When we know something, it’s not just what we know but how we came to know it that determines how useful it is to us: How did we learn it? Is it from a trusted source? How will we save and store that knowledge? How will we pass it on? In a world where we can store entire encyclopedias on flash drives the size of a fingernail, this doesn’t seem like much of an issue. But it’s not that difficult to imagine a world where it might be.

Such a world exists in The Dead-Tossed Waves, author Carrie Ryan’s follow-up to her bestselling debut, The Forest of Hands and Teeth. In these books, the world of the living is small, poor, and clearly demarcated. In that world, what we know and how we know it has implications not only for how people live day to day, but also how they see the world… and how they imagine how the world can be.

CARRIE RYAN:

In my first book, The Forest of Hands and Teeth (released last year) Mary, my protagonist, lives in an amazingly circumscribed world — a small village in the middle of a forest full of zombies where everyone’s told there’s nothing left of humanity past the fences. Mary lives about 150 years after the zombie apocalypse and her village has nothing left from the before time — no books (other than one religious text), electricity, maps and the like. Every bit of information and knowledge they have is passed down through several generations.

I think of it a bit like playing a game of telephone — you know where one person whispers a phrase to the person sitting next to them and it gets passed around the room such that “I had eggs for breakfast” somehow becomes “bacon taped on cats is yummy”?

The idea of memory and the corruption of information over time fascinates me. We’re so reliant on outside sources of information today that if the apocalypse hit… what stories would we remember to pass down?

Because here’s the thing… once, about a decade ago, I sat with my ill grandmother while she told me stories from her life. In one of them, she described going to a dance at Amherst with her mother as a chaperone and wearing lavender stockings (during a time when such a color stocking was rare). One of the matrons at the dance asked my Nana to leave because of her shameless attire (re: lavender stockings). Her mother, my great-grandmother, straightened her back and gave one of the best retorts I’d ever herd — so perfect and cutting and yet also so poised. I remember listening to that story and thinking “this is where the strength of the women in my family comes from — this is how I am who I am.”

And yet I can’t remember what my great-grandmother’s oh-so-perfect retort was and no one else in my large family ever heard the story. It’s lost to time. This is the corrosion of memory.

Now imagine that on a larger scale: how to build things and cure things and repair things. How many miles in a light year or which clouds are cumulus and which are cirrus. All the things we turn to Wikipedia and books for — just slowly eroding away.

This is Mary’s world in the forest: the only information the villagers have is what’s passed down year after year with no influence from the outside world. So when I decided to write a sequel/companion book set beyond the forest, I suddenly had to figure out what would we retain and remember given slightly more resources?

My answer: not much more. In my second book, The Dead-Tossed Waves, Mary’s daughter, Gabry, grows up in a dead-end town at the edge of the ocean. There’s little communication between enclaves of survivors (no electricity because resources for things like wires is rare and travel is dangerous because roads are still rife with zombies). But even more disturbing is that there’s a pervasive feeling among the survivors of “what’s the use?”

What’s the point of caring or learning about art or physics or calculus in the face of everyday issues like keeping the town safe, farming fields, feeding mouths? Knowledge and learning becomes a luxury pretty quickly. At one point in the book a teacher comes to town and talks about the universe and gravity and most of the families pull their kids from school because to them, such information is useless.

Sometimes I think of these characters in my books — these random survivors — as living their lives with their heads down, sometimes glancing over their shoulders to ensure no zombies have breached their carefully structured safety. And then I imagine my protagonists standing, head raised, looking to the horizon and wondering what’s out there.

In the first book, this is Mary, staring at the forest and wondering if there’s a life on the other side. In the second book this is Gabry, growing up in a lighthouse by the ocean wondering if there’s an easier and safer life out there. And then the real question becomes: what causes someone to raise their head from the ground, to not just stare at the horizon but to go out after it?

Zombies can embody all sorts of themes: the slow crawl of death, fear of science/religion/technology/ourselves, inescapable nihilism. But to me, they often represent a life not fully lived. They are nothing more than pure existence shuffling through time with no dreams, hopes, desires or memories. This drives me to wonder what separates the character living life staring at the ground and the zombie straining at the fence?

What makes us raise our heads and go after something more? What makes us care about lives apart from our own? What’s the difference between the person who stands at the edge of the ocean day after day wondering what’s past the waves and the person who gets in a boat and paddles off to find the answer?

Often, it’s my own fear of not taking advantage of this life — of forgetting my grandmother’s stories, of not bothering to read poetry or look at art or remember what kind of flower grows on my front porch or caring about a dispute between two warring tribes on the other side of the world — that causes me to write about people who do take advantage of what they’re given and constantly grasp for more. I hope their drive and determination will bolster my own.

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The Dead-Tossed Waves: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|IndieBound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. See the book trailer. Visit Carrie Ryan’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

Angels and demons and neuroscientists, oh my! Skyler White’s got ‘em in her novel and Falling, Fly, and she’s not afraid to use them. She’s also not afraid to go deeper and look at what those angels and demons mean – not just in the literal sense of being angels and demons, but what these creatures might represent in the zeitgeist… and to her as an author. And now she’s here to lay it all out for you.

SKYLER WHITE:

Through a weird quirk of timing, the collective unconscious has bubbled up several fallen angel books recently. With one much, much bigger than my debut novel released in the same week, it’s tempting to poke the fallen angel blister here, and hypothesize on tumbled ideals as my ‘big idea’. But to the extent I’ve had any success as a writer, it’s come from writing the things that scare me, so I want to go a little bigger with The Big Idea, because mine is something I’ve been worried about.

