Chatting with Jo Fletcher, my UK publisher, about Braking Day. More particularly about what to put on the back cover. What, she wants to know, is the book about? More accurately, what do I, the author, think it’s about? Fortunately, because I am a simple soul, there is a simple answer: it’s an adventure/mystery set on a sub-light starship. Thrills! Spills! Suspense!
Yes, of course. But what’s it about?
And there’s the rub. Because with SF, perhaps more than any other genre, there’s always something else going on. It’s not simply about the story, it’s about the other stuff: the thread forever woven through our fireside tales of vacuum-stranded souls, alien princesses, and starships. SF has the power to make readers think about stuff they would otherwise refuse to, because you can take it out of the everyday context. It’s a wormhole for the mind. A shortcut to a completely different perspective. One of the underlying themes of BRAKING DAY, for instance, is what it means to be “other”. The “other” here has nothing to do with the here and now. But we could just as easily be talking about race, or gender, or religion: whatever tool the natives of Sol III need to turn their fellows into “them” and not “us”. This SF tradition, this let’s-talk-about-something-else-so-we-can-talk-about-this, is an old, old tradition that goes back pretty much to the beginning of the novel in the 18th Century. I’m thinking about Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and the war between Lilliput and Blefuscu. A war that begins with disagreement about the correct way to crack open an egg. I’m pretty sure Swift’s point had very little to do with, you know, eggs.
Which still doesn’t help with the back of the book….
“Deep Space is getting shallower by the light-year.…” Thrills! Spills! Suspense!