I have a story, "The Soul Remembers Uncouth Noises," in Steve Stirling's The Change: Tales of Downfall and Rebirth anthology. For those of you who don't know the genre publishing racket, successful franchises (and Steve's Emberverse is a very successful one) eventually lead to people other than the original author writing in that world. There are lots of reasons why other writers will do that, but the only one that matters for you-the-reader is that writing in someone else's world is fun.
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| See? Knight in armor, Plains Nation warrior, wrecked helicopter. How much more fun could you want? |
Of course, all the fan fic folk out there could tell you
that writing in someone else's world is fun. Some of the fanfictioneers write in other, established worlds as a bridge to creating
their own, but most of them are well aware that they'd probably be doing
themselves more good by creating their own right from the beginning. The truth is, at the bottom, writing in a
world someone else has created is fun. That's
the one reliably good reason to do it.
For a longtime professional fiction writer, it's almost
exactly as challenging as the writer wants it to be. The challenge I set myself
was to take Steve up on one of his observations, that he'd figured that if
there were a truly strange apocalypse, the survivors would also be the truly
strange, and the postapocalyptic culture or cultures would be formed out of the
weird fringes of our preapocalyptic world.
For the past decade or so I've been
dipping a toe in the increasingly-popular Young Adult waters, so I liked the
idea of teenage characters surviving in a world where adults didn't.
Furthermore, one way and another, I've become interested in
twice-exceptional kids -- the category that could probably be more honestly
called "weird geniuses," children and adolescents who are
unquestionably gifted in one area with major difficulties in another: math or music
prodigies with severe dyslexia, fourth graders who have twelfth-grade reading
skills but tantrum like two year olds, and so forth. To me, anyway, one of the most interesting
things about the twice exceptionals is not their difficulties, which tend to be
obvious, but their ways of coping with them, which are wildly diverse and
creative.
Also, school-age twice exceptionals tend to form close
friendships with each other. Part of this may be that there are increasing
numbers of programs for them, so they meet there. A bigger part, I think, is
that two kids who feel like aliens, though their gifts and problems are very
different, are more likely to establish emotional rapport with each other than
they are with more typical people with whom they share a gift or problem. Somehow or other being regarded as weird, and
having trouble explaining yourself to the world, is a more foundational
experience than merely being extremely good at some things and extremely poor
at others.
So I set my story, "The Soul Remembers Uncouth
Noises," in the part of Denver where I live, on the day of the
Change. (For those of you who haven't
read Dies the Fire or any of the other Change/Emberverse books: the world of
the books diverges from ours because at 6:15 pm Pacific Time, on March 17,
1998, all over the world, electricity, explosives, internal combustion engines,
various other such high-energy-density systems stopped working abruptly). I put together three twice-exceptional ninth
graders, gave them just enough luck to get started, and thought about what
might happen to them and who they might turn out to be.
Now, that's a very contemporary YA kind of story, the
Understanding Difference story. And the frame story is actually pretty much a
stock "cavalry western" (that is, back when westerns were a big part
of pop literature, there were several subgenres named after who the main
character would be: lawman westerns, cowboy westerns, gunslinger westerns,
etc.). For various reasons I don't think
Steve will be doing any contemporary Understanding Difference YA soon, but sure
enough, there was plenty of room in the Emberverse for one, along with a
cavalry western. And as some of you may
know from my notes about the Daybreak books and the Jak Jinnaka books, I deeply
love the idea of a fictional world big enough to tell any kind of story you
like.
And it was fun. Lots
of it. That's what matters.
You should go buy that book, and Dies the Fire if you
haven't already yet, and lots more. Read
it so that one of these days, when it's a miniseries, you can smugly tell all
your friends how much better the book was.
