Whatever

When is a zombie not quite exactly a zombie? For James Knapp, and his new novel State of Decay, it’s when you you take the idea of the undead and give it a whole new socio-political spin — a spin that incorporates free will, social castes, an unending war, and other such fun things. I could tell you more about that, but this is a Big Idea post, and you’re not here for me. You’re here for the author to explain it all for you. And here he is!

JAMES KNAPP:

I didn’t write a zombie story. In fact, although the word ‘zombie’ appears in almost every piece of marketing I’ve seen for State of Decay, it only appears once in the book itself. I can understand why it gets billed like this – my ‘revivors’ are the dead reanimated, and I purposely play with some of the classic zombie mythos – but I still wouldn’t call it a zombie story per se. I’ve seen it called urban fantasy, science fiction, horror, and a thriller (no one’s accused me of romance yet)…all this is fair, and if you like those things (as I do) then I believe you’ll like State of Decay, but to me the story has always really been about two basic ideas:

1. Is consciousness the same thing as a ’soul’, and if not then where might those two things intersect?

2. As citizens of a society, what do we owe it and in turn, what does it owe us?

…and to a somewhat lesser degree:

3. How many PSI can a human bite deliver?

If the first two questions sound high-handed, rest assured third one does get answered, and in the way that you’re probably thinking. At its heart, I would call this a thriller; weapons (and bodies) are smuggled, murders are investigated, conspiracies are unraveled and the risen dead lurk in the shadows of city streets. Still, if you were to strip away all of the shell casings, cybernetic implants and arterial blood spatter (though for the life of me I don’t know why you would ever do that), then the first two concepts are what would be left behind. Don’t get me wrong; I like talking about arterial blood spatter as much as the next person, maybe more so, but here I’d rather talk about some of the underlying concepts that, to me, drive everything else.

I liked the idea of a vast meritocracy where a citizen’s worth depended on their level of service to their society, but part of what interested me were the inevitable abuses of such a system. For my story I decided on tiers of citizenship that, on paper, would work like this: Top tier was earned through military service, bottom tier was for those who refused to serve, and a middle tier was afforded for those who were willing to sign their bodies over to serve as reanimated soldiers after death. In theory, you could start at a lower tier and, by serving the community, work your way up rather than serve.

That’s on paper – in reality (my story is reality, right?), top tier lost much of its meaning to those who weren’t rich, bottom tier became synonymous with poverty, and most people picked the middle ground. This was actually by the design of those in charge, because second tiers still have to pay their taxes while earning a decent wage, and then they eventually die off to help provide a virtually limitless supply of foot soldiers. As for working your way up, the next tier was really just a carrot on a string; you would never feasibly be able to reach it.

If reanimation was to be an easy option, that raised the question ‘who would willingly sign up for such a thing?’ Especially when there are murmurings that a donor’s body might go on to commit all kinds of horrible atrocities? I felt that if the government was careful enough to keep the revivors, the war, and the aforementioned horrible atrocities far enough out of the public eye then that answer would be ‘most people’. It’s always easier and more tempting to pay later than to pay now – that’s why the Devil’s pact-printing machine is always low on toner.

In State of Decay you might decide, just before you slide into that guard rail, that maybe second tier was a mistake after all but it’s still your signature on the dotted line. The Devil always comes to collect in the end. In your invulnerable youth you might not care what happens to your body after you’re dead, but you might end up with a long time to think about it; If a person could be brought back from death with the same memories and abilities, how would that differ from being alive? If you’re conscious, in the same body, with impulses moving once more through your same (albeit no longer warm) brain, are you the same person? Or does something else, something less definable, get lost in the translation? Would choosing second tier be avoiding service, or just delaying it?

Of course, if a person who signed up for reanimation had second thoughts they always had the option of pedaling faster toward the top tier; that carrot on a stick they’d never reach. Not in time.

I could corner you at a party and talk about this until you eventually prayed for the sweet release of death, but my word ration runs dry. I considered utilizing the last hundred words or so for a treatise on arterial blood spray, but instead I think I will leave you with this: At the beginning of this piece I said there were two main themes, but I lied a bit; there is a third theme that I can’t discuss without (I feel) giving too much away. While I know the inevitable spoilers will come, I’d like to keep it on the down low as long as possible. Just know it involves the question of free will and becomes one of the major ideas behind the second book in the series. All three of these concepts (four if you count the biting thing) are the threads that tie the trilogy together.

This is the first step in main character Nico Wachalowski’s journey; here he will begin to learn some truths that he’d never even considered before. To do that, he will have to deal with a string of murders, a disturbed psychic’s obsession, an ex-lover’s questions, and domestic terrorism.

Oh, and zombies. Sort of.

—-

State of Decay: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|IndieBound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt of the novel. Follow James Knapp on Twitter.

People in myths live forever — or do they? For every Apollo or Persephone, there are the women and men whose lives these famous deities intersect in the telling of the tale — but who otherwise fall from the page, and from thought. Can they be resurrected? Katharine Beutner thinks it’s possible, and sets to doing so with Alcestis, her debut novel. Who is Alcestis and why does she deserve another look? Beutner explains all.

KATHARINE BEUTNER:

My Big Idea was to stick myself with the task of retelling a myth many people aren’t aware of in the first place. Alcestis was Mycenaean royalty—her grandfather was the god Poseidon, and one of her sons joined the group of warriors waiting inside the Trojan horse—but she’s remembered largely as a model of the perfectly self-sacrificing wife. She chooses to go to the underworld in her husband’s place when the god Hermes comes to retrieve him; three days later, she’s rescued by Heracles, and brought home to the world above, silent, where she’s celebrated for her virtue. In most versions of the myth, that’s all we ever learn about her, even though she is, to the best of my knowledge, the only female figure in classical mythology who enters the underworld on purpose.

You might say I began writing this novel with a big question, then, rather than a big idea: why would Alcestis choose to die? I wasn’t satisfied with the traditional explanation of selfless wifely devotion, and when I first read Euripides’ version of her story, I was frustrated by how easily the play dismissed Alcestis’s heroism. (Also, I kind of wanted to punch both Heracles and Alcestis’s husband Admetus.) I’d first encountered Alcestis in Rainer Maria Rilke’s gorgeous poem “Alkestis,” which ends with her disappearance. That poem gives Alcestis dignity and grace but also chooses not to portray her experience directly. My novel follows Alcestis from her childhood through her time in the underworld, where she falls under the power of the goddess Persephone.

Any story about a living woman entering the realm of death is inherently fantastical, and I drew inspiration from some of my favorite fantasy novels, such as Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Sheri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country. Yet I conceived of this book as not only historical fantasy but also a kind of first-contact novel. I wanted to describe what it would it be like, as a human who grew up in that god-haunted world, to face the gods’ alien capriciousness firsthand, and to find your life tangled up with theirs in the way you’d only heard about in songs. In the underworld, Alcestis seeks her sister Hippothoe, who died when they were both children; she also finds herself captivated by Persephone’s passionate interest in her. All of Alcestis’s actions are shaped by her culture and her training as a royal daughter of Iolcus, but she’s woefully out of her depth, despite her own Olympic blood. Despite growing up in a society molded by the interference of gods, she has little notion of how to handle a goddess and even less idea how to resist one.

