The Big Idea: A.Z. Rozkills

Space is unfathomably vast — and for some people, that’s a feature, not a bug. A.Z. Rozkills understands this, and that desire for space, in more than one sense of the term, is something that motivates the story behind Space Station X.

A.Z. ROZKILLS:

I’ll be honest, what motivated me to wade into the absolute madness of writing an entire novel was the desire for more lesbian science fiction, but that alone doesn’t produce great results. When I wrote Space Station X, as someone who does not have “literary” or “author” or “writing” anywhere in her list of previous accolades (outside of flunked academia), I needed to pull from some very deeply personal experiences and simply find a way to put those experiences on the page. Therefore, without even realizing it, the Big Idea within my entire story is “What makes people run away?”

I’m sure plenty of people are no stranger to wanderlust and the idea that picking up and disappearing is the solution to all your problems. It’s something that I, personally, allowed to drive me across country in my twenties. I guarantee that at one point, were it possible, I absolutely would have taken a rocketship to the edge of the universe in order to feel like I had left everything far enough behind. Part of that desire was depression, part of it was discovering what it really meant to have to share the world with other humans, and part of it was just me being young and stupid instead of actually facing my mistakes and learning from them.

My book, at its core, has two characters who are clearly in each other’s orbit. But they have also, bafflingly, chosen for their own reasons to isolate themselves in an incredibly hostile situation. I have had people ask me “what is it like on Space Station X? Why would I want to visit there?” and the answer is “oh, you do not want to visit there.” And that’s the point. It’s a desolate and lonely place, with little that changes from day to day, and a thin line between feeling like your own fortress of solitude and feeling oppressive and stifling from the realization that by the time anyone comes to rescue you, your screams will have long since stopped echoing through space.

So why does anyone want to willingly stay on that station any longer than they absolutely need to? Jax, the main character, thinks she has a pretty damn good reason, and she’s been there for over a decade. I had to really pull from my own insistence in marooning myself thousands of miles further and further from what I originally called home. I had to pull from that feeling of “I deserve this. It’s penance for my mistakes, and if I can make this work, so far from anything I recognize, then maybe I’m worth something after all.”

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