My big idea is a bit of a dirty word. It’s archaic and medieval and I’ve spent the last two years concerned some editor or critic will paste it to my work, and I’ll be branded with it. The word is “allegory.” And, shamefully, I love it. I love mythology and Aesop and Orwell and Dante and god help me, I love Pilgrim’s Progress. I love it more than 80’s power ballads and musical theater and every other unsubtle, un-ironic guilty pleasure I’ve got. And I know it’s wrong. I know writers’ ideas must serve their stories. I know story arc and psychological realism are paramount. Nothing may be allowed to interfere with the pleasure a reader takes in a good story well told. The writer’s prose needs to step aside. The writer’s ideas need to move on back.

I’d like to say it was courage or rebellion that put me in opposition to the prevailing wisdom that allegory is naïve, primitive, and inherently didactic, but it was a less noble, more selfish impulse. I had a question I needed to explore, and fiction was the safest battleground to test myself against it. So I’m outing myself here: and Falling, Fly has an agenda. I have an ulterior motive. It’s not a political or moral agenda, and I didn’t have a lesson I was trying to impart, or an answer I wanted to teach. What I had was a question.

The question came out of a game I was playing with a group of friends who had all read Lynda Barry’s wonderful One! Hundred! Demons! and were experimenting together with naming our own personal ones. I was working on a portrait of a capitalist/addict demon who’s haunted me for years, called “Too Much is Not Enough,” and wound up with a single, simple question: what is desire? But it’s a simple question with a fractal edge. Why do we want what we can’t have? Is feminine desire different from men’s? What takes wanting away from a healthy, motivating need for nourishment or experience, and makes it an addiction or craving that cannot be sated? Can sexual hunger be translated to ice cream? What happens if the standard of living or parenting style delays practice or even experience with being denied? What does it mean if the sexiest thing a woman can hear is “I want you,” and she becomes what is desired rather than who desires? The only way I could think of tackling such a complex-but-simple question, short of continuing to muddle through my life-as-experiment, was through story.

Stories allow us to model different realities, to step into different skins, to try-before-you-buy different ways of being in or looking at the world. Some writers make models nearly identical to the world I see out my window. Through close observation and astute description, they offer a nearly photo-realistic experience of someone else’s life. Allegory sits on an opposite ledge. In allegory, what we see every day may still show up on the page, but it’s standing in for something we can never photograph. Even with the best CGI. Allegory isn’t about how acutely you can render the impossible in fantasy or the frightening into horror. It’s about what the magic and the monsters mean.

Allegory allowed me to look at the nature of desire from multiple angles and explore not only its different manifestations, but how they interact with one another. It let me introduce Olivia, the fallen angel of desire – the platonic ideal of desire in its corrupted, corporeal form – to Dominic, a neuroscientist to whom desire is reducible to neurochemical signals, and make them fall in love. With allegory, the son of a wealthy philanthropist can be a bit of comic relief and also a study in money-as-creative-force and privilege as a stultifying or even decaying state. But allegory also let me go ‘meta’ and create parallel story-worlds. In one, my symbolism is overt. A character can “mainline the memestream,” and what he creates in that parallel manifests in the other, more familiar one. I had a tremendous amount of fun playing across these worlds and with the ‘third rail’ of actual reality outside the story. I also found it an incredibly rich framework upon which to structure a plot.

But if an exploration of desire was the magical idea, allegory was the monster. I wanted to use the power of symbolism, but keep it obedient to the characters and their story. I wanted to invoke layers of meaning, but not burden my words. I don’t know if I pulled it off. But I know I want to.

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And Falling, Fly: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Watch the book trailer. Follow White on Twitter.

How does one write a user’s guide to the universe? After all, the universe is a pretty big place, and although we all use the universe on a daily basis, there’s a lot of stuff in it that we just don’t fiddle with (this is not necessarily a bad thing — most of us just aren’t equipped to handle an entire star, for example). Suffice to say there’s a lot going on in the universe, and even the people comfortable handling their corners of it have questions about the rest.

It’s “the rest of it” that Dave Goldberg and Jeff Blomquist want to explain in A User’s Guide to the Universe, and they came into the writing knowing one thing: when explaining the universe, it’s easy to get complicated, difficult to stay simple, and dangerous to be boring. Here’s how they got the most bang out of everything since the Big Bang.

DAVID GOLDBERG and JEFF BLOMQUIST:

There are a lot of books out there on physics and cosmology, and nearly every one of them touts as their chief virtue that they are “accessible.”  That said, we can’t tell you how many conversations we’ve had with our civilian friends about some science bestseller in which they say something along the lines of, “That book was amazing, though I’m sure I didn’t understand a tenth of it.”  There’s probably a bit of undue modesty here, but also a kernel of truth.  It’s our experience that most pop-sci books go for the “Wow” factor and as a result, they end up as beautifully written, almost poetic odes to the universe, but ones that are perhaps better at awing than illuminating.

A couple of years ago, we were teaching a freshman physics course at Drexel University, and frankly, we were bored with teaching students about pulleys and blocks on planes.  And the students were bored with those things, too.  We constantly got questions after class or in the hallways asking about things that they will most likely never get to see in a classroom: time travel, the time before the big bang, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.  But it wasn’t just them. At parties, on airplanes, while waiting at the DMV, we got questions from friends, from our editors, and sometimes from complete strangers.

