The story of the land

Moving on from thinking about alien skies, I'm exploring the idea of using the rest of the landscape as part of our story today. 

Landscape can be far much more than just a passive setting into which the characters are dropped.  It can be the major driver of the story.  EJ Swift's Osiris shows us a world where global warming has melted the Antarttic ice and forced the remnant human population into cities built in the waters.  The city defines who people are in that world.  They are either privileged Citizens, or lowlife westerners. The haves and have-nots are physically divided by their city.  This is not a place where it is easy to be upwardly mobile.

In Frank Herbert's Dune the author created the desert environs of Arrakis.  The sand, and the Fremen  who live in it, powerfully shape the story.  Then there's Katherine Kerr's Polar City books.  There the planet is far too near to its sun for people to be out in the day.  Life takes place at night in Polar City.  In Sarah Crossan's Breathe the landscape is the story.  People cluster in the city, the only place where there's enough oxygen to breathe.  It's a cautionary tale about what happens when we cut down all the trees.

In Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines books cities take mobile form, trundling about the landscape.  And they've become predatory, eating up smaller cities.  And Anne McCaffrey's Petaybee is a world of cold, snow, and ice, its colonists drawn from Earth tribes who lived in such environments here,

In all these stories the landscape is a character in its own right, a powerful one that shapes and dictates what the human characters in the stories do.  Landscape can be so much more than pretty views.

Entry-level SF

Yesterday I was reading a discussion about entry-level SF.  It was a long discussion, with many different viewpoints, all of them recommending their best books to hook people into reading SF.

SF has an image problem.  It always has had, but for me as a woman SF writer wanting to write about the world from a feminist perspective it's even more of a problem.

So what would I recommend as entry-level SF for women readers?  Sadly, nothing that I've seen recently on my local bookshop's shelves. That's a problem in itself, as the bookseller clearly believes SF is for men and doesn't stock most of the new books by women authors.  The few that do make it onto the shelves are military SF.  Not a great introduction to the genre for women.

No, if you want entry-level SF go look in the young adult section. It isn't marketed as SF, but one look at the covers and blurbs of many of the books will tell you that they most definitely are.  And just as importantly, many of these books tackle soft SF issues wrapped around the hard SF core of the story. Most of the exciting new SF I've read for the last decade has been YA.

Take Scoff Westerfield's Uglies/Pretties/Specials trilogy, exploring the consequences of extreme re-making of our bodies.  Everybody ends up Pretty, but there's a price to pay, a price that keeps people controlled and docile.  If you want a warning about what cosmetic surgery could become, read them.

Then there's Sam Hawksmoor's The Repossession and The Hunting.  Teleportation experiments on vulnerable kids, anyone?  Or how about Sarah Crossan's Breathe, taking the old joke about taxing the air we breathe and showing what happens when we do.

Memory wipe?  Try Teri Terry's Slated and Fractured.  An exploration of not belonging and its consequences?  Try Veronica Roth's Divergent.

Mobile cities?  Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines series, with their terrifying cyborg Stalkers.

All these books deal with hard SF issues, but they also explore the soft SF cultural and individual consequences for people of the worlds they've drawn. And just as importantly, they all tella damn good story, something a lot of adult SF has got too up itself to do.  But that's another rant for another day.