And that, I think, is key to a book like The Surviving Sky.
It is often based on who the questioner is. This may be a grand statement for me to be making about a book I wrote, my debut no less, but frankly, my answer on what the book is about changes with the framing of the question. But the answer is elusive, it isn’t quite caught yet, it isn’t quite understood, though it has been sighted. It feels like a hunt, as though each answer is a wolf closing in, that as a pack they are nearing their quarry. All of the above answers feel like they’re getting to the crux, but are not quite accurate.
We pour a lot of ourselves and our thoughts and experiences into our stories so, for us, it is hard to delineate themes and say, “Yes, this is exactly what our books are about.”Īnother truth is there truly is a lot packed into The Surviving Sky. One truth is that this kind of answer is very common to most writers, to a certain extent. It’s very epic, very awesome, and it has EVERYTHING AAAA! It’s a critique of capitalism, a story about duty and shared human society, a reflection on our relationship to survival and our damaged environment, and an exploration into the way all of our actions impact our very consciousness. It’s a meditation on power and privilege, who we love, why we love, and the cost of love.
It’s a story about a husband-wife duo who are trying to save their marriage while they try to save their flying plant city from crashing into jungle storms. Of course, since then, I’ve learned my loglines and my tropes, my tweet-length synopses and my clever metaphors.
If I could tell you what it was about in a few pat lines, I wouldn’t need to write that book. After all, I was spending an entire book’s worth of words to answer that very question. I always knew I was writing science fantasy, but in the early days of writing The Surviving Sky, when people asked me what my book was about, I-like many writers-fumbled the answer magnificently.
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