And that’s where we came up with our big idea: answer the Big Questions.  But (and here’s the hard part) they had to be the sort of questions that people actually might — and do — ask, and not read like a FAQ for some freeware CD-burning program.

Can you break the light barrier?  Is there an exact duplicate of you somewhere else in time and space? What happens if you fall into a black hole? These are the kinds of questions complete strangers found so important. Our inaugural question, the one that really got us started, was, “I know the universe is expanding, but what is it expanding into?”  From Nova, the Discover Channel, or even other books, most people are pretty aware of the buzzwords and core concepts, but not what, say, it actually means for a universe to expand, let alone what’s on the other side.  And that’s where we come in.

Our goal is to explain not only what we know, but how we know it, and more importantly, what it means. We wanted to leave readers with the sort of gut understanding that physicists have, only without the math gumming up the works.  We wanted to make clear the distinction between what we really know, and what’s still on the fringe.  We wanted to focus on the science, and not the history; we give credit where credit is due, but don’t go in for the narrative description of “Eureka moments.”

Just as important, we didn’t want to take ourselves too seriously. We realize that every “irreverent guide to physics” tries to make physics fun and accessible, but we opted to throw propriety to wind entirely.  At the center of this are our cartoons.  During graduate school, Jeff papered his office with terrible puns, including (our favorites), “The Solar Neighborhood” (which showed Pluto passed out on his lawn), and ridiculously dorky “How physicists can cheat at tag,” which we put into the final book, and which appears below.

We figured that if we were having fun, readers would, too.  We put in (à la Dave Barry) silly footnotes.  We make fun of our readers (see if you can find the Easter egg in the index), and our mascot is an alien named Dr. Snuggles.  In short, we wanted to write the funniest and most useful physics book you’ll read all year.

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A User’s Guide to the Universe: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. See additional cartoons. Download the coloring book.

Everyone asks questions – but are they asking the right questions? Author Teri Hall is asking herself (and us) this particular question, especially in the context of her debut YA novel The Line, in which certain questions (and whether they’re asked at all) take on a critical importance. Here’s Hall, to explain the questions, and to speculate on why the answers matter.

TERI HALL:

The Line is a dystopia, set in the near future.  I got the notion for the novel while I was sleeping—yes, that’s right—I had a dream. (Take a moment to groan in disgust if you hate it when writers say that.)

It was just a scene really—a scene where a young girl was sitting in the corner of a room, a room where all the walls were made of glass.  It was night, and there was a rain storm, the kind where the rain is coming down so hard that it cascades down the glass in sheets, and makes everything outside look wavery and vague.  The girl was looking out into the night, trying to see, but the rain and the dark made it impossible. The girl “felt” scared in my dream, but she really wanted to see whatever she thought was out there in the dark.  There was a flash of lightening, and something—I didn’t see what—was illuminated.  The girl gasped, and when she gasped, I sat straight up in bed, shocked into wakefulness.

I thought about that scene for days, because I don’t generally have dreams like that, where nothing is familiar or at least signifies something familiar.  I wondered why that girl was sitting in a glass room alone at night.  I wondered what she saw outside when that lightening struck.  I wondered why she was so afraid.

I wondered what world that was, that I had seen in that dream.  And I started to write about what I thought that a world like that might be like.

That’s how I got the notion for The Line.  But the Big Idea?  Well, the big idea behind The Line is a question.  A few questions, actually.  Here they are:

1) Why are we so afraid of the Other?    (Yep, the Other in the capital letter sense of Other.)

2) What does it truly mean to have courage?  Can that quality ever be relative?

3) Ditto on the quality of integrity.

4) Why does our notion of beauty hinge on the quality of harmlessness?

5) Can people really change?  Do we get a second chance?

I hope the questions I’m asking in The Line are question that people still care about.  I think they are.  I’m especially thrilled when the young folk (I love saying that phrase—it makes me feel all creaky and ancient even though I fancy I’m not, yet) get excited about these sorts of questions.

I had my very first classroom visit the other day, with a class of 7th graders who read ARCs of The Line.  One boy described his favorite scene in the book—a scene where something fairly chilling happens on a public street in a small town, and nobody blinks an eye.  They all just keep on walking, or worse, they watch, with a sort of sick exhilaration.

I asked the class if they could think of any countries where that scene could happen today, in real life.  They answered quickly (very SMART kids), naming countries like North Korea, or China. And they were spot on.  The scene could happen in places like that today.

But I wanted to say to them (I didn’t say it) that the scene could happen here, in The United States.  I wanted to say the scene does happen here.  And that we don’t seem to be noticing.  I wanted to ask them what they thought they would do, if that scene happened in front of them.  I wanted to ask them what they thought their parents might do. I wanted to see if they were aware of differences there, and if so, why those differences might exist.

I’m afraid, most of the time, of the answers to those questions.  I want people to think about those questions, long and hard, and have answers at hand before they need them.  And that’s the Big Idea behind The Line.

—-

The Line: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt (pdf link).

Words are funny things, and I mean that in a “funny weird” sort of way, not the “funny ha ha” sort of way (although words can be that way, too. I mean, obviously. Hmm. I’m drifting). But what if words were more than words. What if words were more than their metaphorical content? What if they could literally (heh) leap from the page and do things? What would that world of words be like?

