Karen Sandler

Category: Books

  • RTW – The Best Book I Read in November

    I just finished a post on why I love reading e-books and scheduled it for this coming Saturday. I mention this because YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday prompt for today is What’s the best book you read in November? and thanks to my Kindle, it was easy as pie to refresh my memory on what I read this past month. I could have also checked Goodreads, but since I’m not great about updating my reads there, it’s not as reliable.

    Anyway, my best book for November was The Declaration by Gemma Malley. In The Declaration, Anna and Peter are illegal children living in a hellish children’s home that’s like something from a Dickens novel. A Longevity drug that extends life indefinitely has led to an overcrowded world, and the illegal children are the ones who pay the price. It’s set in a futuristic Britain and its British voice is part of what led me to fall in love with this book and its characters. I very much enjoyed the humor interleaved with the very dire situation Anna and Peter were in. I also found the set-up intriguing and since we’ve recently reached the 7-billionth mark of the population on our planet, The Declaration had some very real-world elements to it.

    Of course, this is an “older” book (published 4 years ago), but as a newcomer to young adult, I’m still catching up on the great books. The upside to that is I don’t have to wait for the sequel. The Resistance is already available. And since I have the patience of a flea when it comes to waiting for the next book in a series, I am a happy camper about that.

    Has anyone else out there read The Declaration? What was your take?

  • RTW – Required Reading

    YA Highway this week wonders what books I might recommend as required reading in a high school English/Literature class. You gotta figure that the first title that springs to mind is Tankborn, because a girl’s gotta promote. But actually, if I say so myself, Tankborn would be an excellent choice for a high school reading program with its themes of class, race, and what it means to be human. Okay, shameless plug over.

    The first non-Tankborn book I thought of is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. This is a mind-blowing book in terms of gender identity, but also a fascinating piece of worldbuilding. I can imagine long discussions about what might be different about earth’s societies if we truly lacked separate genders, if we were only sexual beings a few days a month.

    Even more intriguing is the main character Ai Genly, a male-gendered person through whose eyes we see the people of Gethen. They consider him “the pervert” because he’s stuck in his male body. The students could imagine themselves as either the single-gendered person or an androgyn. Or that androgyn in his/her monthly “kemmer” when their body chooses a specific gender. One more possible discussion topic is the fact that the Gethens are living in an Ice Age. The students might be asked to consider how a people could survive in that kind of environment.

    A second book that comes to mind is Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country. This is a post-apocalyptic story, set on earth a few hundred years after a catastrophic war. In the particular community of Women’s Country, the women live a largely agrarian life within a walled city with a few male servants. The remaining men are warriors who live outside the city.

    The men who live with the women are gentle beta types, while the warriors, as you might imagine, are fierce alphas. The women only interact with the warrior men once a year, when they are brought in to father the next generation. However there’s more to the relationship between the warrior men and dominant women than it seems on the surface.

    There’s plenty to discuss here–the impact of a feminist-dominant society, the usefulness of aggressiveness in this world, what it truly means to be a man. The roles we play in the world, and which of those we choose ourselves and which we let society place upon us. On top of this, it’s a beautifully written book.

    You might see a common element in these two books. They’re both written by women. So many (nearly all) of what are considered the classics were written by men. Yes, there are the Bronte sisters’ books and Austen’s. But while those offer an intriguing look into the society of the time, they don’t give as much meaty food for thought as the two SF books that I mention.

    So that would be my final recommendation: Add more women-authored books to the required reading list. There are many out there besides Ursula K. Le Guin and Sheri S. Tepper. Octavia Butler, Julian May, Nancy Kress to name a few. It’s time for school districts to seek them out.

  • What’s Science Got to Do With It?

    Last Thursday, #MGlitchat’s topic of the week was science fiction in middle grade books. I write YA rather than MG, but I was kind of jonesing for a writerly discussion (and science fiction is a subject dear to my heart), so I joined in. It proved to be a lively topic.

    In the course of the hour or so I was participating, a few of us got into a side discussion of what constituted science fiction. Since I’m of, ahem, a certain age, and have been reading SF for a few decades (no, I won’t tell you how many), I ascribe to the classical definition of the genre. That is, it’s science fiction if, were you to remove the science element, there would be no story.

    One of the other folks on the chat wondered if that definition is no longer valid. I think it’s a fine question to ask, but I just can’t think of another definition that would serve the same purpose. It is, after all, science fiction, so there has to be science. I guess the only question would be, can you call it SF if there’s no actual science? Or if the only “science” aspect are space ships, or laser guns, or people use unfamiliar slang?