And that brings me to a second big question: what happens to the usual structure of the mythic romance if that romance involves two women? In one of my high school English classes, a favorite teacher of mine described Odysseus’s entanglements with Circe and Calypso by shrugging and noting that, in the world of the Greek epic, “goddesses happen.” The traditional myth of Alcestis makes clear that her husband Admetus earns his special dispensation from death because he is a favorite of Apollo. I kept that element of the myth and paired it with Persephone’s pursuit of Alcestis. In my version of Mycenaean Greece, goddesses happen to women as well as men.

I aimed to give Alcestis her own epic tale, one as dramatic as the stories of Odysseus, Aeneas, or Orpheus. But I also wanted her to be accessible to contemporary readers of historical fiction and fantasy. In the original myth, Alcestis is supposed to represent the ideal of Greek womanhood, but not because of any special abilities or magical inheritance (unlike Achilles, that big cheater). I’ve tried to preserve a sense of her as a real and ordinary person, to allow readers to enter her world as immersively as she enters the underworld and to fully experience her strange, remarkable, too-little-known story.

—-

Alcestis: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel here. Follow Beutner on Twitter.

Technical note unrelated to the book: Please see this note regarding the presence of links to Amazon.

Some of you may note that despite my being annoyed with Amazon in the last week, Amazon links have not been pulled from previous Big Idea pieces, and I added an Amazon link to the latest Big Idea piece as well. The reasoning here is simple: Unlike some large online retailers I could name, I don’t go out of my way to hurt an author’s sales when I have an argument that doesn’t directly involve that author. And you know, making it difficult for my readers to seek out a book at the Internet’s largest retailer would do just that. So the Amazon links stay, for the benefit of the authors.

(And no, not also because I have affiliate links. Never have used affiliate links for The Big Idea pieces here. Too lazy.)

That said, I have made two small changes:

1. Rather than deleting Amazon, I added a link to IndieBound, a site which makes it easy for people to get books online from independent bookstores near them. Frankly, I should have done that a long time ago.

2. Customarily, in the intro paragraph, I’ve linked the title of the book to the commensurate Amazon page. This week and going forward I won’t be doing that; I’ll be rotating that link between the stores I link to at the bottom (Amazon, B&N, IndieBound, Powell’s). And for that link, I feel fine keeping Amazon out of the lineup until such time as they, you know, put my Tor books back up. Feels fair to me.

As I do every year (except last year, when WordPress ate my entry, BOO), I’m giving you my thoughts on the Oscar nominee field and who, at first blush, I suspect will win their categories. Because I want to keep today’s previous entry near the top of the Whatever front page, I’ll put these thoughts behind the cut.

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Where is the story of the world being told? It might be in the place you least expect: far away from news cameras and press releases. Sara Miles finds her work in those margins — she is the founder of the St. Gregory’s Food Pantry in San Francisco — but more than that finds the inspiration and ideas which inform her latest book on faith, Jesus Freak. Below, Miles goes into detail about looking where others don’t to see something new… and explains why doing so may be what we’re meant to do.

SARA MILES:

In the 1980s, I spent a lot of time writing about wars, mostly revolutions and counter-revolutions–– like the ones in El Salvador or the Philippines––and hanging out with soldiers, guerrillas, peasants and death squad members, as well as other journalists. My big idea then was really a technique. If I had to cover what everybody else thought of as the main event––an election, a massacre, a press conference by some crazy general––I’d focus on the stuff that was happening off to the side.

So I’d ignore the official announcements, the formal interviews with important people, and instead I’d chat with the lady mopping up in the back room of the Presidential Palace, or check out which movies were playing next to the Army headquarters, or spend an afternoon drinking Pepsi with guys stuck digging graves on the outskirt of town in the aftermath of a battle. I liked looking at things slant.

As a methodology, this approach kept me interested––even when I came back to the United States and started writing about electoral politics. The official version, prepared by handlers and delivered by hacks, was always just unspeakably dull. The dutiful Q&A was mostly an opportunity to be lied to. But some really funny things happened when nobody was paying attention. (Ask me about the pool party in Silicon Valley where Tipper Gore played drums with an aging Grateful Dead cover band.)

And this approach to writing remained useful when I had a totally unexpected mid-life conversion to Christianity and wrote two books about faith, including my latest, Jesus Freak. In fact, the methodology became an idea.

Because it turns out that God is very much interested in the margins: in the unlikely, ridiculous, and outcast. It turns out that the center of power––military, political or religious––is actually not where most change takes place. And it turns out that Christianity is all about the unexpected.

Think about the prophets with their mad faith the mountains will be flattened and the valleys raised up; think about Mary, with her conviction that the poor will be filled with good things and the rich sent away empty. Consider the impossible idea of an almighty God who chooses, of all possibilities, to be born to a shameful unmarried teenage mother in a barn; who scandalizes politicians, priests and his own family; and who spends his time on Earth hanging out with crooked cops, whores, and the dirtiest, least attractive foreigners around. Imagine a God who winds up as a despised, tortured criminal, condemned by religious authorities and executed by the state.

“Look away” is a big idea, if one embraced more by fools and losers than by the smart and powerful of our world. But my experience is that the more I look away from the way things are supposed to be, the more I get to see.

—-

Jesus Freak: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s

Read an excerpt of Jesus Freak. Visit Miles’ food bank.

When thinking about “urban fantasy,” we’re aware that the word “urban” sets the fantasy in a particular type of setting — but does that setting (and those stories) require a specific place? For the purposes of the genre, and our conversation, is one “urban” as good as another?

Not for author Margaret Ronald, and in this Big Idea, she explains why the city of Boston is in itself essential as the setting of her acclaimed fantasy series, of which Wild Hunt is the latest installment. Take your places, please.

MARGARET RONALD:

I am not a city girl by nature.  I was born in a small Indiana town, lived there for close to two decades, and went to college in an even smaller Massachusetts town.  When I’m on vacation, I retreat to lakes and cabins well away from civilization; when I think about what got me started writing, I remember biking down flat roads with fields on either side, watching storms approach for miles.

So when I describe Wild Hunt and Spiral Hunt as “urban fantasy,” there’s always part of me that wonders how on earth I ended up writing anything remotely urban.

Some of it is probably part of how my muse operates, since a strong sense of place is something that really sparks my imagination.  After all, the first story I ever sold — “Christmas Apples,” in Realms of Fantasy, also an Evie story — was inspired by a place. I’d visited a friend’s house several times, always in winter, at the turning point of the year. The house was hard to find, difficult to reach even when you knew where it was, and at the times I’d seen it, always a place of revelry and rejoicing, a golden haven against the cold.

A better description of an Otherworld feasting-hall I could not conjure.   And when I started playing with the idea of a story set at that time of year, that house and the feel of it were central to the result.

But with Boston — and with any city, I think — the scale is entirely different.  I think a lot of it has to do with being entranced by the city.  There’s so much here that I want to show to other people.  Doing so in writing is like having a friend over and taking them to all the cool places you’ve discovered over the last couple of years.  You have to see this, hear about this, try this!  Sharing the joy I found in that first discovery is one of the best things about writing a story set in Boston.

And in doing so, I keep discovering more about the city, more than I could ever write about.  There is so much here — and so much of it is hidden to the casual glance.

As an example, take the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.  It’s not one of the big tourist draws, nor is it one of the first things that come to mind when most people think about Boston. But if you’ve been there, you have some idea what I mean about hidden magic within a city.