Debut author Blake Charlton has given this very idea a lot of thought, and the result is Spellwright, a fantasy of words and more. And to explain you a little bit about his thinking, Charlton is here, using more words. Words! They’re everywhere, man.

BLAKE CHARLTON:

What if you could peel written words off the page and make them physically real? Could you cut yourself on a sentence fragment? Thrust a sharply worded invective at an enemy’s throat? How would physical language shape culture, technology, history? Tolkien created Middle-earth for his languages, not vice-versa. But could I dream up a world built by–not around–its languages? More importantly, could I intertwine a character’s story into this world?

These questions occurred to me when I was an undergrad studying the near-magical language of Shakespeare–and sundry other dead guys–as well as the two magical languages that exist in this world: nucleotides and polypeptides. I’m being a wee bit metaphorical here, but squint at a genome in the right light and you’ll see that any microscopic text that holds over three billion letters, governs its own expression, and self-propagates is astoundingly magical. (Bio Geeks: go BANANAS creating an analogous statement for a proteome!)

Back then, I was a pre-med trying to double major in English and Chemistry. (But I’m feeling much better now, thanks for asking!) Now a medical student, I’m more balanced but still struggle with anxieties about my dyslexia. You see, I didn’t learn to read fluently until I was thirteen and began sneaking paperbacks by Robert Jordan, Robin Hobb, and Ursula LeGuin (so so much LeGuin) into special ed study hall. Fantasy saved me, transformed me from an angry brat into earnest geek.

That’s why, when I daydreamed about a world with physical language, my mind jumped to the classic fantasy clichés of a Magical University, a Prophesy, and a Chosen One. Yeah, I know: you’re cringing. But, baby, don’t leave me. I love you. Here, take my hand, and let me explain why you should fight the gagging that started when you read “Chosen One.”

Everyone says to “Write about what you know,” or “Write about what you love.” That sounds pleasant, but screw it. Write only about the familiar beloved and you’ll get saccharine mush. Add a third ingredient: “Write about what you fear.” Do that and you’ve got powerful flavor. Do that and you must experience your terror, discover how much you can tolerate. Do that and you’re cooking, not with mush and sweetener, but with honey and habañeros.

Disability is what I fear most. I still dream sometimes that I’m on the special ed short bus. So let’s connect the dots of my fear and love, dyslexia and language. What if you were born into a world of magical language but misspelled any text you touched?

“Okay, bald guy,” you say, “I’m holding back the cliché gag reflex, mostly because I pity your dyslexic yet glossy self. But so what if your protag misspells magical text? Check the magically world-traveling text of my emails. If spellchecking programs could feel pain, I’d give mine a strangulated hernia, and nothing bad happens.”

That’s because you only screw up the English. Your PERL and Ruby on Rails and all your other gemstone-based languages are stuck in your plastic thinking box. You’d be more worried if a misspell could send the C++ flying out to wrap around your neck.

In the world of Spellwright, some magical languages affect matter, others energy. Spells behave like computer programs, executing their commands exactly; and like most biopolymers, folding into a proper shape to gain function. Simple spells might levitate something or allow spellwrights to correspond magically. Adept authors might make textual creatures–writing a body from prose that affects matter and a mind from prose that affects energy. These creatures, called “constructs,” might be laboring gargoyles or ghosts of pure energy. Masterful spellwrights might even write textual extensions of their own minds, making themselves hyper-intelligent.

Into this world drops Nicodemus Weal, who is so prolific in these languages that he was once thought to be the Chosen One fated to prevent Ye Olde Demonic Invasion. Oh, darling, you’re looking dyspeptic again. Take another deep breath. I’m bringing in clichés for a reason. Let’s quote Scott Lynch. You like Scott Lynch, right? Such a nice and creatively obscene man who in Spectra Pulse noted, “In fiction, execution trumps everything. Clichés cannot survive to become (in)famous without continual, skillful, and passionate reinvention.” Yes, I’m serving up a slice of Chosen-One-Vs-Demonic-Invasion Pie, which has been baked so often it’s gotten a bit tough, a bit bland. But what if Nicodemus’s disability disqualified him from becoming the Chosen One, permanently? What if the Demonic Hordes aren’t interested in devouring humans, but in altering human language and how language can exist in the universe? What would it mean to be human without language? What evolutions of language might make us post-human?

“But, Blake,” you say, “kicking the crotch of what-essentially-makes-us-human has been the signature move of the data-dumping steel toes of hard SF. How can you kick said groin with the brightly beaded moccasins of a non-gritty, megawatt magic-system, YA-Okay epic fantasy?” Mostly I can because I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to. But also, I can do it with a softer touch. I’m gushing here about my trilogy’s Big Ideas; trust me not to dump it all on the reader all at once. If I’ve hit my mark, Spellwright is a fast, fun, accessible fantasy that draws you into a world built by its living words.

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

Read or listen to an excerpt here. Visit Charlton’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Author N.K. Jemisin has a lot to be excited about today: Yesterday saw the release of her debut novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and the book is getting the sorts of reviews, starred and otherwise, that most debut authors can only dream about (“Multifaceted characters struggle with their individual burdens and desires, creating a complex, edge-of-your-seat story with plenty of funny, scary, and bittersweet twists,” reads one of those starred reviews, from Publishers Weekly).

