Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? by Johan Harstad

Also, newer crossover series like Lost had a great impact on me. I was never a big sci-fi buff when it came to literature, that was more of a movie thing, loving the Alien franchise, The Abyss, Solaris (not the Clooney remake, mind you, but the weird, scary Soviet original), Star Wars, etc. I had completely forgotten about them and I realized I hadn’t read any books in those genres since I was that age – and so I got online and ordered a bunch of them to reread. It was very, very different from my other books and it made me remember a lot of the books I read when I was 11, 12, 13, 14, like Stephen King, Michael Crichton, a lot of thrillers and horror novels. Needless to say, perhaps, they couldn’t hand the book out to third graders in the end … they gave it to 9th or 10th graders instead.įor me writing the book was great fun. So, after having thought about it for a while, I decided that I would try my best to scare the shit out of them with a novel that also paid tribute to books and films of the genre I grew up with. The idea was that the book would get normal distribution and all, but it would also be handed out to about 10,000 3rd graders in the city. I was free to do whatever I wanted, I could write a short book with mostly illustrations or about bullying and all that stuff.

But life takes some strange turns and one day in 2007 I was asked or commissioned, more or less, by one of the big Norwegian publishing houses to write a book in connection with my hometown Stavanger – The Cultural Capital of Europe 2008 (yeah, it sounds great. Johan: Hi there! If someone had told me ten years ago that i would someday write a YA sci-fi/horror novel, I would have thought that they probably didn’t know me very well since I never thought I’d ever write a genre faithful-novel at all, little less a YA one. Can you tell us a bit about what inspired the novel? Have you always been a fan of science fiction/horror? The Book Smugglers: Welcome, Johan, and thanks for taking the time to answer a few of our questions! 172 Hours on the Moon (originally published as DARLAH) is a crossover YA/SF novel, in which three teens are sent to the moon as part of NASA’s PR revitalization program gone terribly wrong. This month, that novel is being published and sold in the United States as 172 Hours on the Moon.Īs Thea is a junkie for all things scifi and horror related, we were thrilled to be a part of the US release of 172 Hours on the Moon, and to have the opportunity to interview the author! Please give a warm welcome to Johan, folks! A celebrated short story author, novelist, and playwright in Norway, Johan Harstad made his speculative fiction and YA debut with the 2008 publication of DARLAH. Today we are very excited to be a part of Johan Harstad’s 172 Hours on the Moon blog tour, celebrating the release of the novel.

Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? by Johan Harstad