If you haven’t been there, go, preferably sometime in winter or very early spring, when the world has been repainted in shades of blue and gray, warmth is a memory, and green is a cruel joke. Inside what appears to be a dull brick building is as great a wonderland as any hollow hill: a lush garden under an atrium, tiles and columns and sculpture from dozens of cultures jammed together in an arrangement that at first seems chaotic and only slowly reveals itself as part of Mrs. Gardner’s plan. There is mystery here as well: why choose these artifacts, why place them like this, why set the sublime beside the mundane? Why put an ushabti next to an ostrich egg in silver fittings and both below a Titian? (And then there are the empty frames that still hang in the Dutch Room . . .)

Entering this place can be like stepping from one world to the next. Yet it’s still very much part of Boston — in fact, I’d argue that the culture of Boston of the time was one of the major reasons Mrs. Gardner chose to build the museum and fill it to her specifications.

By writing about these places, setting my characters to run around them or discover their secrets or fight their way through the magic that surrounds them, I hope to introduce them to readers — not by showing a realistic portrait of the place, but by pointing out some of their wondrous elements.  It’s like a quick set of introductions at a party: here are some interesting things, now go see what’s true, what’s exaggerated, and what hasn’t even been mentioned.  Or the ways that I introduce characters to the reader.  Here is the Gardner, a place of beauty no matter the season. Here is Genevieve Scelan, in over her head and trying to wrangle what’s left of Boston’s undercurrent together. Here is the tower of Mount Auburn Cemetery, from which you can see the whole city and beyond. Here is Abigail Huston, named for her great-grandmother, a woman with one too many secrets.

Here is the real Boston, deep with history and a thousand hidden sources of beauty or strangeness, a thousand doors to other worlds that are all the more wondrous for being part of our world. Here is Evie’s Boston, reflecting the original and itself reflected in its own fragmented, chaotic undercurrent, in which every deal has the possibility of betrayal . . . and in which more than one Hound is hunting.

Welcome.

—-

Wild Hunt: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s

Read an excerpt of the novel. Visit the author’s blog. Read the Big Idea for Spiral Hunt, the first book in this series.

What you want to hear vs. what you need to hear: This is an eternal struggle with writers when they approach someone to read the drafts of their work. What you want to hear (“It’s brilliant! Change nothing!”) is sometimes very different than what you need to hear (“Here are the problems”) — so much so that even when we hear what we need to, we’ll still fight against it.

Josh Sundquist knows of this struggle. A cancer survivor turned motivational speaker, he had written a draft of what would eventually become his memoir Just Don’t Fall: How I Grew Up, Conquered Illness, and Made it Down the Mountain. He knew what he wanted to hear about it. But was he ready for what he needed to hear? Let’s find out.

JOSH SUNDQUIST:

“My advice to you,” the handwritten letter read, “Is to throw away this draft of the manuscript and start over from scratch.”

I was too young to understand it at the time, but I was lucky to receive such a letter. Very, very lucky.

Most first-time authors, upon completing their manuscript, assemble an inner circle of friends and family to read over the draft and give their honest feedback as to whether they think it’s ready to be submitted to agents. But therein lies the problem with this practice. Friends and family are inherently biased to like anything you produce and tell you what you want to hear. You are a genius. This is a surefire bestseller. It would make a great movie, too, probably staring somebody really famous.

What an author needs instead is an impartial reader, someone who doesn’t know him personally. There are two ways to find such a person. Number one, you could approach a random individual in a bookstore or some other place book readers tend to congregate (say, Whole Foods), hand her your manuscript, and hope she has an unnaturally strong inclination towards lending her free time to strangers. Number two, you could pay for feedback from a professional. But most first time authors don’t have that kind of money. I know I didn’t back when I wrote my initial draft.

Which is why I went with option one: Getting lucky with a near stranger. That, of course, is the very definition of high risk behavior (in writing and otherwise), but I was fortunate in that I received the aforementioned painfully honest handwritten letter in response to my request for feedback.

I was only sixteen years old at the time. As it happened, I had been featured in a national newspaper for the motivational speaking career I had recently launched. I was traveling to schools across the country, talking about how I had lost my leg to childhood cancer and gone on to become an internationally ranked ski racer.

After it was published, I sent the writer of the article my manuscript and asked if he’d read it. He was a professional journalist, I figured, so maybe he’d have some helpful suggestions.

He did. And that’s how I found myself reading his handwritten note telling me to throw away my life story as I’d written it and start over.

“You to need to tell us what it was really like for you,” he wrote. “You’re hiding behind motivation.”

He was right. It was a habit I’d developed on stage as a fledgling speaker, coupling motivational clichés with an I’m-so-perfect-and-heroic version of my story. But it wouldn’t be until I returned to writing in my mid-twenties that I was ready to take his advice.

Back in the first draft, for example, I wrote about my amputation like I was some kind of inspirational wunderkind, perfectly resolute in my bravery even at the tender age of nine. Why I wrote this way, I’m not sure. I guess it was a role I thought I was supposed to play as a motivational speaker. But when I wrote the new draft, I was ready to share the real story, the story of how for weeks leading up to the amputation I would sit in bed and hold my leg and cry myself to sleep. I wasn’t brave. I wasn’t inspirational. I was just a boy facing the fact he’d never play soccer again.

When I took drafts of this new manuscript to friends and family, I received warnings that certain passages were overly raw and revealing, that they were dangerous to my career as a motivational speaker. But this time around, I knew these readers were too close to me, that they just wanted to protect me, that they in fact loved me too much to be able to step back and understand my big idea: Writing a memoir that connects on a deep, human level means writing a memoir that strips off the public mask and exposes the deeply flawed and frail child hiding underneath.

—-

Just Don’t Fall: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Visit Josh Sundquist’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Let’s see what we’ve got:

* A Stain on the Silence, by Andrew Taylor. Taylor won the 2009 Cartier Diamond Dagger from the UK’s Crime Writer’s Association, which is going to be awesome in an upcoming game of Clue. In this literary thriller, a middle-age fellow discovers a daughter he never had — on the run for murder! And pregnant! It’s always something. Out 2/16 from Hyperion.

* Wild Hunt, by Margaret Ronald. The sequel to Ronald’s debut urban fantasy, Spiral Hunt, which was featured in a Big Idea last year. Wild Hunt will also be the subject of a Big Idea real soon now. Out now, from Eos.

* An ARC of Black Blade Blues, by J.A. Pitts. Dragons! Among us! As shapeshifters! Debut urban fantasy. Out May 2010 from Tor.

* Jesus Freak, by Sara Miles. The founder of San Francisco’s St. Gregory Food Pantry explores faith and her own late-in-life conversion. Out early February from Josey-Bass Books. Miles will also be contributing a Big Idea essay in the near future.

It is:

Query first, and don’t write up a Big Idea piece until/unless you have a confirmed date from me. Why? Because there are going to be times when I say “sorry, no space,” and you’ll have written that essay for nothing. And I’d hate for you to waste your time like that.

So, please query first. Thanks.

Got faith? This question is more complicated than it seems here in our world — and in the world of Mark Teppo’s Codex of Souls series, of which the newly-released Heartland is the second installment, it’s even more complicated than that. Why? Because in Teppo’s world, faith has a quality to it that’s distinctly different than it is in our world — a quality that, at the very least, makes the world of the Codex of Souls a lot more interesting, in a teleological sense. Here’s Teppo to give you the lay of the land.