But in the middle of all of that excitement in the present, Jemisin is thinking about history: Who writes it, what it reveals (and what it doesn’t), and what it means for the people who have learn their history or be doomed by it. How does this tie into her novel? Well, I’m glad you asked. N.K. Jemisin is on hand to tell you.

N.K. JEMISIN:

This week, in my copious free time, I’m reading Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. It’s basically a dissection of the history that most US citizens learned in school, and some of its core fallacies — like the idea that the New World was an undeveloped, sparsely-populated wilderness before Europeans arrived. In reality, Mann explains, the pre-Columbian Americas had a population to match that of Europe — much of it concentrated in sprawling urban-centric empires like those of ancient Rome. And like ancient Rome, these New World civilizations thoroughly engineered the landscape, building aqueducts and roads and planting forests to optimize hunting, fishing, flooding, and commerce. (Did you know there’s a “Great Wall of Peru”? I didn’t.) It’s a fascinating book, though obviously not without controversy, and it seems well-researched and well-written. I’m not done with it yet, but I’m enjoying what I’ve read so far.

Why am I talking about somebody else’s book when I should be talking about mine? Because this is the kind of thing that really gets me going: hidden truths. History is written by the victors, after all — which means that beneath many historical “facts” lie counter-facts and conflicting events, illogical assumptions and unrealized motivations, all of which would shake us to our foundations if we ever found out the truth. Maybe. Because there are always those who have reason to keep the truth alive, often at great personal risk, even if only via whispered tales and half-remembered songs. And yes, via a few lies too, told maliciously or through ignorance. One person’s truth is always someone else’s heresy. This is what I decided to write an epic fantasy about.

Hidden truth isn’t really a new concept in fantasy, granted. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” (LotR) trilogy is basically the coda of a much longer symphony that most of its principals don’t know they’re playing. Discovering the symphony’s earlier movements (OMG, Uncle Bilbo’s gag ring is really Teh Ultimate Accessory of Ultimate Eeeevil!!) is a big part of what makes the story “epic”. Thing is, what makes LotR work for most readers is that it isn’t really about the whole symphony. Although the scope of the story widens as each hidden truth is revealed, it remains resolutely centered on people — the hobbits, mostly — who are ignorant/innocent of the weighty history that precedes them. And they don’t particularly want to be enlightened. Even as they discover the truth, they don’t really care about it beyond its effect on their everyday lives and comfort. With the revelation of the One Ring’s origins, their whole world has been knocked off its foundations… but all they really want to do is put it back the way it was, so they can go home and have a beer.

This kind of epic fantasy has always felt incomplete to me, somehow. Yeah, sure, there’s a certain mental comfort food in the idea of putting the world back to rights. But there’s always a part of me that wonders, which rights should it be put back to? Did the heroes make the best choice, or just the easiest one? Who gets to answer that question? But such questions aren’t easy to answer, which is why I think a lot of fantasy simply doesn’t try.

So. In The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, I start with a woman who isn’t happy with the world as it is. Yeine would like to go home and have a beer too — and she’s the kind of girl who would happily do so, though never to excess. (She’s very responsible.) That beer’s not likely to happen, however, because her kingdom is suffering through a terrible economic crisis and most of her people can barely afford food, much less beer. The reasons for this crisis seem simple at first: her people have offended the most powerful family in the world. Yeine’s mother, once a member of that family, committed the sin of marrying beneath her station — Yeine’s father — and the family disinherited her and blacklisted Yeine’s kingdom in retaliation.

Standard overthrow-the-tyrants fantasy plot, right? Well, no. In fact Yeine’s world exists in a golden age of peace and prosperity. War is strictly controlled and limited, slavery and child exploitation have been eradicated, starvation and illiteracy are rare, and all nations function at a baseline of technological and social sophistication so that none are left behind. All these wonders are the doing of a single family — the same family that’s tormenting Yeine’s people. Overthrow them, and the result would be anarchy, horror, and death on a global scale.

Or so they say.

But history is written by the victors in this world too, so Yeine spends most of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms trying to figure out the truth about her estranged relatives and the sources of their power. But what happens if she learns the truth? What if those truths could destroy the world? Is she really doing a good thing by trying to put the world back to rights? Which rights should she put it back to? And will she make this decision based on what’s best for the world, or based on her own selfish motives?

These aren’t easy questions, and although the first book wraps up Yeine’s story pretty solidly by the end, I don’t think I go for the easy answers. The implications of Yeine’s decision will impact her world for two more books, and the ultimate outcome… well, I’m still writing Book 3. But let’s just put it this way: in the end, no one will want to put things back the way they were. Mostly because that would mean going through the whole mess all over again.

(I, however, will want a beer.)

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The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read the first three chapters here. Follow N.K. Jemisin on Twitter.

Hey: Do you like your life? If your answer is “sure, but it could always be better,” then David Louis Edelman would like a word with you. Edelman is thinking about humans and their capacity for dissatisfaction, and how that concept relates to his acclaimed “Jump 225,” trilogy, of which Geosynchron is the concluding volume. Will you be satisfied with his exploration of both? That, my friend, is entirely up to you.

DAVID LOUIS EDELMAN:

Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. You either love it to pieces like cats and mieces, or you think it’s a pretentious piece of crap.

I belong in the former category, and it’s partly because of a scene from the novel that never made it into the film. The book begins with the man-ape known as Moon-Watcher encountering a strange piece of advanced alien technology. This black monolith shows him an image of a fat and happy family of humans – humans who aren’t constantly starving, who aren’t constantly worried for their safety. Clarke writes:

Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy – of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step toward humanity.

