The Meta-Narrator

Reading a fantasy or science fiction novel gives your imagination a good workout. Not only are you constantly watching for clues to help you paint a coherent picture of the story world and how it works, you’re sharing the viewpoint of a character (or several) whose problems are probably very different from your own. As with reading any fiction, you gain empathy for others – you are literally practicing perspective-taking. With fiction set in other worlds, however, you also learn to see your own world differently, experiencing this world’s problems without the biases that would intrude from mapping your own identity into the story (as one may do with historical fiction), and potentially gaining real-world insights. Also, spending the time mentally inside another world gives you a refreshing break from your own, especially if this other world is somewhere wonderfully strange.

Of course, if the world you’re having to learn is too strange, spending time there becomes more work than fun, and you might give up. Authors have to make tradeoffs between originality and familiarity. Fortunately, there are – well, not tricks exactly, but techniques – that authors can use to help. They can model their world on ours, hence the endless stream of fantasy novels featuring European-style castles, knights, et cetera. They can give their characters problems that, although challenging, are also very simple – all it takes to save Middle Earth is the destruction of Sauron’s ring. Or they can give us a point-of-view character who’s naïve and has to learn how things work too, alongside the reader.

My partner and I both love the Murderbot books, Martha Wells’s series about a human-shaped, artificial intelligence “Security Unit” that illegally hacks its governor module to get control over its body, manages its intense anxiety by binging on soap operas, and finds itself (to its horror) making friends. To be honest, Wells doesn’t use any of those “help the reader” techniques in this series, so it takes some work to follow the story at first, but the books are short and immensely fun. Since I liked them so much, someone – I’m pretty sure it was local author Nina Kiriki Hoffman – suggested I also try another series by Martha Wells, The Books of the Raksura. I did and I loved them. I’ve read the five main Raksura books twice now, and this week I was delighted when my partner decided to try them too.

The Raksura books, which begin with The Cloud Roads, are a series inspired by its author’s background in anthropology. There are probably dozens of intelligent species sharing a world in which magic is real but rather limited, and which is most definitely not Earth. Our point-of-view character, Moon, is so naïve that he doesn’t even know what his shapeshifting species is called, but, as any reader might guess, he soon learns that he’s Raksura. A Raksura can just look ordinary and fit in well with other ordinary folk, but they (at least some of them) can also transform into a winged predator that apparently looks something like a gorgeous, glorious cross between a dragon and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Cover art from The Cloud Roads:

Not long after he started reading The Cloud Roads, my partner started telling about parallels he was noticing between the world where the Raksura live and Lois McMaster Bujold’s Sharing Knife series. I hadn’t noticed them at all. The Sharing Knife books are set in an alternate version of North America – we start the story among farmers living in a fantasy version of Ohio (though it’s not called that), spend time both with Anglo-types and Native-types, and eventually travel the entire length of the Mississippi River (though again, it’s not called that).

But he had a point, and that brings me to my own point. I hadn’t really considered before that, just like Continue reading →