<
https://lithub.com/10-literary-science-fiction-and-fantasy-novels-that-offer-hope-for-the-future/>
"During graduate school, I finished the novel that found me an agent—but when
my agent submitted it to publishers, all twenty of them turned the manuscript
down. Truthfully, it was closer to a collection of loosely-linked short
stories, and the feedback from editors was consistent:
Pretty sentences. But
nothing really happens.
This is not to impugn books in which little happens! I love those books, which
is why I tried to write one. As a teenager, I revered realist literary fiction,
stories whose epiphanies emerged from quiet, interpersonal moments—stories that
needed no pyrotechnics to move me as a reader. I wanted to write like that, and
to be taken seriously in the way of those writers. I feared allegations of
sentimentality, avoided melodrama, and wrote characters so faint that even my
agent once delicately suggested that a protagonist “get a hobby.”
Of course, I was devastated when my novel-in-stories died on submission. After
I recovered, though, I saw the truth of the feedback. Many writers do a
beautiful job with subtle fiction. I just wasn’t one of them. I thought, too,
of the books that shaped my brain as a young reader, like
A Wrinkle in Time
and
His Dark Materials: epic science fiction and fantasy that introduced me
to other worlds while also paying close attention to prose and character. What
if I tried to write a book like that?
My first two novels are ultimately realist, though each has a speculative
element.
The Anatomy of Dreams follows two dream researchers working beneath
a charismatic but ethically-questionable professor. In
The Immortalists, four
siblings visit a fortuneteller who claims to be able to tell anyone their date
of death. But
Under Story, in which a divorced couple discover a time-bending
parallel universe, is the first time I committed fully to genre fiction.
I felt intimidated. To write about our world well is challenging enough; to
write well about an imaginary world is a different, riddle-strewn gauntlet.
There were so many issues to brainstorm, so many problems to solve and
reversals to think through. By the end of the day, I was often so mentally
exhausted that I struggled to think of words. But the process was thrilling,
too. I wrote the first draft over five years, immersing myself in its
worldbuilding, crosshatching real science with invented elements. I wanted to
be meticulous enough that readers could give themselves permission to
believe—to do a magic trick so airtight that it would feel real even to me.
But I didn’t want the worldbuilding to overshadow the heart of the novel: the
story of a single couple’s grief and healing, their under story. In many ways,
it’s the story of my healing from years of chronic pain, though there isn’t a
migraine in the book. Still,
Under Story is about the devastation of a life
that breaks down and the miracle of the life that blooms from those ashes. It
is a tribute to the fact that existence is always both/and, not either/or: pain
and pleasure, loss and love."
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
