First, let me talk about the novel itself. If the first page, looking at the sky and what’s around, strikes a bell, it should. I was thinking of the first page of Gibson’s Neuromancer when I wrote it.
Where are we? What’s the context? It’s all there.
But there’s more. The novel began life as a novelette and several short stories, which bounced. And then the late Eric Flint convinced me that if you’re not a Famous Author, you can’t sell an anthology of your own shorter fiction.
At that point, I began looking at what I had, and realized how they tied in together, but I needed a structure to do that. What quickly came to mind was a novel that aged fairly well, when I reread it a few years ago: John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, which won the Hugo for 1968. That, in turn, used a structure created by Dos Passos for his trilogy, USA, from the 1930s.
As soon as I started to create the structure, I realized how well it worked for the non-distant future. Some of you, at least, have listened to the radio, and heard the top of the hour newsbreaks. That’s what shows up later – every so many chapters, there’s a page or page and a half news break. Without infodumps, or “as you know, Bob”, you get a skimming of what’s happening in the world, what my people are responding to… and in some cases, the results of what they’ve done.
It’s an uncommon structure, but it works well, if not overused.
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Now, if you’ve listened to my reading, or read yesterday’s post, you’ve met two of the three major viewpoint characters – no, not Tolliver. Francoise and Amelie.
Which tells you this is not the usual. What you see is everyone else, the hotel workers, the oilfield people, feel helpless. Instead, Francoise finds it in herself to achieve agency, to take action, not let things just happen to her. No screaming heroines here.
One author who got an advanced reader copy, was bothered by Francoise’ actions that catch Tolliver. If it wasn’t clear why she did what she did…
I dislike horror. I read Lovecraft when I was younger, but standard horror – we’ll ignore the plot holes that, um, frieght trains can be driven through. Let’s look at the real world. Look up Islamic State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State Follow it down the rabbit whole, such as what they did to the Yezidis.
Now that you’ve got a context, as the author, let me tell you what was in Francoise’ mind.
If they were “lucky”, the men would be given to the rebels as slaves, and the women to the troops for “fun”. If they were really “lucky”, some rebel trooper would “marry” Francoise, and maybe even Amelie.
If they were not “lucky”, they wouldn’t trust them, and machine gun them all down, then use a backhoe to shove them into a mass grave, without bothering to make sure they were all dead first.
And that’s what was in her mind when she pulled up her skirt.