Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.

Sabitha: Comedy and science fiction—two great tastes that taste great together. Today, they come with a side of plumbing! Christopher George Quick is here to tell us about his space adventure novel, Citrus Bravo. Christopher, take us away!

Christopher: Citrus Bravo follows the misadventures of Arthur Bartlebee, a humble plumber aboard an aging space station named Citrus Bravo. Although Arthur would love more than anything to live out his simple days managing the pipes and drains of the station, he is quickly ripped away by a whirlwind of absurd events that place him smack dab in the center of an otherworldly conspiracy. Flanked by odd aliens and carefree cyborgs, Arthur is bewildered to find humanity’s destiny lies in his less-than-capable hands.

Sabitha: What inspired you to write this book?

Christopher: I was inspired to write this work because of a dream I had where the name “Citrus Bravo” was the name of a Martian base. I don’t remember any of the content of the dream, but the name basically haunted me until I decided to do something with it. The making of the main character into a plumber is because I’m a plumber and I always thought that Sci-Fi missed out on talking about the tales of the mundane. Everyone in Sci-Fi is some uber soldier or explorer extraordinaire, occasionally you get the unlikely hero trope, but they don’t ever seem to be regular working class stiffs, like our boy Arthur.

Sabitha: I love that—there’s a special place in my heart for working class science fiction stories. With such a fun set of characters, imagine you met them. What would you say?

Christopher: If I met one of my characters, I would say, “Hi, how are you?”

Sabitha: And the response? What would they say?

Christopher: If they ever ran into me they would say, “You son of a B!&#$ you’re going to pay for what you put me through!” as they throttled my neck.

Sabitha: How much research did you need to do for your book?

Christopher: Since I work in plumbing, there wasn’t much research needed for that aspect of the book, but for one of the scenes I did have to learn a lot about methane-eating bacteria to try and create a presentation for Arthur to give the rest of his crew-mates about space-faring waste management. It was riveting.

Sabitha: Waste management is criminally underrated. If your next book isn’t about space-faring methane-eating bacteria, what is it going to be about?

Christopher: Citrus Bravo is a pretty brief work, definitely in the novella range, so I think I would like to write a stand-alone sequel to it. Something with new characters but in the same literary universe. Maybe I’ll call it Cherry Alpha.

Sabitha: Thanks for sharing your story and your process. We’re looking forward to reading! Where can the Night Beats community find you and your book?

Christopher: You can order it here. You can see the other disappointing swill I’ve written on my Goodreads author page, and I have a fledgling Mastodon account that I will probably abandon later.