Why sci-fi
Y'all have heard me talk about the whole sci-chic thing – the fact that PARALLEL doesn’t really fit into any of the existing molds for YA fiction. I like what Jen of Librarian Tells All said in her recent review of PARALLEL: she called it "good sci-fi dressed up to look like Sweet Valley High.“ (She also said:
Just When This Book Has You Thinking It’s Some Dumb Sweet Valley Crap, It Goes All Awesomely Quantum Mechanics On You.
Thank you, Jen, for my favorite review line ever.)
Okay, so why did I write a book like this? I got that question quite a few times when I was speaking to students on the East Coast last week. Well, there are a couple reasons. First, PARALLEL is the kind of story I’d want to read. It forces you to use your brain to make sense of the narrative, and I like books like that. My favorite stories are ones where the author respects me enough as a reader not to beat me over the head with the little details he or she expects me to notice. It’s on me to pay attention. THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE, a book I adore, is like that. So is John Irving’s A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY, another one of my all-time favorites.
Both of those books also have something else in common with PARALLEL – the main characters experience something inexplicable and supernatural, but the stories themselves feel very real and grounded and relevant. They are in no sense fantasies, despite their sometimes fantastical elements. J.J. Abrams’ television shows are like this, which is exactly why I’ve gobbled every single one of them up. (Okay, not ALCATRAZ. But no one watched that show so it doesn’t count.)
But my reasons for writing a book like PARALLEL extend beyond my own tastes. I dressed my sci-fi up to look like Sweet Valley High because when I was a teenager, science fiction was as intimidating to me as the science classes I was so careful to avoid. Intimidating and, in my mind (I’m embarrassed to even write this now), uncool. I was a cheerleader. I watched 90210 and Party of Five and listened to Dave Matthews. I wore mascara every day. I was not a girl who wandered into the Science Fiction section of the library. But I wish I had been. (And I’m pretty sure my parallel self totally was).
It wasn’t until college that I discovered sci-fi. It was a class called "Science Fiction, Science Fact,” and I took it to satisfy my hard sciences requirement (I already had “Physics for Poets” under my belt). We read Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, examined the science underlying their fiction, and in the end, produced a piece of our own. My short story, about an eternal paradise that was moving around the Earth at the speed of light, thereby allowing its inhabitants to live forever earned me a respectable A minus and sparked my interest in a genre I’d previously avoided.
Why had I been such a hater before? Was it gender bias in the classroom? A fear of failure? A preconception that science was boring or not for girls like me? It was a probably a little of all of these things. The same factors that continue to steer young women away from science. It’s these barriers that I want to knock down with my books by giving girly-girls a way to engage with science in a new way.
That said, PARALLEL is not an easy read. It forces you to pay attention to details and dates, and there are rules that you’ll probably have to stop and think about, and maybe even ponder over. I’m not gonna lie, there’s quite a bit of science speak. But behind all that is a narrative about a girl on a journey of self-discovery, a girl who’s struggling to live in the present the way we are all. I think that’s true of all good sci-fi – the contexts are unique and unusual and a little mind-bendy, but the stories are universal.