Here’s the thing that’s intrigued me ever since I read those lines back in junior high school – one of the things that inspired my Jump 225 trilogy, consisting of the novels Infoquake, MultiReal and Geosynchron. We in the developed world are those fat and happy humans that Moon-Watcher was envying. We don’t have to worry about starvation, we’re not constantly looking over our shoulders for marauding tigers. On Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we’ve got the physiological level down, no sweat.

But we’ve still got that vague feeling of discontent. No matter how much we achieve or how comfortable we get, there’s always a fatter and happier group of humans right over the horizon. Maybe they’ve got a hundred million dollars in their bank account. Maybe they’ve got a bigger plasma screen or a faster PC or a cooler car. But this isn’t just a question of materialism; even people who aren’t caught on the endless treadmill of Newer and Shinier Stuff feel this discontent. Maybe they feel they’re not having enough sex, or maybe they feel they’re not reading enough, or maybe they’re dissatisfied with their carbon footprint. Maybe they’re doing just fine on a personal level, but they feel the world around them needs some serious work.

Regardless, something’s driving us to get out of bed in the morning and to compete, to strive, to better ourselves and the world around us.

The human race is powered by dissatisfaction, as Arthur C. Clarke noted above. We have this innate and unquenchable urge to progress. To change. To move. That constant feeling of vague unease that Moon-Watcher experienced is written in our DNA. It may have been an evolutionarily useful trait that helped the species survive the lean times, but now we’re stuck with it like a vestigial limb.

But why? And where are we progressing to?

In my novel Infoquake (book 1 of the Jump 225 trilogy), the character Figaro Fi talks about this constant urge in terms of “bio/logic” software, or software that runs on the human body:

Want is everywhere. It’s in people. It’s in programming. In politics. In nature. The universe just won’t stay still. It wants to move; even its smallest particles want to be in motion. Take bio/logics. Aren’t bio/logic programs in a natural state of incompleteness? We release 1.0 of a program, and inevitably it is imperfect. Version 1.0s want a version 2.0, don’t they? They practically beg for it. You toil for months on version 2.0, and you’ve still barely tapped into its bottomless reservoir of want. Version 2.0 wants a version 3, version 3.0 wants a version 4, and so on and on and on and on and on – forever!

If any civilization should be ready to declare victory over the world and put the urge to improve to rest, it’s the civilization of my Jump 225 novels. The people in my novels have nanobots called OCHREs floating in their bloodstream which cure disease. They can instantly project a virtual body around the globe using something called the multi network. They can hook into their version of the Internet straight from their brains, and hold silent conversations without letting on that they’re even communicating with someone. They’ve got a network for virtual sex that takes place entirely in the mind, so it’s free of mess and disease.

Sounds like paradise to us. But then again, imagine what Moon-Watcher would think if you told him you have a soft bed, a climate-controlled house, a wheeled vehicle that can travel seventy miles an hour, and a small metal box that allows you to talk to anyone on the entire planet, instantly. Oh yeah, and you also have so much food that you can tape it to your cat just for fun.

Moon-Watcher would have trouble imagining why you ever have a moment of want or dissatisfaction. And we might feel that way about the world of Jump 225. Yet there’s still room for a ruthless and amoral entrepreneur like my protagonist Natch to trammel over his competitors. There are still warring segments of society and bickering politicians. My secondary protagonist Jara still worries about whether she can pay the bills and whether she can find true love and self-worth.

So if we’re still struggling a thousand years from now, will we ever reach perfection? (It’s not for nothing that the standard greeting of the characters in the Jump 225 universe is “Towards Perfection.”) One day we’ll figure out homelessness and war and poverty and starvation and disease, right? Could we ever solve all of our problems, and what would that look like?

Glad you asked.

Into the middle of all of my characters’ striving and struggling comes a radical new technology called MultiReal. I don’t have space to describe the technology in full here – that takes most of book 2 – but it’s basically an ultra-powerful prediction engine that allows you to see the consequences of your choices. You can predict where you’re going to hit a baseball to the extent that you can hit it exactly where you want, every time. You can shoot a gun and never miss your target.

During the course of book 2, MultiReal, we discover that not only can you determine whether you should take road A or road B… by cracking the code of human consciousness, the software allows you to actually take both roads at once. Avatar can win the Academy Award for Best Picture, and The Hurt Locker can too — as can Star Trek and I Love You, Man, for that matter. (In real life, of course, we all know that Up deserves the Oscar. I will brook no discussion on this.)

Let’s go back to the theory that dissatisfaction powers the human race. How can you possibly be dissatisfied with power like MultiReal at your disposal? If everyone can get what they want, wouldn’t that dispense with human conflict altogether? Wouldn’t that make governments obsolete? Where else could the human race possibly progress to?

But even if MultiReal represents Perfection for the human race, what’s the price for achieving it? In Geosynchron, the concluding volume of the trilogy, our protagonist Natch finds out exactly how humanity can get itself off of that endless treadmill of dissatisfaction, what that means, and what it costs.

Is that price worth paying? And if so, who should pay it?

Infoquake, MultiReal and Geosynchron are in stores and available online now. And I just discovered last week that Locus will say this about Geosynchron in its March issue: “This smart, idiosyncratic blend of cyberpunk, libertarian entrepreneurship, and social engineering will, I think, stand as a seminal work of 21st century SF.”

