By Passages Editor, Monica Stark
Most science-fiction novels don’t begin at a fish plant on Digby Neck, but Pantheon did.
Francis McCullough and Christopher Prime met while working cutting fish at the plant in Little River. They became friends, discovered they were both avid readers and science-fiction fans, and eventually decided they might as well try writing a book of their own. It may not be the most conventional origin story for a novel, but literature has a long history of emerging from workplaces far removed from literary circles. Writers have come from mines, mills, factories, farms and workshops, carrying ideas from their working lives onto the page. In this case, the workplace has remained part of the creative process. Francis and Christopher still work together, which gives them plenty of opportunity to turn over ideas, pick apart plots and ask the endless series of “what if?” questions from which their stories seem to grow.
The result of all that discussion is Pantheon, a science-fiction mystery set 100 years in the future on Mars, involving a weary police chief, someone else’s memories of a murder and a corporation that has figured out how to sell people something they have wanted for as long as there have been people: a way not to die. The setting may be a long way from Little River, but both authors remain firmly rooted here. “No matter where else we might have gone, Digby Neck and the Islands have always been home,” they said.
Francis has lived in places from Weymouth to British Columbia before returning to Little River, where he now lives with his wife, Shannon, and their two sons. He enjoys ATVing and is an avid hunter. Don’t be surprised, they warn, if you hear him say, “I can’t wait until hunting season,” the day after hunting season ends. Christopher lives in Freeport with his wife, Alicia, and their daughter, and when he isn’t at the fish plant or lost in a writing project, he can often be found helping Alicia with her chickens.
Although Pantheon is their first novel, writing itself isn’t entirely new territory. Christopher has been writing stories for about as long as he has been capable of writing them. Most have been horror, and while he has shared fiction on online forums, this is his first attempt at a full-length novel. He did, however, self-publish a nonfiction book in 2022. Francis’s writing career had been on a somewhat longer hiatus. He wrote short stories in elementary school, and at least one of those early efforts can be found on the shelves of the Sandy Cove school library.
It was Christopher’s experience with self-publishing that got the two talking about trying a novel together. They already read science fiction; they already spent plenty of time talking about stories and ideas. Why not see if they could create one themselves?
“We thought it would be a fun and rewarding experience to write a sci-fi novel of our own,” they said, “something that even if no one reads it we’d still be able to say we contributed to a genre we both enjoy.”
They didn’t start with Pantheon. Their first attempt made it several months into development before they had to admit that they couldn’t get the plot to work the way they wanted. Rather than keep forcing a story that wasn’t coming together, they abandoned it and went looking for another idea.
Fortunately, ideas don’t seem to be in particularly short supply. Francis and Christopher keep a Story Ideas document that is now approaching 70 entries, many of them beginning with a simple “What if?” Some will presumably never get beyond that stage. Others have enough of a spark to keep nagging at them until they begin pulling at the threads to see whether there might be a story attached.
The idea that eventually became Pantheon started with one of those questions: What if a detective investigating a body found on Mars discovered it had come from Earth? How did it get there?
If that doesn’t sound much like the description of Pantheon above, there is a reason. They changed their minds. In fact, the plot changed completely halfway through the first draft, and very little of the original premise remains beyond the murder-mystery element. For Francis and Christopher, that doesn’t seem to represent a failure of planning so much as part of figuring out what story they were actually trying to tell.
That willingness to pull an idea apart and rebuild it is central to the way the two work together. Christopher is the one who puts the words on the page, but there is considerably more to making a novel than writing its sentences. Plotting, world building, character creation and scene mapping are collaborative, as are the editing and revisions that follow. One of them might suggest a character, a scene or a plot point and run it by the other. They discuss what works, what doesn’t and what might work better. Sometimes one idea wins out; sometimes two ideas get combined; sometimes the discussion leads to something neither of them had considered when they started.
Perhaps surprisingly, given the opportunities this arrangement provides for creative disagreement, they say the partnership itself hasn’t been particularly difficult. “This might sound trite, but there’s nothing about our writing partnership itself that we’d call a challenge,” they said. Their interests overlap, they have yet to encounter any major creative differences, and the fact that they work together gives them plenty of time to talk. Most importantly, they agree on the final arbiter of any disagreement: whatever works best for the story.