MARK TEPPO:

It starts with the idea of faith.  One of the underlying conceits in modern thrillers is the occult macguffin–some divinely blessed thingamajig crafted from technology so otherworldly that our ancestors immediately shat themselves in fear when they realized what it was and then scattered it across the known world like Set hiding the evidence after he dismembered the body of his brother, Osiris. Typically, what separates the rag-tag group of heroes from the band of villains is the idea of faith:  one group believes in the power of the thingamajig, one doesn’t.  These secular empiricists, through the right and principled application of their rational minds, triumph over the apocalyptic dementia of faith and belief.

Or do they?  Because the little trick these writers always pull is to tag on an epilogue wherein they show the reader that maybe–just maybe, if you let them take you down an alternate path a little ways–the zealots weren’t crazy.  Maybe there was something to the mystic device they were seeking.  Maybe God does live in the Machine.

Now, there are two ways to read this technique.  The cynical way, which is to say that writers are aware of the preponderance of some manner of religious belief in their readership, and they don’t want to alienate their audience by sticking to the hard and fast definition of a scientifically discernible universe.  In which case, this little nod and wink at the end is to say, “It’s okay; I understand that you need a little mystery, so here, let me give it to you.”  Or, they actually want to hedge their bets.  They want to leave the door open on the idea of faith.  Perhaps it isn’t such a bad thing, religious zealotry aside.  There may be more things in Heaven and Earth than our wee brains can discern, and we shouldn’t discount the possibility.

But the trouble with that tiny quibble is that it is a thread that will unravel everything.  If the author, who has just spent several hundred pages discounting the religious and philosophical implications of the occult macguffin, suddenly flashes you the secret hand signal–It’s okay; I’m in on the secret!–where does that leave the heroes?  It makes their rational pragmatism just another crazy dogma, and their victory dance into the sunset is the Fool dancing off the edge of the cliff.  Indiana Jones stands on the steps of a building in Washington, D.C. and says, “Damnit, the government can’t take the Ark and put it in a box; it needs to be studied.”  Then Marion sidles up to him and says, “Hey, sailor, can I buy you a drink?”  Really?  These two just witnessed the power of the Hand of God, and they’re heading off to the nearest bar for a drink?

If you’re going to suggest the world is not as it seems, why be so coy about it?  Why have only a few of your characters believe that something lies beyond the Veil?  If you’re going to hunt for occult artifacts, then why wouldn’t people who believe in the occult be working for Team Heroic as well as Team Nefarious?

Once you go there, the rest is easy.  Magic is afoot.  The Grail, the Spear, the Ark of the Covenant, the Emerald Tablet:  they’re all real.  Alchemy works.  Astrology and tarot are viable means of charting and seeing the future.  Aleister Crowley’s maxim of “Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law” becomes the driving principle of how the world works.  Occult knowledge is knowledge of the secret workings of God, and you had better believe that everyone who is looking for the secrets is going to know how to use them.

This is the basic premise of the Codex of Souls series.  I assume every occult conspiracy theory, every scrap of religious doctrine, every third-world myth, every blood-soaked grimoire, and every justification for sacrificing babies and cute animals is true.  The entire occult history of the human race is up for grabs, and the rest is a matter of finding patterns in that world of crazy.  You know what? After a while, you start seeing some.

The first two are called Lightbreaker and Heartland, and they’re about faith.  Our hero needs to discover how to have faith in himself, because in a world where everything is true (and nothing is permitted, says the Old Man in the Mountain), believing in yourself is the first step toward discovering some real truth.  If, like the Gnostics attest, you can’t trust the Demiurge, then who can you trust?

—–

Heartland: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Visit the Codex of Souls web site, which includes the short story “Wolves, in Darkness,” taking place in the CoS universe. Visit Teppo’s LiveJournal.

Are you prepared for a Scythian invasion? If your answer is some variation of “Bwuh?” then congratulations, you are like most people, who wouldn’t know a Scythian from Parthian, or indeed if either were people, or, say, a type of insect or breed of sheep. And this would also make you suited to live in the world of Alan DeNiro’s novel Total Oblivion, More or Less, in which there is, in fact, a Scythian invasion, just one of a number of invasions, and modern day go-along-to-get-along types suddenly have to deal with the fact the world has changed in strange and incomprehensible ways.

And how do these folks deal with all this sudden incomprehensibility? As DeNiro now explains: Perhaps differently than you might imagine.

ALAN DENIRO:

In a recent study by National Geographic, 63 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds couldn’t find Iraq on a map. In a multiple choice question asking whether Indonesia, Armenia, South Africa or India had a Muslim majority population, about half said “India.” This type of illiteracy (or aliteracy) creates its own “realm of the fantastic” in everyday life–so what happens when people who know little about the world around them are confronted with, say, Scythians swooping down on their town?

Total Oblivion, More or Less is a novel in which Scythians and other ancient European tribes have invaded America from the north. Modern technology soon stops working, and a counterinvasion from a mysterious Empire to the south has led to constant warfare between the two factions. With a devastating wasp-born plague, and a mass uprooting of the local people, most Americans find their normal lives radically different in a few short months. The narrator, a 16-year-old girl named Macy, has to travel down the Mississippi with her dysfunctional family from a refugee camp in Minnesota; her father is supposed to have a teaching job awaiting him in St. Louis. The landscape and river have undergone a radical transformation, however, both geologically and culturally, which makes the journey fraught with peril.

One of the big ideas that let me launch into these waters is that of oblivion, a deep forgetfulness that comes over everyone in the novel like a fog. No one really knows why all of these changes have occurred, and on a macro-level no one is particularly interested in finding out why some dogs have been given the capacity for speech, or why the Imperial capital, Nueva Roma, suddenly sprung up on an island in the Gulf of Mexico overnight.

At times, Macy seems to be the only one at all concerned about the changes going on around her, or is willing to ask why things have changed so much. Most of the people she interacts with don’t really have the time or the energy to deal with the existential questions of why, exactly, the Mississippi River has achieved oceanic depths that allow the traversal of a submarine (which may or may not be from the Byzantine Empire–but anyway, that’s another story) and why Macy can see giant megaliths on the horizon in Iowa. At times she asks pointed questions that are rebuffed. There isn’t an easily determined causality–things just happen in an eternal present that most people accept without too much fuss.

I wanted to use this “unknowing” as the basis for the narrative structure; it was also an attempt at a different type of worldbuilding for me. Rather than construct a solid structure with a carefully worked out geographical compendium, the novel is more constructed like a sand castle close to the shore, with waves occasionally streaming around it and changing the contours of the structure. Moreover, the oblivion in our current American culture becomes one of the backdrops for the novel’s arc.

These various oblivions presented a few opportunities as well as challenges in telling this story. For one, I could keep it close to the vest with my protagonist and freed me from having to do a larger quest to “solve” the problems of the world. Macy is mostly trying to keep her sanity and family intact–and even though she is one of the few characters around who has curiosity about the melding of the ancient and the contemporary, she too has an understandable focus on the here and now–she and her family, after all, are fleeing for their lives down the Mississippi River. Even if there was some kind of larger plot point of, say, a time travel portal open in Saskatchewan, which the Scythians are streaming through (which there isn’t!), Macy wouldn’t exactly have the werewithal to go on a grand quest to make things go “back to normal.” Conversely, this required being as true to Macy’s voice as humanly possible–her observations of all of the crazy things going on around her are (except for very short bridging sections between the main chapters) what the reader has to go on–not only in a storytelling sense but an emotional one as well.