Which has rid me of my own vague sense of dissatisfaction. For a few days, at least.

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Geosynchron: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Visit the Geosynchron Web site. Read an excerpt. Visit David Louis Edelman’s blog.

Surprise! While usually I post one or two Big Ideas a week, this week there are three. Because sometimes I overcommit. Hey, it happens. It’s not like it’s a bad thing. Especially in this case, because this week’s first Big Idea comes from New York Times bestseller and Stoker and World Fantasy Award-winner Robert McCammon, who is back in action with Mister Slaughter, a book of intrigue and murder set in colonial-era New York, and part of a series featuring professional “problem-solver” Matthew Corbett.

And in the writing of the series, McCammon found himself constructing not only a multi-volume adventure, but also something else entirely — the sort of apparatus first thought up by no less than H.G. Wells. McCammon explains, below.

ROBERT McCAMMON:

Suddenly I found myself creating a time machine.

Yes, I read the book and saw the movie (both versions, enjoyed the one starring Rod Taylor the best) but here I was actually putting one together, strapping myself into the red leather seat and traveling with a hum of computer and whisper of pages into the past.

What was I thinking?

And, more importantly, where was I going?

Or, to be more correct, where am I going?

Well, I do know where I’m going but I’m not sure how I’ll get there yet. This is all preface to say that I find myself writing a mystery/suspense series set, among other locales, in the town of New York, population five thousand citizens, in the 18th century. I never intended in my long career to write a series. Creating a time machine was not on my agenda. But suddenly I began to put odd pieces together—my love of history, of the detective novel, of the supernatural and macabre, and yes even of science fiction—and the thing began to first whisper, then hum and whir. And I was off on a voyage unforeseen and frankly quite frightening.

I am writing about a young man named Matthew Corbett, an orphan and law clerk, who becomes by his wits and circumstances a “problem-solver” in New York. This occupation brings him into contact with both gentlemen and ladies of that era as well as cold-blooded killers and those dark souls—both male and female—who would like to use his head as a hatstand. In particular, Matthew through the course of this series comes to the attention of one Professor Fell, a shadowy emperor of crime who has interesting plans for both the future of the colonies and Matthew’s own destiny.

I’ve written three Matthew Corbett novels so far, namely Speaks the Nightbird, The Queen of Bedlam, and the newly released Mister Slaughter.

My big idea was not just to write one book, but to write ten books that flow together as one. Events of the first book spur events in the second, and events in the second drive the third book forward. Characters move from one book to the next. The time frame between each book is at most a season. Someone who plays a minor role in one book may appear as a major character in the next. Mysteries and plots are solved and completed in each book, yet some threads—and questions—are left to be completed in the next volume, or the one after that. I know what the major plot is, and what the overwhelming purpose is that Professor Fell has set his sight upon, yet how I’m going to get there is both the challenge and fearsome fun of directing this particular time machine.

And it is fun, really. One of my challenges is to make it so. To make the characters real, to use suspense and an essence of “strangeness” that hopefully makes a book memorable, but also to emphasize humanity and add a good measure of humor to the mix. I’m challenging the reader in a way, as well, because hidden in each book (and sometimes not hidden very deeply beneath the surface) are the names of three or four fictional detectives. So, in a way, this particular time machine is a demonstration of my affection for the detective story, and the great characters who have gone before.

Or, in the case of my time-traveling machine, characters who have not yet been born upon the stage, but are destined to leave their mark upon a particularly impressionable young reader in the far-distant era of the 1960s.

I hope my character of Matthew Corbett can stand cloak-and-tricorn with the best of them. He will go through many trials and tribulations. He will pass across the lives of many beautiful ladies and many villains who wear their ugliness like badges of crooked honor. He will come to many a rough road and treacherous wilderness, on his journey into the dark territory of Professor Fell.

It’s my hope, also, that Matthew is worthy enough to find a place in someone else’s time machine in the unknown and unknowable land we call ‘the future’.

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Mister Slaughter: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s|Subterranean

Read an excerpt of Mister Slaughter (pdf link). Learn more about the Matthew Corbett series.

Here we have a first for The Big Idea: Our first translated essay. Alexey Pehov writes in Russian, and in Russian, he’s done very well, winning awards and racking up sales over the last decade with his Chronicles of Siala series and other novels. Now his debut novel Shadow Prowler, the first of the Chronicles of Siala, has come to the English language (translated by Andrew Bromfield, who translated Sergei Lukyanenko’s Night Watch series), and Pehov wants to tell you about it — and how his desire to play with the form of fairytales propelled him out of the ordinary life of an orthodontist (no, really) and into an extraordinary life as a fantasy writer.

ALEXEY PEHOV:

People often asked me this question: You are a qualified doctor; you enjoy a great profession and a promising career; so why did you start writing? What was the catalyst for venturing into the creative world?

The desire to write this book didn’t begin right away. It was a long and roundabout process with ideas percolating in my mind for many years before finally forming themselves onto paper.

When I was seven years old, I realized that when a cartoon show or a book ended—that it was not the “end” at all. Because of one’s imagination, the story could continue or one could make up an entire new story. No need to depend on television, books or computer games anymore!

A person could close his or her eyes and imagine any situation and any characters with their own set of magic system and relationships… and that imaginary world could even live on in one’s dreams: Diving to the depths of the warm sea, climbing towards a snowy peak or watching the setting of two suns.

