Books Michael Loves
Shatter the Sky by Rebecca Kim Wells
One of the key pieces of early worldbuilding in Shatter the Sky occurs when the protagonist, Maren, goes to an event with her girlfriend Kaia… and everyone treats their relationship as completely normal. In Shatter, LGBTQ+ relationships are never remarked upon. They’re just a thing that happens. Similarly, there are multiple non-binary characters whose presence is just a fact of life.
Rebecca Kim Wells’ approach to sex and sexuality in Shatter the Sky is to present a world that is better than ours. This shouldn’t feel as revolutionary as it is, but…
Here’s how 95% of people writing a fantasy novel seem to go about creating their worlds:
Step 1: Take our world - Earth in the 21st Century
Step 2: Turn the technology dial down to the medieval era
Step 3: Turn the social progress dial down a random number of notches
Step 4: Insert magic/dragons/zombies/other
Step 5: Start writing
Precious few writers dare to write a fantasy world which is actually better than ours in some ways. This is partly due to status quo bias – people write books in the present moment and fantasy books are set in the past, so of course the past must have been worse.
I find the approach to fantasy which merely takes the present moment and adds more castles to be very frustrating. Fantasy novels have such an enormous possibility space. Almost anything is possible. Why not present LGBTQ+ relationships as entirely normal? Why not present a world where people with disabilities are taken care of properly, rather than ignored or reviled as they are in current society? Why not write a world without white supremacy?
Shatter the Sky does all of these, and it’s wonderful. It’s also a great story with a scrappy protagonist, compelling stakes, and a strong plot. It also has the overture of a love triangle which (unfortunately) completely sunk the sequel. Still, I’ll always love Shatter the Sky for its world-building if nothing else.
The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
Linus Baker is a 40-something office worker. He’s extremely shy and stuck so hard in his comfort zone it might be more accurate to say he’s jammed in there. He works as an inspector for government-run orphanages and, whilst he finds the work rewarding, he’s put upon by his boss and disliked by his co-workers. His landlady is a harpy. Even his cat dislikes him.
However, when his new assignment takes him to an island off the coast of England, he meets Zoe. Zoe is the opposite of Linus. She’s young, she’s free, she has bare feet, she drives a sports car too fast for Linus, she laughs freely and often. She’s a breath of fresh air. She brings him into a new world and he’ll never be the same again.
That sounds like the setup for a 00s era ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl brings the stuffy white man out of his shell’ narrative, doesn’t it? Presumably the two characters will fall in love, despite the age difference. Zoe will show Linus how to truly live and Linus will… be a stuffy white man, which is all MPDGs (Manic Pixie Dream Girls) ever want.
There are just two things standing in the way of this early 00s narrative. First - Zoe only appears young, she’s actually hundreds of years old. Not necessarily a dealbreaker for the MPDG format, but an interesting niggle. The second thing standing in the way of the format is… Linus Baker is gay and has no romantic interest in Zoe whatsoever.
I found myself a little confused when reading the early parts of The House in the Cerulean Sea. Linus’s sexuality is revealed in the first chapter, before we even met Zoe, so my ‘I’m intimately familiar with western narrative structures, so I know where this MPDG stuff is going’ instinct conflicted heavily with the facts on the ground. Yes, I know it’s technically possible to have a stuffy, down on his luck, put upon straight white man meet a young, carefree woman who drives to fast and finds him adorable and for them to not form a romantic relationship, but those two characters are often used by writers as two interlocking puzzle pieces. Having Linus not fancy women just obliterates that dynamic. Suddenly, I had no idea where the relationship with Zoe and Linus was going. The possibilities were endless.
I don’t think having a gay man be a novel’s protagonist would be particularly shocking for most people in the 21st century, but it’s remarkable how rare it still is. It’s also remarkable how that small change can really remix tired narratives. Having diverse representation in fiction is worthwhile for its own sake - everyone should be able to walk into a branch of Waterstones and find books where their lived experience is reflected back at them, not just the straight white people. The House in the Cerulean Sea shows why diversity benefits everyone, even those who have traditionaly been represented heavily. Diversity of character naturally leads to diversity of narrative. It switches things up. It means that, one day, when a reader picks up a novel, they might find a stuffy, put upon, heterosexual white man meeting a young, carefree heterosexual young woman, and we that reader might not immediately know where the narrative is taking things.