In the popular lexicon, the phrase “total oblivion” has come to mean “absolute destruction,” and in a very real sense that is true in the novel. However, the “more or less” in the title, perhaps, gives a glimmer of hope. Most people in the novel are able to adapt–and despite the terror and chaos that Macy experiences, she has the freedom to construct her own history the best she can.

—-

Total Oblivion, More or Less: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel. Visit Alan DeNiro’s blog. Follow him on Twitter. Learn about Scythians.

Books that arrived at my doorstep today:

* Total Oblivion, More or Less, by Alan De Niro. Modern day Minnesota attacked by Scythians, and other strange doings. Ballentine/Spectra. Out now, and Alan will be doing a Big Idea piece on Thursday.

* Token of Darkness, by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. A deadly car accident allows a teenage football star to see ghosts; naturally this leads to complications. Delacorte Press, out 2/9.

* The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N.K. Jemisin. In a mystical land, an unwitting heir to the throne is thrown into a perilous situation. Orbit Books. Out 2/25, with a Big Idea piece planned for the same day.

* The World We Live In, by Susan Beth Pfeffer. The third book in Pfeffer’s series in which a rogue meteor irrevocably changes life as we know it. Harcourt Press, April 2010.

Imagine you’re a caveman (this will be easier for some of you than others). Now, you’re handed an iPod. How do you think you would think about it? Would you even be able to think about it? Yes, I know, a deep thought for a Tuesday. But it’s actually relevant to this week’s Big Idea, from author Patrick Lee. No, his new thriller The Breach is not about cavemen with iPod, but it does think on how disruptive technology can be if you’ve never seen it before — and aren’t prepared for it. Take it away, Patrick Lee.

PATRICK LEE:

It was almost Clan of the Cave Bear meets The Dirty Dozen.  That was the first half of the big idea: what would happen if stone-age humans somehow came upon a stash of 20th century weapons and equipment, without meeting the people who’d designed and built it?  Imagine a hundred crates of the stuff just magically showing up in the woods outside one of their camps, twenty-five thousand years ago.  What impact would our technology, all by itself, have on their lives?

Most of it they’d never make sense of: socket wrenches, volt meters, hard drives.  Hell, a toilet plunger would leave them scratching their heads.

But I bet they’d figure out the guns.  Maybe not the first day, but in time — certainly.  Someone smart enough to shape a spear-head from stone and fix it to a shaft with vines — I don’t know how to do that, do you? — would eventually work out that the little open-topped container full of shiny blunt-ended things fits neatly into this opening down here, and then when you move this big thing on the side until all the clicks are done, set the little red/green thing to red, and put pressure against the part that’s unusually well-shaped for a fingertip… yeah, I think they’d eventually get it.  The early lessons would be costly (God help them when they got into the grenades), but they would learn them.  Given time, and a few batteries among the supplies, they might even puzzle out some of the electronics — significant, considering that a two-way radio is still among the most powerful weapons a soldier carries into battle.

These ancient people would never grasp how any of this stuff worked.  Most of us don’t know how it works.  But what little they learned to use would be enough to make life interesting.  I imagine the next few decades of interaction among their tribes and clans would be rather eventful.  And if I’d felt like studying paleoanthropology for a few years to prepare myself to write a book like that, I may well have charged ahead with it.  Actually, no, I wouldn’t have.  So here’s the second half of the big idea:

What if it happened to us?

What if we came upon a supply — in the case of The Breach, an ongoing one — of technology crafted by someone thousands or even millions of years more advanced than us?  How much of it could we make sense of?  How eventful would our next few decades be, among our tribes and clans?

From the beginning, working with this idea, my goal was to root it as realistically as possible in our present world.  I wanted it to feel as if these events could actually be happening.  I wanted the story to creep the hell out of people, the way reports about Groom Lake and Roswell used to, before they got a little too familiar — a thing can only be so scary once it’s been a successful teen drama on The WB.  Think back to the days when Peter Jennings would do an ABC special on Project Bluebook, and your uncle would take a swig of his Michelob and say, “You know, some of that shit’s probably real.”  That’s the feeling I wanted, without actually using Groom Lake or any of its contemporaries.

So that’s the approach I took: a real-as-I-could-make-it tone, and a premise that effectively makes hunter-gatherers out of the modern human race — the select few who are in on the secret — as they try to understand technological relics that are, in most cases, simply beyond them.  And as they deal with the political and global consequences.  And hope like hell they can distinguish the toilet plungers from the grenades.

—-

The Breach: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Read an excerpt from The Breach. See the book trailer. Visit Patrick Lee’s blog.

Books what came in the mail today:

* Tails of Wonder and Imagination, edited by Ellen Datlow. An anthology of fantastical tales featuring cats (thus the modeling of the book with Ghlaghghee). Night Shade Books, out this month.

* Lightbreaker and Heartland, by Mark Teppo. The first and second books in Teppo’s “Codex of Souls” series. Lightbreaker is currently out; Heartland will be out this month. Teppo will also be penning a Big Idea for Heartland in about a week. Night Shade Books.

* Shadowline, by Glenn Cook. Night Shade reprints a science fiction trilogy from the “Black Company” author; this is the first of those books. Out in January.

* Hespira, by Matthew Hughes. Hughes’ latest installment in his genre-bending Henghis Hapthorn series. Out now, from Night Shade Books.

* The Talisman #3. The third installment of Del Rey Comics’ adaptation of Stephen King’s and Peter Straub’s massive fantasy book. On sale 1/27.

Some various notes of varying variosity:

* For those of you who have been saying to yourself “Why can’t I buy The God Engines in a brick-and-mortar store, as is right and proper?” I have some good news: Word has reached my far province that TGE will soon be shelves at select Borders locations. Which is awesome, because I’m personally a big fan of walking around in a store, going into the shelves and asking them “what have you got for me today?” As to which Borders they will be in, I can’t say, although remember that if you don’t see the book on the shelves, you can always go to the helpful clerks and get them to special order it for you (this works in real-world book stores other than Borders too, incidentally). Yes! Ask for it BY NAME.

Bear in mind that Borders is likely not the only place where you might find TGE on the shelves; specialty bookstores like Borderlands Books or Uncle Hugo’s or Mysterious Galaxy are also likely to have it as well, and of course I love them for it. But if you don’t have such a specialty store in your area and/or are doing more general bookstore shoppery, Borders is the place to go for TGE.

* Other good news for TGE: Subterranean Press tells me that it’s ordered a second printing of the trade edition, which makes me really very happy; it suggests the book is doing well. Thank you, folks. My mortgage rejoices. And while all currently existing orders (i.e., orders up to this point) should be processed out of the first printing, from this point forward if having a first edition is very important to you, I would suggest ordering directly from Subterranean Press.

* Moving away from me and talking about other folks for a bit, I have a note here from my esteemed colleague Walter Jon Williams that he is once again doing the Taos Toolbox, a two-week master class “designed to bring your science fiction and fantasy writing to the next level.” He writes:

This is not a workshop for beginners. We won’t teach you correct manuscript format or what an adverb is and why you shouldn’t use one, because we’ll assume that you already know. We want to concentrate on giving talented, burgeoning writers the information necessary to become professionals within the science fiction and fantasy field.

