John Kessel is a renowned science fiction author and was a creative writing professor at NC State. His most recent work, “The Moon and the Other,” released this past spring.

Q: How long have you been writing novels and how many novels have you written?

The first novel came out in 1985, so I guess that’s a long time — 30 years or more. Let’s see. I’ve written one, two, three … four novels. Four novels that have been published and another one that’s finished and will be coming out next year.

Q: What first drew you to science fiction?

Gosh, I started reading it when I was just a kid and it was always my pleasure reading as a kid. I started off reading comic books when I was very young and then I graduated to science fiction magazines and stories. This would have been in the 1960s. I’ve really been involved with science fiction since I was very young. It’s one of those things that a lot of kids do when they’re young and they sort of outgrow, but I stuck with it.

Q: What are some authors and stories that have greatly influenced you and your writing?

A few writers at one point or another were really important to me and it changes over time. When I was young, I really admired writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. As I got older and studied literature, I turned to writers like Ursula Le Guin and Philip K. Dick, who wrote “The Man in the High Castle.” And then, some writers probably not as well-known like Gene Wolfe and Thomas Disch. And then there’s lots of writers from my own generation that I really admire; people like Karen Joy Fowler, James Patrick Kelly and Geoff Ryman. There’s quite a few. I learn a lot from other writers.

Q: What are some of the challenges the genre presents?

The setting is often very different than our own world. Either it’s in the future or in some other altered circumstance. You have to get that information across to the reader without slowing down the story. That’s kind of tricky. The book we are talking about, “The Moon and the Others,” is set on the moon in the 22nd century, so the way people live there, in these underground cities, where you have to worry about air and food and all sorts of other things … there’s a lot of situations and background details I had to work into the story without having too many long explanations. One of the tricks of science fiction is to work that stuff in and not leave the reader confused or unable to figure out what the circumstances are.

One of the other frustrations of science fiction is that a lot of people, who might otherwise really enjoy the story that you are telling, because it’s science fiction, feel that “Oh no, I don’t really understand that stuff” or “I don’t know any science so I can’t read science fiction.” Most science fiction doesn’t demand you to know any science really, it’s just the matter of becoming comfortable with the ways such stories are told.

It does frustrate me sometimes. I write what’s called literary science fiction, and that means I really like to have intelligent readers read my books  — people who are not necessarily science fiction fans. A lot of times, they will never pick it up or see it because they think “Oh no, I don’t read that stuff.”

In my books, I try to combine both the stories, characters and social commentary with some science fiction element, but I’m more interested with the characters and the commentary than I am with the science per se. I’m interested in that, but it is not why I’m writing the story.

Q: What is “The Moon and the Other” about and what do you hope people will take away from the story?

My basic elevator pitch is “A Tale of Two Cities” on the Moon. It’s set 130 years from now and there’s maybe 20 different colonies on the moon. One of them, where much of the action takes place, is a matriarchal colony, which is politically dominated by women, but men have certain privileges and rights, what they call social and sexual privilege, at the cost of giving up the right to vote.

The other colonies on the Moon are more male-dominated and they distrust this place. It’s a conflict between this matriarchal society and these other places, primarily another city-state called Persepolis, which is founded by Iranian immigrants. There’s a social conflict here between a patriarchal and a matriarchal culture, and also other political issues. What I wanted to do is set this society as a utopia or a dystopia. I wanted this society to be sort of like our own, which has its own positive aspects and negative aspects.

Q: How long, from conception to publish, did it take for your new book, “The Moon and the Other,” to be finished?

This is probably the longest brewing novel I’ve written. I first started thinking about this in the mid-90s. I guess you’d have to say that I wrote the majority of it over the last seven years, so it was a long time coming for me to get this where I wanted it to be. It’s a fairly long book; it’s complicated with a bunch of plotlines and different characters. I had to think a lot about making it realistic and making the social situations intriguing.

Q: You’ve taught at NC State for over 30 years. What is one writing lesson you never stop teaching?

There’s a lot of things I seem to come back to over and over again. One is that your characters have to have reasons for the things they do; they have to have motivations that are comprehensible and it makes sense for them to behave the way you want them to behave in the story. Think about the story from the reader’s point of view. What is it that — when they stop reading page one — makes them want to read page two? What is it on page two that makes them want to read page three?