My dream to create new worlds as a writer, however, could only be realized after graduation, as studying took up all of my time.

Despite coming to writing later in life, how lucky was I to discover the best form of escapism—turning back the clock to childhood and returning to the world of fairytales. What kid doesn’t like magic and adventure?

Some people say that life consists of a series of coincidences and complex decisions. And when we make complex decision, we only choose one side of a complicated issue.

Unlike real life, fairytales often involve clear-cut extremes: good and evil, ugly and beautiful, rich and poor. With my own stories, I like to include the grey area in between. A story without nuances is like food without salt or pepper. You can eat it, but it can taste rather bland.

I had always wanted to transform the world depicted in fairytales into a more controversial—or even contradictory—one. A world where the heroes and the enemies are not immediately apparent, where characters sometimes break out of their fairytale archetypes. A world not unlike our own real world.

Therefore, readers may be surprised by some of the developments in Shadow Prowler, or even find some of its occurrences odd from the standpoint of classic fantasy.

So why did this Russian doctor choose to write stories of a fantastical bent?  Fantasy, for me, has always appeared as a bright, sparkling bird for which no limit in distance, altitude or speed exists. Fantasy has no boundaries.

Traveling is one of my hobbies, and in the past years, I had trekked to Mount Everest, biked the Sahara, navigated the Ecuadorian jungles and visited remote islands. Everywhere I went, I met such unique and exciting people—and any one of them could have been the hero for someone’s book.

So for my main character in Shadow Prowler, I chose to give him an ambiguous profession. At first glance, thievery and heroism may not be very compatible concepts, but this decision wound up working quite well. And as we know, in an adventure tale, stranger things have happened.

So welcome to the world of Siala! A story taken from the black-and-white pages of folk and fairy tales, so to speak, but infused with the multicolor complication of nontraditional heroes and battles. I hope you enjoy it.

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Shadow Prowler: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt of the novel. See the book trailer.

The world is a complicated place — even when the world is a fantasy world with dragons. Or, at least, it can be a complicated place even when there are dragons. Why? Because dragons can be complicated… and more to the point, people are always complicated, no matter where and when they are. At least Stephen Deas seems to think so, and in his high fantasy novel The Adamantine Palace (the first in a series), he mines those complications for drama and adventure, and yes, throws in a dragon or two to spice it all up. What comes of all this complication? Here’s the author himself to clear it up for you.

STEPHEN DEAS:

First, let me be clear about one thing. “The Memory of Flames” (of which The Adamantine Palace is the first part) is flash-bang fantasy. It’s written to be fast, furious and fun. Dragons! Intrigue! Murder! Sword-fights! That sort of thing. There’s a ton of reviews scattered around the internet that will tell you all about that side of things and I don’t intend to say any more. I will explain one piece of background, however, relevant to the Big Idea theme here.

The dragons in these books are monsters. They’re not cute, they’re not cuddly, and the only reason anyone gets to ride around on the back of them is because they are forcibly subdued by alchemical potions that are fed to them from birth. In fact, these dragons are so dangerous that for even one to break free could spell disaster for pretty much the entire civilisation (no prizes for guessing what happens pretty close to page one).

So you can, and probably should, read it as a straight epic fantasy with a cast of shady characters and a rampaging dragon that’s pretty ticked off about having been kept in a drugged stupor. I had no pretensions to anything more than a story about kick-ass dragons that ran on rocket-fuel when I set out to write these books; but sometimes when you sit down and write, you don’t get quite what you asked for.

Under its skin, “The Memory of Flames” started exploring questions about how we manage our monsters (and in this way, the dragons are a metaphor for whatever huge thing scares the hell out of you, whether it’s global warming, social welfare, lack of social welfare, nuclear weapons or fire-breathing monsters). The world I’ve written exists in an unstable equilibrium, held in place by layers of checks and balances and opposing forces. In that respect, I think the same is true of any complex civilisation (hey, if we all quit doing what we’re paid to do and just did whatever we fancied, eventually the machines would all pack in and stop working by themselves).

So what happens when someone gives the status quo a good hard kick? How do people react when their power is threatened? Or when it unexpectedly comes their way? What do people do when they realise something must be stopped AT ALL COSTS? How long will people live in denial of what is happening right in front of them because to acknowledge it would derail their own personal agenda?

In writing “The Memory of Flames,” these sorts of questions came up a lot. Control of information, too. The alchemists, whose duty it is to keep the dragons subdued, keep many things to themselves. Are they right to keep their secrets? What happens when some of these secrets get out? Certainly there are plenty of people who would use those secrets for their own ends; then again, what opportunities are lost because the right person in the right place at the right time didn’t have the first clue what was going on? Every society has its monsters in some form or another and has ways to keep them in check. Are they the right ones? “The Memory of Flames” doesn’t offer any answers to that. Just asks a lot of questions and shows a lot of ways it can go horribly wrong.

Like I said at the start, this is under the skin. I don’t want to by preachy (hate to be preached at) and the story always comes first. Fast and furious and a shit-load of fun, like I said. Take it or leave it, you choose. But I don’t see why the two can’t go hand in hand. Science Fiction has been doing it since the genre was invented (you might even argue that’s its raison d’etre). So I see no reason why epic fantasy can’t do the same thing every bit as well.

The worlds and the sceneries may change, but humans and their problems remain the same wherever they are.

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The Adamantine Palace: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt of the novel. See Deas’ blog. Follow Deas on Twitter.