Waterstone Media

Stories Matter

The Fifth Season

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I don’t generally pay much attention to awards. At most, if I’m reading a book and I saw it won an award, I’ll think to myself, “Well, that’s cool.” I don’t think, at least as my memory serves, that I’ve ever chosen a book to read because it won an award.

But I was curious about The Fifth Season, the 2016 winner of the Hugo Award. It kept making best-of lists, and people really, really seemed to like it.

So I read it.

I found it to be absolutely amazing.

First off, it needs to be said that the writing in the story is beautiful. The language was direct and straightforward and perfect. Every word that was written seemed perfect for the scene. I was reminded at times of Neil Gaiman’s use of language, which I always hold to the golden standard of language in stories. This wasn’t quite that good, but it’s the closest I’ve seen in a long time.

Second, the revelations in this book always got me. Granted, when I try to read a story, or watch a movie, I don’t like to try and guess what is going to happen. To me, it ruins the enjoyment. I like to just dive in and see what happens next. I remember getting to one part of the book, putting down my kindle, and actually saying out loud, “Holy Crap!”

I’m pretty sure I woke up my sleeping baby, which made my wife pretty mad.

Mental note: be careful reading amazing fiction around sleeping infants.

Finally, there was the sheer imagination of the story. All too often, it seems easy to me to want to retell the stories we all know so well. Dwarves and wizards and magic and good and evil. But The Fifth Season avoids these traps and instead presents us with a fresh world, with magic that is grounded in thermodynamics.

I always find recommendations to be tough. Without knowing the person, it’s hard to know what they’ll like and what they won’t. So, instead, I’ll leave it at this. I really loved this book.

The Girl with all the Gifts

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Warning: Some minor spoilers ahead.

It’s not too often that I read horror fiction, or even, for that matter, post-apocalyptic fiction, or zombie stories. But I had heard so many good things about The Girl with all the Gifts that I decided to go for a quick read.

I’m glad I did.

The book opens up with what seems to be an ordinary scene, but the more the scenes develop, the more you realize there is something incredibly wrong.

I loved the simple prose of the story. It tells a zombie survival story from the perspective of a few characters. Some are obvious at first glance: the grizzled veteran, the scientist willing to go to any ends to solve a puzzle, a classroom teacher, and a small girl.

But what made this book a winner for me was that these characters get fleshed out beautifully through the story. No one is exactly what they seem, and every character has levels of depth to them that is brought out in ways sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic.

Horror works when we care about the characters, and that’s very true of this book. We are given time with each of them, connecting to them and learning more about them. This isn’t a slaughter-fest, at least not of the main characters. Instead, the tension builds gradually through the scenes, with a satisfying payoff in the end.

It’s not often that I give books five stars in my Goodreads account. I try not to too often, not because I don’t think books are good, but because I want to save the highest ratings for only the very best books. I would say something like 80-90 percent of my reading is rated at four stars.

The Girl with all the Gifts got five from me.

A New Vision

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It’s hard to believe, but after four years of speculation and campaigning, it will all (hopefully) be over in the U.S. tomorrow. We will have a new president.

Don’t worry. This isn’t a post about the election, at least, not exactly.

Like pretty much everyone I talk to, I’m upset about the election and the choice we are asked to make. While I have had conversations where people are genuinely enthused about a candidate, more often than not, votes seem to be based on who you don’t want to have in office.

I’ve been thinking about this a bit, and I’ve specifically been wondering if there is anything fiction can give us here, specifically science fiction.

There’s a famous saying that gets thrown around in all sorts of contexts: “Begin with the end in mind.”

The great thing about science fiction (and maybe even fantasy, although I haven’t encountered much that would qualify) is that it provides a vision of what the future could look like. What might a society of the future look like?

The obvious and low-hanging fruit is Star Trek (more the classic series and TNG than the reboot). Every episode, we see what it might be like to live in a society that has moved beyond the concept of money, a benevolent federation that seeks to explore and promote peace and dialogue.

It’s certainly not perfect, but the series explores the concepts and gives a reference point. Another great example is the foundation series by Asimov.

Sci-fi is rife with examples of futuristic societies, and I love the idea of looking at these fictional possibilities and think about how we can start to work towards them today.

Does anyone else have examples of well-imagined future societies that inspire them?