As you may have heard, my next book is a YA. It’s also a somewhat strange hybrid of science fiction and fantasy and dystopian and comedy and a huge departure from anything I’ve written before.
You may, understandably, be asking yourself what I was thinking. It’s not like there’s a dearth of dystopian novels on the shelves at this moment. No friend, there is not. Bookstore shelves groan under the weight of end-of-the-world, life-has-gone-mad-and-crappy scenarios. Some of the books are excellent, some are making money on the already overburdened backs of Katniss and Co.
I began Bright’s Light back in 2008. Yes, the book has been a long time in the making. As I’ve noted before, my goal is to write in every genre I like to read and I’ve always loved a good all-is-not-well-with-the-world cautionary tale. As the story developed, a process that sometimes felt like a werewolf undergoing a particularly wrenching transformation, I drew for inspiration on the dystopians that I loved when I was a dewy young P: Huxley’s Brave New World, 1984, Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, Sleator’s House of Stairs, Orwell’s Animal Farm. (It should be noted that I was equally smitten with utopian tales like Huxley’s Island and B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two.)
Opian literature, as I will now refer to it in a trend adopted only by myself, is perfect for anxiety disordered bossy people. Deep down I’ve always thought I knew how people should and should not live. Evidence supporting this conviction: none!
Turns out that writing an opian is much harder than reading one. Who would have thought?!
I wanted to write about the last society on earth in an era in which corporations have taken over and run the joint into the ground. I also wanted to get a little Neil Postman-y and consider what would happen if we really did amuse ourselves to death. Another thread is the harm we sometimes do when we attempt to do good: i.e. the science fiction preoccupation with unintended consequences. That’s where the well-intentioned alien in the book comes in. And to top it all off, I wanted the book about the last days of the last people on the planet to be funny. I also wanted to write about rivalries between friends. No wonder I have PTSD and plan never to tackle this genre again!
When you see the book and my new author photo, you will probably think: Oh, that Susan Juby. She only wrote a science fiction novel so she could get a sci-fi inspired author photo. You might have a point there. (Many thanks to Dave Nunez of Delgado Photography, who is married to world’s coolest hairstylist and salon owner Megan. Dave does all the photos for Serenity (yes, it’s named in honour of Firefly) Salon and Jessica Kurtz who did the crazy-pants hair and makeup.
Yes, I am aware that this photo makes me look a trifle unbalanced or at least like I’m my own biggest fan: “Look everyone! I’ve dressed up like a character from my OWN BOOK! How forward thinking of me!” Whatever. We had fun. My hair will never be that big again and for that I’m sad.
But back to the reasons behind the book. I’m endlessly interested in how one can adapt one’s voice and style to different genres. I’m also interested in the conventions at work in the genres themselves. Science fiction writers often take a current trends or discoveries and chase them all the way to their furthest extremes. It’s fascinating to try to follow the writer’s train of thought from how we might get from where we are today to where the writer takes the characters. I’ve always loved the way that science fiction disorients readers and then reorients us to a new reality and I am in awe of contemporary practitioners like Robert Sawyer and John Scalzi and Orson Scott Card as well as Catherine Austen, Suzanne Collins and MT Anderson, to name just a few, who do all of that while building new and mesmerizing worlds AND tell great stories filled with fascinating science and are sometimes even funny. Bright’s Light leans heavily toward the “bolognium” side of things and so might have more in common with fantasy than science fiction.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that the book’s quite different. I hope you enjoy it. It hits the shelves August 25th. Meanwhile, I’m at work on a couple of new projects, one aimed at older readers and another YA. I hope they won’t take four years to complete. I’ll be looking for suggestions for startlingly ill-advised but thematically appropriate author photos when the time comes.