Ben Berman Ghan - The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits - SSBA Sci-Fi Finalist

Today's feature is the second last one for the SSBA Finalists of 2025! I bought this book, forgetting it was an SSBA Finalist book based on the awesome title, The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits, and I cannot wait to dive in!

As usual, more information on the SSBA can be found here, and links to all of my other SSBA posts can be found here. Side note, nominations are open for the 2026 awards - so send them in!

On to the author spotlight!  

Ben Berman Ghan - Author Biography

Ben Berman Ghan is the author of The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits (Buckrider Books, 2024), as well as Behold the Dead (Anstruther Press, 2025), Visitation Seeds (845 Press, 2020) and What We See in the Smoke (Crowsnest Books, 2019). His prose, poetry and criticism have previously been published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, The Ex-Puritan and Ancillary Review of Books, and have been reprinted in such anthologies as Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction and Year’s Best Science Fiction on Earth. His work has won the Foreword INDIES Silver Medal for Science Fiction, was longlisted for the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic and has been a semifinalist for the Small Spec Book Award for Science Fiction. He is a grateful recipient of the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity’s Science Fiction Writers’ Residence and is a PhD candidate in English and creative writing at the University of Calgary, where he lives with his partner and two cats. 

Where you can find Ben Berman Ghan: 

You can find me on Bluesky or on my website inkstainedwreck.ca or my Instagram.

Interview

1. Who are your biggest influences/favourite authors/books?

My influences are always changing. Certainly both Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X Trilogy and Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s novella This Is  How You Lose the Time War were big influences on this book.

2. What are some recent books you’ve enjoyed and can recommend?

OMG I love recommending books. Here, in no particular order, are the best 10 books I read in 2025, with a mix of 2025 titles and a few 2024 titles I didn’t get to in time last year

     Rakesfall (Vajra Chandrasekera)
    Creation Lake (Rachel Kushner)
    Notes from a Regicide (Isaac Fellman)
    The Extinction of Irena Rey (Jennifer Croft)
    The Wax Child (Olga Ravn)
    Sea Now (Eva Meijer)
    Audition (Pip Adam)
    Remember You Will Die (Eden Robins)
    The Siege of Burning Grass (Premee Mohamed)
    The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain (Sofia Samatar)

3. Please tell us a bit about some of your other writing/work

Rabbits is actually fairly representative of my work, though I have largely moved on from the cyborg since then. Reflecting on my work, I do find that what I write is often preoccupied with ecological catastrophe and the struggle of identity in bodies that are continually changing. I am interested in the sentence level work of prose. Much of my published fiction is linked to on my website.

4. What’s next for you?

My next book, The Library Cosmic, is due in spring of 2026 with Buckrider Books! A collection of three stories and three novellas, it is bombastic and strange and frightening. I hope everybody likes it!!!

The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits by Ben Berman Ghan

A gorgeously complex work of literary speculative fiction that spans centuries The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits starts in 2014 with a winged alien sowing the seeds of a strange forest on the moon. The novel then moves through humanity’s colonization of the moon and its consequences, onto a war with alien beings within a space-going whale, a cyborg mind that sleeps for hundreds of years after sheltering the city of Toronto from the worst of the war and finally a re-creation of humanity. Ghan poses thoughtful questions about artificial intelligence, humanities quest for the stars and ecological destruction in this wide-ranging story, which is held together equally by beautiful writing and deft characterization. The end result is an ambitious debut that leaves the reader contemplating many amazing possibilities for the future of our world.

Buy the book here!

1. What inspired you to write this book?

I don’t really know, I didn’t have a specific inspiration, it all came together rather naturally. I had the image of a cyborg waking up in a graveyard on the moon, and that came to me around the time I was visiting London in 2019, so the graveyard became Highgate Cemetery in London, and I had the image of Toronto wild and overgrown, inspired partly by Lisa Jackson’s VR exhibit Biidaaban from 2018, and partly by the art of Mathew Borrett. Everything else came naturally. 

2. What was your favourite part of writing it?

There are no favourites, every word is a joy to me. But if I have to pick, perhaps the moments where the novel becomes its most dreamlike and weird, where I could throw logic to the wind and just have fun and let the language and the weirdness of the setting flow out from me.

 

 

 

Thanks for reading! 

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