Though short fiction will be enthusiastically received, there will be an emphasis at Taos Toolbox on the craft of the novel, with attention given to such vital topics as plotting, pacing, and selling full-length works.

Accompanying Williams in the teaching will be Nancy Kress (who won a Hugo just this last year) and New York Times bestseller Carrie Vaughn, who is coming in as a special lecturer, all of whom know just a little something about that whole “writing what works” thing. Check it out.

* Brought to my attention: Save the Dragons, by Dave Freer. Freer’s an sf/f writer formerly of South Africa, currently of Australia, who is trying to bring his pets to his new home but in a jam due to the expense of the quarantine requirement. To help with the costs, here’s what Freer’s doing:

The idea is simple and borrowed from Schezerade and her companions of ages past: I tell you all a story and at critical moments I pass the hat around. When you’ve given me enough money I continue.

In fact I’m modifying this slightly – the idea is to put up a chapter a week of my latest book “Save the Dragons” assuming that I’ve received enough donations. The book has 25 chapters plus an epilog. You get the first one free and then I collect $400 (US) per chapter (and per week).

If and when the book is published anyone who contributes more (in total) than $25 will get a personalized signed copy in Hardback posted to them (or if it doesn’t ever come out in hardback -all but my first book have done — in the next most expensive format). And no matter what all the money raised goes to keeping the Freer furry animals together with their servants -  that would be us  – as we head off in search of a new life.

The story has been in process for a while now — Freer’s at chapter 21 and within $2,000 of his goal — so this would be a fine time to help with him a late push. Hey, dude’s doing it for his pets. You gotta respect that.

2010 is here, so let’s drive right in to this year’s series of Big Ideas. And to begin the new year, we have science fiction and fantasy author Sarah A. Hoyt and her new novel Darkship Thieves — for which one of the initiating reasons for the book was the author being annoyed. Annoyed at what? Or annoyed at whom? Hoyt will explain all — and remind us all that inspiration can some at you from any angle.

SARAH A. HOYT:

Most of my big ideas – and a lot of the small ones – start with my being annoyed.  In this case, the source of annoyance was the whole flap about clones and how the cloning technology was going to destroy the world.

Let’s forget for the moment that most journalists, displaying the biological knowledge of the common household teapot, seemed to believe that clones would be born with the memories of the original or would be a sort of dark-universe twin of the original.  That was bad enough but could be ignored.  What couldn’t be ignored was the continuous din of people who should know better for the regulation of this technology.  Let’s make it illegal, they said, because otherwise people will be cloning themselves and having their brains transplanted to the body of the clone; they’ll be using these kids for spare parts; they’ll be–

It went on and on.  Two things bothered me about this: first, the belief that humans would use the new technology only for “evil” purposes and second, the idea that legislation was a sort of magic wand that undid the technological discovery and made it unusable.  The first might be true or not.  Granted that the worst possible purpose is in the range of human uses of any given technology.   However, we don’t always follow through on our evil designs.  We haven’t managed to nuke ourselves out of existence yet, for instance.  As for law stopping it…  It depends whose law and where and how good enforcement is or can be.   I think the war on drugs has shown that nothing can be banned completely, permanently or effectively.

What banning technology can do – look at the war on drugs again – is make it go underground and thereby insure it gets used only for the worst – or at least the most harmful to society at large – purposes.  Drug addiction might be no picnic even if it were openly talked about, but it’s made worse by the fact that the activity is illegal, must be hidden and has taken roots in a whole criminal underground.

In my view, at least, banning cloning – and the inevitable human enhancement – technology would ensure it would be used for all those purposes that people were afraid of.

So I started with two worlds – the one in which cloning and human biological enhancement was banned, and the one where it wasn’t.

Only I’m cursed with a twisty and convoluted mind where no idea can be simple.  Besides the “good world” and “bad world” design was too Manichean to satisfy my inner critic.  Things are never that black and white.

I went back to the drawing board and let other themes fall in – themes that interest me, like the idea of the resilient child that turns out all right despite everything.  And the one that doesn’t.   Like human instinctive – if hidden – dislike of those who are perceived as different.  Tinged with fear when those who are perceived as different are also smarter. Like the idea that there is no technology that would be harmful in the hands of an individual that can’t be made more so – on an epic scale – in the hands of an entrenched bureaucracy.

So when Darkship Thieves starts, in the 24th century, biological enhancements are illegal on Earth.  They didn’t start out illegal, but heavily regulated in most of the world.  In the rest of the world, on the other hand, they’d been used by tin pot dictators and corrupt bureaucracies.  It had started on a massive scale, creating children as fodders for armies, as strength for ethnic majorities, and as smart people who could fix all of the world’s problems.

What this led to was tyranny by super-engineered humans – Mules – who didn’t consider themselves human, partly through having hobbles (including the inability to reproduce) built into their genes, partly through having been raised as things, not people.  It eventually led to a revolt against the Mules and an overthrowing, which resulted in a world wide government of sorts and tight controls on human improvement and artificial human genetic change.

The Mules and some of their more grossly bio-engineered collaborators escape to space.  The still-human servants of the Mules colonize an asteroid.  The Mules themselves go on, into the wider space, because even among their collaborators they are considered odd and inspire fear.

Those still human servants form Eden, a society in which bio-engineering is extensively used and in the open.  They are connected to an Earth that doesn’t even believe they exist through one of the remaining pieces of technology introduced by the Mules – powertrees.  The powertrees grow in the vacuum of space and yield power pods, which can be harvested and are used to power the technology of Earth and Eden.  Edenites collect these pods by flying ‘darkships’ and making use of bio engineered pilots and navigators.

Athena Hera Sinistra, daughter of a Good Man – sort of a regional governor – of Earth tumbles into the midst of Eden society when she’s rescued from the powertrees by a darkship pilot.

The end result could be described, in Shakespeare’s words, as “all are punished.”  Or perhaps “all are redeemed.”  It depends on how you look at it and squint.

Not that there is anything murky about Athena, or Kit, the darkship pilot who rescues her.  They are quite decisive and active in facing what’s wrong with both of their flawed societies and in trying to improve it (in Athena’s case a little… er… forcefully.  The woman has anger issues.)  But in the end their struggle to reach what they consider humanity – humanity as a moral, not just a biological ideal – passes through personal discovery and revelation of deep, dark ills in both their worlds.

They fight against those evils – I cannot seem to write characters who merely whimper about things.  I’ve tried – and emerge victorious for a given definition of the word.  They find themselves as humans – or as human as they’re likely to be.  They find their own places in the universe and an humanity that transcends biological status or appearance.

Of course, they’re only two people, so they cannot change their worlds completely.  That will take time and independently-arising movements.

So we’ll leave my characters, at the end, sure of themselves and willing to continue struggling.  Revolution and wholesale mayhem will have to wait for future books.

—-

Darkship Thieves: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s

Read an excerpt of Darkship Thieves. Visit Sarah Hoyt’s LiveJournal. Follow her on Twitter.

Now that the holidays are behind us and everyone is properly at their work desks, it’s time for me to make an open call to writers, editors and publicists to participate in “The Big Idea” feature here at Whatever (and later, when it’s ready, on its own Web site). Below, a quick FAQ to get everyone up to speed. Feel free to share this with whomever you like and to link to it freely.

1. What is The Big Idea?

It’s a feature presented here on Whatever, up to twice-weekly, in which authors discuss their latest books, to the delight and edification of Whatever’s up to 45,000 daily readers.

