ell, well, well…we meet again! Welcome back to The Bibliophagist and also my favorite day of the week. Before we get to that…can I just tell you that I started a crystal selling business with my father-in-law?! Obviously, you all know by now that I’m a witch…well witches-as well as many other people-love crystals. So…naturally after getting addicted to buying them, we chose to just sell them ourselves. Our business name is Mystic Dragon’s Lair and we are at one of the largest gem and mineral shows on the East Coast for the weekend, buying inventory. I can’t tell you how happy I am and excited to begin this new journey.
Now, on to the reason we are all here…Saturday Spotlight. Today I am happy to talk to an author that was a new name to me, someone I’d never heard of. I love these authors more I think because I love knowing I am introducing people to new authors as well. As a book lover, my biggest joy is finding new authors and helping them out as well. That is why I do these spotlights. I want to give back to the authors who have made me laugh, cry, and brought be many close friends and adventures.
Let’s get to know more about today’s spotlight author…Grant Price!
About the Author
Quest Post
Opportunity in Crisis
I read an excellent book recently by Liu Cixin called The Dark Forest. The second novel in a dystopian sci-fi trilogy (called Remembrance of Earth’s Past, though most people refer to it as ‘The Three-Body series’), it revolves around an alien race that decides to destroy humanity and take over Earth after having to flee its own unstable planet, and the various stupid-to-ingenious responses conjured up by humanity in the 400-year period—called the Crisis Era—that it will take for the alien fleet to reach our solar system. As a novel that takes Fermi’s Paradox as its basis, it’s packed with hard science and far-out concepts that I had to strain to understand. It’s also bleak. As bleak as Desolation Peak in a thunderstorm. But despite the despair, death and philosophical quandaries that color the narrative, The Dark Forest still, somehow, manages to retain a diamond-like core of hope. And I bring it up here because I’d like to touch on how important it is for dystopian fiction to retain this core of hope, no matter the odds faced by its protagonists.
Here’s a question I asked myself a few months into writing what would end up becoming By the Feet of Men, my first published novel: What’s the point in writing a book about a world rendered unrecognisable by a climate crisis if I don’t think humanity is going to be in any fit state to read books soon because of our own climate crisis? I mean, part of the reason people write (part of the reason we do anything of note) is to be remembered, isn’t it? Unfortunately, an event as cataclysmic as anthropogenic global heating doesn’t allow for this luxury – we’re going to be too busy surviving to be doing much remembering.
Now, my gloomy mindset was admittedly partly due to having spent so long with hard-bitten characters in a harsh world that I’d created: the earth is unrecognizable, the survivors are hungry and brow-beaten, all infrastructure has collapsed, and what life still remains is governed by violence, self-interest and hypermasculine ideals (although in that sense, the new world is the same as the old world). It’s not exactly One Day by David Nicholls. But I was also downhearted because I didn’t really have a question to the question: What’s the point?
I was still in the dark even as I started querying agents about representing the book. Of the responses I did get, the critique was always the same: this is too negative, too bleak, too hopeless. It’s too tough to sell. How can you expect to keep the reader on board if you don’t throw them a lifeline to hold on to once in a while? You have to show that there’s opportunity in crisis, they said. Give the reader something to hope for. Especially now, when it seems as though each day we wake up to the sound of another bell tolling humanity’s demise.
That was what I’d been looking for: opportunity in crisis. And so I went away and started to tweak and massage and reshape the book. I changed dialogue, clipped the most maudlin passages, wove in a few gold threads amid the gray and the black. I rewrote the ending, too. And when I was done, I finally understood that the act of writing dystopian fiction absolutely has to be based on the belief that humanity will change course and steer itself clear of the future that the author is presenting. Why? Because surely if you were a dystopian fiction writer who believed 100% that what you were writing would come to pass, you simply wouldn’t bother. If the world is going to end, who are you writing for? Exactly. When reduced to its essential components, dystopian literature has to be a kernel of hope wrapped in a mantle of adversity. To write it is to believe in something better.
Like the characters in The Dark Forest and By the Feet of Men we are living in a Crisis Era full of uncertainty and darkness, and it can be easy to allow this to overwhelm us. But it is also a time of opportunity: to create, discuss, develop, innovate, explore, solve and change. To paraphrase Graham Greene, fear and hardship lead us to produce our greatest work. And as long as we protect the diamond-hard core of hope that is essential to any dystopian narrative, we may yet emerge from the climate crisis stronger than before.
Thank you so much to Grant for writing this awesome guest post! Be sure to look him up on social media as well as Goodreads! Check his books out and maybe find a new favorite book or author.
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