That’s one of the things that has stopped me watching most films that Hollywood puts out. When (nearly) all narratives focus on the caucasian, the heterosexual, the cisgendered and the non-disabled, narratives lose their ability to surprise because they’re all just endlessly retelling the same handful of stories over and over and over again.
Dreadful Company by Vivian Shaw
Dreadful Company boasts entertaining characters, an interesting story and a damsel in distress who rescues herself, which is always fun. These elements are good, but I don’t love them. What I love about Dreadful Company is the first sentence of the novel.
“There was a monster in Greta Helsing’s hotel bathroom sink.”
That, right there, is the most wonderfully succinct piece of scene setting I’ve ever encountered. The image of a monster in a sink is fantastical and extremely silly. The name ‘Helsing’ implies a rich history thanks to its connection to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The fact that it’s a hotel bathroom sink, specifically, adds the scene a strong sense of place, and invites a series of questions: Is the monster supposed to be there? Did Greta book this hotel knowing it contained monsters? How does she feel about a monster that is small enough to fit in a sink?
In a world where many books take more than 10,000 words to get to the point of their story, it’s wonderful to be hooked by an author by the first ten words.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Touch and The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North
Claire North is wonderful at coming up with inventive worlds and then creating stories within those worlds. Plenty of Science Fiction & Fantasy authors spend all their effort in creating a world and then phone in the actual story. Claire didn’t do this for her first three books.
These books all contained a setup, and a twist, which let the reader get a grip onto what the actual story would be about.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is about a man who keeps living the same life over and over again. He’s born, lives his life, dies and then is born again back when he started. Other people in this world also live, die and repeat like this, so they play games with each other. People born in ancient Egypt hide relics for people generations later to try and find. So that’s the setup. The twist is that, on Harry’s deathbed, he encounters a young child who tells him that the apocalypse is getting closer.
Touch is about a creature that lives inside humans – it can move from person to person at the slightest touch of skin. That’s the setup. The twist is someone kills one of the humans the creature is living in, and the creature wants to find out why.
The Sudden Appearance of Hope is about a woman who is wiped from peoples’ memories if they are out of her company for more than a few moments. The twist is she uses this ability to become a jewel thief.
These books are all really well written and have great characters. I happily recommend them to anyone who will listen. Claire’s ability to come up with a wonderfully inventive concept and then ground it with a simple, easy to understand story with which to explore that concept is just… [Italian chef kiss].
Unfortunately, from Claire’s fourth book onwards, she seemed to lose her way a little. The End of the Day is about Charlie, who is the harbinger of death… but there’s no twist. The book is just Charlie wandering around and talking to people who are going to die. 84k is about a dystopian future where crimes are paid off by the rich… and that’s pretty much it. There is more of a story than in The End of the Day but nothing as vital and compelling as her first three books.
Pretty much everything by Frances Hardinge
I can’t write about inventive authors without mentioning Frances Hardinge. Every one of her books is intricately crafted and she almost completely eschews sequels. Cuckoo’s Song is about a child stolen away by the Fae, and the creature they put in the child’s place. A Face Like Glass opens in a the tunnels of a cheesemaker – a labyrinth full of traps, protected by a door with 35 locks to protect the cheeses from thieves and saboteurs. A Skinful of Shadows is about a girl who can house peoples’ ghosts in her body.
I loved Dreadful Company because it hooked me with its first sentence. I love Frances Hardinge’s work because her writing is so compelling it doesn’t matter that her starts are a lot slower. The world and the characters draw me in, because I know it’s always worth it.
My friends often recommend me classic science fiction and fantasy novels, and with one exception (The Chrysalids by John Windham), I find them slow and tedious. They take so long to get to the point and rarely do anything interesting when they eventually get there. Frances’s writing is different. She teases the reader with details and plot hooks to keep them invested, whilst taking her time and setting up an intricate puzzle box that she then spends the rest of the book unlocking.
I don’t like everything she’s written. Deeplight was just a little unpleasant for me, and I just can’t get into Fly By Night – it’s too lore heavy. Still, loving four books out of the six that I’ve read is a good ratio.
Shades of Grey and Early Riser by Jasper Fforde
Jasper Fforde is by far the wittiest writer I read regularly. Yes, wittier than both Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. I know that’s fighting talk in literary circles but there it is.