2. Why would I (or the writer I represent) want to be part of it?

Because Whatever readers love books (hey, they’re visiting the blog of a professional writer), there’s lots of them, and because The Big Idea feature is linked to all over the Internet, drawing in readers from elsewhere — all of whom like hearing from the author what it is that makes their book so damn interesting. As Leverage television show writer John Rogers recently wrote:

[T]his series of blog posts… has allowed me to discover more fine new fiction in a year than all the online reviews I’ve plowed through in the five previous.

3. What authors have participated in The Big Idea?

The index for 2009 participants, which includes award winners and New York Times bestsellers, is here.

4. What does a Big Idea feature require?

A short (400 to 1,000 word) essay from the author on an important aspect of the book. A guide to writing a Big Idea feature is here.

5. Which authors are eligible to be considered for The Big Idea?

The feature is open to all authors regardless of genre, fiction and non-fiction alike. Past participants have tended to come from the genres of science fiction and fantasy, but that’s because I’m a writer in that genre. But there have also been authors of non-fiction, romance, YA and mainstream fiction as well.

Likewise, presses and publishers of all sizes are welcome to query, so long as their works are distributed to major bookstores on a returnable basis and are available on the following three American online book stores: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Powell’s.

6. How do I get (or how does my author get) considered for The Big Idea?

Here’s what you do:

a) No earlier than two months from the book’s official publication date and no later than one month from that date, send me an e-mail at john@scalzi.com, with an e-mail header formatted like so: “BIG IDEA QUERY: [Author] [Book Title] [Release Date]“. In the body of the e-mail please briefly describe the book.

(This rule is not applicable to January – February 2010 — I still have open slots to fill in that timeframe. But going forward this rule will apply.)

b) I’ll try to get back to you within the week regarding availability; if you don’t hear back within 10 working days, you can ping again.

c) At some point prior to release, send the book to me (or have your publicist/publisher do so), following my publicity guidelines (mailing address is at that link). ARCs are fine; finished copies are groovy, too.

d) If I have a slot for you (or your author), I’ll give you the date scheduled for the piece; please send (or have your author send) the piece a week before the run date to john@scalzi.com, with an e-mail header formatted like so: “BIG IDEA ENTRY: [Author][Book Title][Scheduled Run Date].”

The following statement is important: You (or your publicist, editor, publisher) need to ask to participate in The Big Idea. Just sending a book or a press release asking me if I’d like to interview you (or your author) isn’t going to work; I get a lot of each. I find The Big Idea works best with authors (and others) who know what it’s about and are affirmatively interested in participating. Also, as a working writer myself I don’t have a huge amount of time to chase down people to participate. So if you want to participate, please ask! Thanks.

7. Do any authors have priority for open Big Idea slots?

In a general sense I will give priority to a) authors who have not written a Big Idea piece before; b) authors whose books are coming out in the week a slot is open; c) authors who actually follow directions noted above. Beyond that, it’s pretty open, and my intent is to get a good mix of authors and books.

Any other questions? Drop ‘em in the comment thread. Otherwise, I look forward to seeing your queries!

And now, for your linking convenience, an index of every author who contributed a Big Idea essay this year, in alphabetical order, From Adams to Williamson. Catch up on what you missed, and keep these authors in mind when you’re cashing in your bookstore gift cards this week.

John Joseph Adams

C.L. Anderson

Julia Angwin

Paolo Bacigalupi

Steven R. Boyett

Sarah Rees Brennan

John Brown

Jeff Carlson

Harry Connolly

Megan Crewe

David Anthony Durham

Greg van Eekhout

Brian Evenson

C.C. Finlay

Jasper Fforde

Diana Pharaoh Francis

Daniel Fox

Laura Anne Gilman

Lev Grossman

Janice Hardy

Jim C. Hines

Charlie Huston

J.C. Hutchins

Kaza Kingsley

Mindy Klasky

Jay Lake

Tom Levenson

Malinda Lo

Paul Melko

China Miéville

James Morrow

Chad Orzel

Nicole Peeler

Diana Peterfreund

Sarah Prineas

Cherie Priest

Margaret Ronald

Diana Rowland

Carrie Ryan

Robert J. Sawyer

Seth Shostak

James Swallow

S. Andrew Swann

Catherynne Valente

Jeff VanderMeer

Carrie Vaughn

Scott Westerfeld

Edward Willett

Michael Z. Williamson

An excellent collection of authors, if I do say so myself.

Also, for any of you who are wondering when or if BigIdeaAuthors.com will ever see the light of day: Yes, we’re still working on spinning off the Big Idea to its own, fully-featured site. It’s just taking longer than we thought. In the meantime, of course, I’ll still be presenting The Big Idea here, as long as authors are still interested in participating. Indeed, after the new year (and when publicists are back at work), I’ll make a formal call for more of them.

But for now, please enjoy these.

There are many reasons I like Jasper Fforde’s writing, but one of the main reasons I do is that Fforde has the rare talent of taking fundamentally farcical plot concepts (People enter books! Detectives solve crimes in a nursery rhyme world!) and paying them off in ways that are not, in fact, merely farcical. So while Fforde’s books are delightfully loopy and funny, they aren’t constructed in a knockabout, we’re-just-in-it-for-a-lark way. There’s a there there, isn’t there. And that’s harder than it looks.

Fforde’s at it again in Shades of Grey, a book which posits a future in which what you see, chromatically speaking, in a large part defines who you are. A wild idea — a big idea, even — but as you’ll see (although not necessarily chromatically), when Fforde sets to writing, the obvious consequences of such a world aren’t necessarily the first or biggest thing on his mind, when it to comes to constructing his story.

JASPER FFORDE:

My Big Idea was not to use the Big Idea. Chuck it out, stuff it in the corner and relegate the obvious thread to the ignominy of subplot status. Then have the Small Idea advanced undeservedly to prominence. So my post-apocalyptic book has the nature of the ‘Something that Happened’ not only unanswered, but largely ignored. The remnants of the advanced technology that litter the landscape remain tantalisingly unexplored. All that remains of the Previous – mostly teeth, by now, complete with fillings – are simply trod underfoot. Anarchy is an alien concept; the world is ordered, neat, and static. The questions that dominate my character’s lives range from how they can marry into the Oxblood family’s String empire, the need to conduct a chair census, the visit to the Last Rabbit, the vexing question of where all the spoons went and, most important of all, how one can avoid the cold spectre of social embarrassment in a world obsessed with politeness and order?

I like challenges. Write oneself into something of a pit and then miraculously break free. But this isn’t some form of narrative suicide, it’s another way of approaching Story. Here’s why:

I have twelve or so ‘Writing Rules’ and sandwiched between number Seven: ‘Never use the word Majestic’ and number Nine: ‘On the hoof flexibility’ I have: ‘Always favour the less well trodden path’. An obvious adage, perhaps, but given the lamentable sameness of many novels, one that should be lifted to greater prominence. The theory is simple. You are walking in a metaphorical forest, chewing your metaphorical pencil and making narrative decisions, when you are presented with two paths – a well-worn route to safe, broadly-lit upland literary pastures, and a less-used one – a route towards experimentation, speculation, and risk. So I chose my idea – Post Apocalyptic Dystopia – and then noted the well trodden path: The immediate aftermath of a global upheaval. The population in disarray, citizens fighting for survival in a new world order. Too obvious. How about seven hundred years afterwards, when the fall of mankind has no more relevance than the Dark Ages has to us today? I don’t know about you, but I rarely talk about Edward III’s scandalous claim to the French throne in 1337, but it’s all people talked about then.

