Sleepless by
Charlie Huston is one of those near future science fiction things you
hear about but never realized exists until you hold it in your hands.
It's detailed.
Most of the time
when someone says 'detailed' he means 'they talked about a space ship
a lot and maybe there was a character and stuff happened.' Or maybe
the author dedicated forty pages on fashion styles to explain why the
protagonist took that parasol with those boots.
Sleepless is
detailed in that every part of the world - the WOW game stand-in, the
human bombs, the devastating disease - are effortlessly referenced
in sentences and phrases before Huston dedicates entire scenes to
explaining just what the hell is going on. The background details are
such a part of the world that his characters live these pieces of
science fiction and the reader can breathe it all in without pausing
to admire the damn spaceship for pages on end. Think of the last time
you had a fight with a friend on a message board and tried to explain
to someone (to whom message boards did not exist) how you had trouble
communicating in real time. The important part of the story you are
telling this person is not that you have to wait minutes, hours, or
days to get the last-last word in, but that you are having an
argument with a friend and the bastard won't lay down and accept
defeat in light of your brilliance. In between recounting witty
repartee, you still have to explain message boards. That's the
importance of detail.
As I Nano (only
four thousand words behind, it's okay, that's a weekend marathoner,
no problem) I have to keep detail in mind because while it's tempting
to boost a word count with nonsense like two thousand words of what
color sneakers my character has on, the bits I get to keep later
while Nanoedmo'ing (National Novel Editing Month) are the pieces that
advance the story while maintaining a careful snare around the
reader's attention.
If you have a
minute in between typing madly and procrastinating just as madly,
give Sleepless a try. It's science fiction without
the spaceships and it's a brilliant apocalypse that will make you
wonder about the tiny things in life. And if near future science
fiction can't make you doubt every minuscule interaction in
your life with a tiny shake of fear, it's obviously not trying hard
enough.
Another detailed
series I've always enjoyed are the Company novels by
Kage Baker. She takes history and future with the same finesse, and
while she shines with historical detail I'll admit my favorite of the
series is Graveyard Games where she really starts
telling us about her world's terrifying future.
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