Shades of Grey is a novel set in a dystopian future where people can only see one colour, and a thousand shades of grey. There is a strict hierarchy between the colours. People who can see purple are at the top, then blue, green, yellow, orange, red and finally, at the bottom, the people who can only see grey. It’s an interesting book because it’s almost all setup – every chapter introduces some aspect of the world (technology, wildlife, history etc.) which will eventually pay off in the novel’s conclusion. It doesn’t exactly have a story, but it’s so funny and the characters are so compelling I don’t care.
Early Riser is a similar sort of book, but with more of a traditional story. It’s set in an alternate universe Wales where most of the earth experiences -40 degrees Celsius winters for six months of the year. It’s a very silly book, but it doesn’t shy away from some pretty heavy themes. The ending does suffer a little from ‘and then everything got sorted out’ syndrome, but it’s still well worth a read.
The Mating Season by P G Wodehouse, and Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome.
Comedy ages badly. If it doesn’t age because someone involved turns out to be awful (I have trouble watching anything Graham Linehan wrote, as he’s now a serious TERF), it ages because tastes in humour move on. I can’t re-watch Robot Chicken any more (a show I loved in my late teens/early 20s) because it’s just… unbelievably offensive. This is why it’s remarkable that The Mating Season (published in 1949) and Three Men in a Boat (published in 1889) are still really funny to this day.
Funny for me, I should say. I’m English and middle class. I’ve lived in London for most of my life and have gone for trips on rivers. In some ways these books are about my life, although the books contain fewer smartphones and feature less interesting female characters. There’s a very long, very funny section in Three Men in a Boat, for example, where one of the characters takes along a map to the Hampton Court maze. ‘It’s really simple!’ he says ‘with this map I’ll be in and out in five minutes’. He then spends three hours trying to get out of the thing. That was exactly my experience when I went to the Hampton Court maze, although I at least had the excuse of being a child at the time.
Both books play a lot with the idea of juxtaposing what’s happening in the main characters’ heads, and what’s happening in the real world. The Mating Season, for example, has a scene where the protag and his host are composing a hunting song. They keep drinking, but the scene is perfectly normal, until another character walks in, and it’s suddenly revealed that the two drinkers have been dancing on the table for some unspecified length of time. The narration and the reality of the text suddenly clash into each other and it’s hilarious.
Similarly, in Three Men in a Boat, the first chapter details the three main characters and how ill they are. They talk about the maladies they almost certainly have, and how they can’t bear this life of stress and strain any longer, so they should go on a holiday. The joke is that these people are perfectly fine, just extremely lazy.
Usually I’m not really a fan of stories where the protags are… kind of terrible people, but I make an exception for Wodehouse and Jerome, partly because their characters are all so likeable, and partly because the text does a good job of punishing the characters entertainingly for their faults.
They are, of course, books from a very different time. Women are almost entirely absent from Three Men in a Boat and Wodehouse’s relationship with his female characters is… complicated. Not disastrous, but not great either.
Some Background (or: Why I love what I love)
I read English Literature & Drama at University, which meant by the end of my undergraduate degree, I was fed up with reading anything that had been written between about the 5th Century BC (The Oresteia) and 1868 (Therese Raquin). The thing about classical literature, I thought in my early 20s, was that everything about it had been since iterated upon. This meant that more modern books were generally better, or more interesting, because they were standing on the shoulders of giants.
The other reason I had grown tired with classical literature is there’s only so many stories about kings being sad I can read before finding them a bit samey. The settings, the characters and the stories all seemed to blend into one another.
Skip forward to the late 2000s, when I bought my first E-reader. In the space of two weeks, I read The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins and The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman.
The Player of Games is a book about culture clash – two civilisations conduct diplomacy using a game that is so fantastically complex it’s almost like systemising an entire pocket universe.
The Hunger Games trilogy is a wonderfully readable set of novels. I completed all three books in three days. They boast strong characters, a compelling world and genuine consequences for the events that take place in the story. Books 2 & 3, for example, explore the protagonists PTSD as a result of the things she saw and did during book 1.
The Half-Made World is a story about people being caught between two supernatural forces: One side are humans who carry daemon-infused guns – they’re outlaws and incredibly powerful, but they’re also slaves to the will of their weapons. The other side are a Stalinist group of humans whose wills have been entirely dominated by a collection of sentient trains.
When I read these five books, I was transported to new worlds. I encountered ideas I’ve never dreamt of. The stories were fresh and so original it made my head spin with the sheer inventiveness of the authors. My problem was that I then couldn’t go back and read a book about poverty in the east end of London, because I kept thinking ‘well yes, this is all a fascinating insight into the human condition, but where are my sentient trains?’