion like Judaism? Anyway, life is already fascinating on Earth, so I’m pretty content here.”
David, who was raised in West Philadelphia, lived with his mother and sister after his parents divorced when he was eight.
He had planned to be a creative writing major at Oberlin College, but “was seduced” by psychology.
He then got a PhD in psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
His mother was not Jewish, but David explored his Jewish heritage while at graduate school and embraced it.
He converted to Judaism almost 25 years ago — “though to me it honestly felt more like a reversion”.
Two other family members in his generation went through this same process with Judaism.
David describes himself as religious, and says “it’s very hard to separate my creativity from my religion/spirituality.
“Being creative is the main way that I express awe and reverence for the world, and the big ideas and feelings that come up in Jewish religious experiences feed right back into my writing.
“The two forces are, for me, all about engaging deeply and earnestly with meaning, with the big questions.
“The Artist’s Torah, a guide to creativity rooted in Jewish sacred texts, was my attempt to hold these forces together explicitly.”
His path into writing started when he was six.
He lived near two youngsters who were talented cartoonists.
“They drew fantastic comic strips full of great adventures,” David recalled. “I didn’t have an easy time with visual art, but I wanted to try to keep up.
“So one day I decided to start by writing the story out in words to see if that would then somehow help me generate the pictures.
“And then I looked at what I had written and decided maybe I didn’t need the pictures after all. That’s when I became a writer.”
David — who also works at Georgetown’s Centre for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship — is working on a “difficult” novel at the moment.
“Difficult for me, I mean; if I can ever get it right, hopefully it won’t be tough for readers,” he explained.
“But the novel is about an alternate version of history in which the Jewish people, expelled from Israel, have to go to another dimension to find a safe home — and struggle to find it even there.
“I’m also looking forward to next summer, when my third poetry collection, What’s Left to Us by Evening, will be published by Orison Books.”
David and his wife, who is the director for Jewish Life at Georgetown, have one son, “a wonderful human being named Reuben. His name is the reason that my novels tend to have Reuben sandwiches in them”.
Does David see himself ever returning to short story anthologies?
“I’m open to anything,” he said. “It’s true that novels sell better, but I’m not planning to turn any good material away, whatever form it wants to take.”