So we’re seven hundred years on and – several less well trodden paths later – we’re not talking about survival but simply getting through the day. A day in a different yet recognisable society based on different values and rules – visual colour in this case, where everything from social mobility, aspiration, health and commerce are based around colour. Earn enough and you can afford colorised bananas for dinner. More expensive, but it impresses the neighbours. The strict social hierarchy is decided not on something so hideously old fashioned as choice, intellect or the ability to lie convincingly to electors, but simply the colour you can see. If you are born able to see Purple you’re at the top of the stack; If you are born without any colour vision at all, then you’re at the bottom. Unquestionably objective. These are the sort of less well trodden paths I like. Because once you’re seven or ten less-well trodden paths from that first, the path has become so faint that you might not actually be on a path at all. And if you are now walking through that virgin forest of originality, then you have strayed well.

But it’s not enough to think up a new idea. It has to work. And that’s another less well trodden path all on its own. Landscape is one thing, characterisation and plotting quite another. And this is what I enjoy about the sort of writing I’m attempting in Shades of Grey – to try and give the mundane a narrative force all of its own. Two guys in a room and one of them has a gun? To me, that’s just plain lazy. Two guys in a room and one of them has lied about whether he has seen the last rabbit or not? And this one lie is enough to have someone ostracised by society and a need to prove themselves as redemption? Now that’s drama, and what’s more, it’s unconventional drama. The reader is always looking for something new and fresh and interesting, and since all the stories have pretty much been written, the bold frontier for authors these days is to further the technique of how they can be told – with different settings, different characters, different times – and for me, different values.

In case you’re wondering, we DO find out where all the spoons went, and you can learn how a tree goes Purple, and why the Green Room is better than the Mildew. You may even learn why nobody comes back from High Saffron, why there is a Caravaggio in the Greyzone and what Jane put in the Prefect’s scones. It’s narrative drive, but not as we usually know it. For me, the best Big Idea is the sneaky Small Idea that overtakes you on the inside when you’re not watching.

—-

Shades of Grey: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Read an excerpt of the novel. Visit the Shades of Grey Web site. Follow Jasper Fforde on Twitter.

Want a Big Idea that’s about a really big idea? Well, this week’s book is about quantum physics, and it doesn’t get much bigger than that (well, given the scale quantum physics works on, it actually doesn’t get much smaller than that, but you know what I mean — it’s a really big idea about really small things). Just the words “quantum physics” makes some people itchy, and don’t think author Chad Orzel doesn’t know it — he teaches physics for a living as a professor at Union College. But to show the subject is not as intimidating as all that, Orzel proposes to show that even our canine friends can follow the subject — and use it to their advantage when, say, chasing squirrels.

Thus: How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, featuring Orzel and his dog Emmy discussing Particle-Wave Duality, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the Many-Worlds Interpretation and other very cool ideas in quantum physics. Does it work? It does indeed; this is a great book for folks who are interested in science and physics, whatever their previous level of knowledge on the subject (that’s a hint for you last-minute Christmas shoppers). I personally liked the book enough to give it a blurb; I’m a big fan of books that make science understandable for everyone, and Orzel (and Emmy) have just the right touch for that. This is a fun and fascinating book.

All of this leaves unanswered the question: “Why would a person think to teach physics to his dog in the first place”? Here’s Orzel to explain.

CHAD ORZEL:

There’s an old saying that you never really understand a subject until you try to teach it to someone else. It turns out that the best way to understand quantum mechanics is to teach it to your dog.

The big idea at the heart of the book is “Quantum mechanics is just about the coolest thing ever.” Because, really, it is– you’ve got particles that behave like waves and vice versa; objects whose properties aren’t determined until they’re measured; even “virtual particles” that pop into existence from empty space, and disappear again in a fleeting instant. What could be cooler than that? It’s even weirder than science fiction– if you had tried to sell modern physics to a pulp magazine in the early 20th century, they’d have laughed at you. And yet, quantum mechanics is one of the best-tested theories in the history of science. All of these bizarre phenomena are experimentally verified, to something like 14 decimal places.

And quantum physics is not just some abstract idea with no practical implications. Quantum ideas are the basis for most of the coolest things in modern life. You wouldn’t be able to read this without quantum physics: the modern telecommunications networks that form the backbone of the Internet use diode lasers, which rely on the quantum nature of light and matter to operate. Even the computer you’re (presumably) reading this on would not be possible without a detailed understanding of the quantum physics of electrons inside solids, and how they can be manipulated to make silicon computer chips.

Of course, “Quantum mechanics is just about the coolest thing ever” is not, by itself, enough to make a book. If you want to write a new book on the subject, you need a hook to grab people who wouldn’t ordinarily read a book about physics.

In my case, the hook is a talking dog. My dog Emmy, to be precise, whose interest in quantum mechanics and its potential use in catching squirrels and bunnies is the jumping-off point for explaining the theory. Each chapter opens with a conversation between me and Emmy about some aspect of quantum physics, followed by a more detailed explanation of the physics for interested humans (and dogs).

I’d like to be able to say that the whole talking-to-the-dog-about-physics thing was a carefully calculated move to bring physics to a general audience. In reality, it was a total accident– I wrote a couple of talking-to-the-dog blog posts (Bunnies Made of Cheese and Many Worlds, Many Treats), and they were a big hit. The book just sort of happened after that.

Once I started, though, it became clear that dogs and quantum physics are a great fit. Anyone who owns a dog knows that they approach the world as an endless source of surprise and wonder, and readily accept many things that would drive humans nuts. If you’ve ever watched a dog staring intently at nothing, you know that the idea of “virtual particles” will be no problem for a dog. If dog treats appeared out of nothing in the middle of our kitchen, Emmy would take it as vindication (and you can be sure she would see to it that they vanished very quickly). Quantum indeterminacy is not a problem for a dog, as they never believe anything really exists until they’ve sniffed it thoroughly. And surely it’s easier to get your head around the idea of particles that are also waves than it is to figure out what cats are up to.

So, quantum physics is a natural fit with the canine mindset. And that turns out to be a great way to explain quantum physics to a human audience. People can relate to Emmy’s schemes to turn quantum physics to her advantage, and that provides an easy way to make a connection to even the weirdest ideas of quantum physics. If you can manage to think like a dog, it’s not that big a leap to an appreciation of the weird and wonderful quantum world.

Emmy’s voice is also a huge help in keeping the text moving. Whenever the explanations start to get a little thick (and they do, because quantum mechanics is heavy stuff), Emmy breaks in to ask for clarification, or express a key idea a different way, or just comment ironically on the density of the explanation. It’s a great way to keep the material from overwhelming the reader.

This was a fun book to write, especially the dog bits. And I certainly know a lot more about quantum mechanics than I did before I decided to try to teach it to my dog. I hope that humans reading it will enjoy it, and maybe learn some new science that they can teach to their own dogs.

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How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Visit DogPhysics.com, the official Web site for the book. Read a preview of the book and watch videos about the book. Learn more about Emmy, the physics-learning dog, and follow her on Twitter. You can follow Chad Orzel on Twitter, as well.