The challenges have instead come from learning how to make the thing. Abandoning their first story was one. Rebuilding Pantheon halfway through was another. Then there were all the jobs that came after writing it. Independent publishing means that finishing the manuscript isn’t the finish line. There is editing and revision, formatting and production, marketing and a host of business decisions that have very little to do with imagining life on Mars. Those parts of the process have presented “one hurdle after another,” they said, but they have also discovered an advantage to working as a pair: when something goes wrong, there are two people trying to solve it.
After all that rebuilding, Pantheon eventually became the story of Mark Church, a tired police chief on Mars who discovers a safe in his living room. What the safe contains is considerably stranger than money or valuables: it gives him someone else’s memories of a murder. His investigation leads him toward Pantheon, a powerful corporation that has unveiled a virtual afterlife service and is promising its customers a form of immortality. As Church gets closer to the truth, he begins to uncover what the company has done to create that afterlife, and what must be done to stop it.
There are plenty of recognizable science-fiction elements in the story: Mars, future technology, virtual existence and questions about the relationship between humans and machines. Underneath them, though, is a much older and more familiar subject. At its heart, Francis and Christopher say, Pantheon is about loss.
Church’s wife is alive, but has been incapacitated since an assault several years earlier. He has lost the person she was without actually losing her. Pantheon, meanwhile, has built its business around humanity’s desire to avoid loss altogether. If death is the one separation no amount of money, technology or determination has ever allowed us to escape, what happens when a company claims it has finally found a way around it?
That opens the door to other questions about technology, memory, hubris and selflessness, but the authors keep returning to the same central problem: “How do we respond to losing those things we wish we could hold onto forever? Our loved ones, our memories, our own lives. What do we do when those things get taken away?”
It is a very human question for a story set on another planet, and perhaps one reason they believe Pantheon can find an audience beyond people who normally browse the science-fiction shelves. The novel takes place a century in the future and depends on technologies that don’t exist today, but the problems underneath them are already ours. We already store pieces of our lives digitally. We already leave behind photographs, messages, voices and videos. We already use technology to preserve things that memory eventually loses. Science fiction simply gives writers permission to take those familiar impulses a little further and ask what happens next.
Francis and Christopher are careful, however, not to make the ideas more important than the story. “Above all, we’ve tried to tell a good story,” they said. They expect science-fiction readers to be the natural audience for Pantheon, but hope that readers who don’t normally choose the genre will find enough in its mystery, characters and themes to come along for the trip to Mars.
They are already planning to return there. Pantheon is intended as the first book in a series called Church & Sable, named for its two main characters, Mark Church and Lilly Sable. Book Two, however, won’t be their next project. Instead, they have started work on a horror story, which they plan to begin teasing through their Allen C. Lawrence Facebook and Instagram pages after Pantheon has been out for a while. Given Christopher’s long-standing interest in horror, perhaps the change of direction isn’t as surprising as it first appears. It also suggests that the experiment Francis proposed after Christopher published his first book has become something more than an exercise in seeing whether they could do it once.
Before any of that, of course, they have to get Pantheon into readers’ hands. Several hoped-for release dates have already come and gone as the publishing process has taken longer than expected. At the time of writing, they are still aiming for a release before the end of summer, with updates being posted through the Allen C. Lawrence author page on Facebook.
Then comes the part that plotting, world building, editing and formatting can’t really prepare them for: strangers reading it.
“It’s exciting to think that something we created will be out there for other people to read and hopefully enjoy,” they said. “And, honestly, that same thing is also terrifying.”
Both describe themselves as introverts who value quiet and private lives, so putting their work in front of the public brings a kind of vulnerability neither is particularly accustomed to. For months, Pantheon has been something they could discuss, dismantle, change and rebuild between themselves. Publishing means eventually deciding it is finished and allowing other people to decide what they think of it.
“Having a creative work out there in the world is a vulnerability that we just have to push through if this is something we’re going to do.”
They seem to have answered that question already. There is another book underway, a series planned and nearly 70 ideas sitting in a document waiting their turn. Somewhere among them may be another trip to Mars, a horror story, or something neither of them yet knows quite what to do with. There are still plenty of “what ifs?” left to explore.