    Are there books that one might want to call science fiction, but have no science integral to the story? For instance, is Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games science fiction? It certainly has a science fiction feel to it. But what’s the science?

    How about the Games themselves? There’s a great deal of science not only in the creation of the horrific arenas, but also in the tracking of the participants every moment. There’s a certain scientific aspect to the projection of the future as well (although that element of the series could also be labeled “speculative fiction,” which is a more generic term).

    What about my own book, Tankborn? Is it truly science fiction? I believe it is. Yes, I could have created a straight fiction novel based on the Indian caste system but it would have been an entirely different book. Instead I used caste in a futuristic novel in which a bastardization of that system re-constitutes itself in a society that has left earth and colonized another planet. There is science in the creation of the genetically engineered GENs, science in the circuitry wired in their bodies that is used to control them, science in the devices that are used to interface with the GENs’ annexed brains. Some of the “science” in the book, e.g., my lev-cars and illusory holographic projections might not be strictly necessary to the story, but they do flesh out the setting. However if the science of the GENs were pulled out of Tankborn, many crucial aspects of the story would fall apart.

    So are dystopian books, in and of themselves, automatically science fiction? I can’t speak for every dystopian out there since I haven’t read them all (yet :-)). But in addition to the Hunger Games trilogy, there are other dystopians that would certainly qualify in my mind as SF. Neal Shusterman’s Unwind is an excellent example, as is Mary E. Pearson’s The Adoration of Jenna Fox. In both books, certain scientific advances (in addition to social changes) led to the dystopian world depicted in the story. In fact, without the science and social aspects in tandem, there would not be a story.

    I’d love to hear others’ opinions of what science fiction means to them. I’d like to hear what books you think are science fiction and why you think they are. For instance, I believe Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a fantastic SF book, but some might call it literary. So what are you reading in science fiction? And what’s science got to do with it?

     

  • Embryonic TANKBORN (How a Script Became a Book, Part 1)

    I think the question authors are asked most often is “Where do you get your ideas?” Unless I’m being flip (“Mail order. Three for a buck for the hackneyed ones, a couple hundred for a really stellar concept), I find it a hard question to answer. That’s because a novel is so complex, with so many moving parts. Ideas were required for many, many aspects of my YA science fiction novel, Tankborn. The characters, the plot twists, the setting, all the various details of world building.

    But if I back away from the details (which is hard for me to do) and answer the question more broadly, I have a very quick answer to where I got the idea for Tankborn. Tankborn came from Icer. In a way, Icer was the book embryo that became Tankborn.

    So, what, you ask, was Icer? Those of you who have read some of my interviews might know that I used to write screenplays (movie scripts). Icer was the first screenplay I ever wrote. When I lived in L.A., I used to take writing classes through UCLA Extension (UCLA was also my alma mater, where I got my MS in computer science).

    One of the classes I took was a screenwriting class, sometime in the early 1980s. I took notes in a steno notebook, which included the scribbled notation at left which is the very first time the concept of a “tankborn” was committed to paper. I didn’t call these still-to-be-created beings tankborns yet, but that scribbled note was the genesis of the idea.

    If you enlarge the image, you’ll see that I originally named the character Jeffry Rose and her age was 28. Jeffry Rose was a futuristic inter-planetary investigator I featured in a couple of SF stories back in the late 70s, early 80s. As I developed Icer, Jeffry Rose became Kayla Hand (the surname because of the strength in Kayla’s hands). Then that surname was dropped in later producer meetings.

    The instructor of the screenwriting class liked my story concept so much that after the class ended, he coached me through a “beat outline” or “beat sheet” to help me finish the script. As an example, to the left is a sample beat sheet (click for a larger image) for part of a Star Trek: TNG (“The Children”) that I also wrote back in that era (more details on that below). I probably completed the original Icer screenplay in the early to mid-1980s. Here’s how I described the gestation tanks in the opening of a very early version of Icer. I’m leaving out the dialogue that’s intercut in this description:

    The cells finally begin to resolve into a fetus, almost too small to be recognized as human. A larger fetus, and we see it’s floating not in the womb, but in an alien green fluid. The fetus spins slowly, until we see its face. The eyes open wide. They’re colorless, the iris solid white.

    We see another fetus, turning slowly beside the first, its eyes colorless as well. A third fetus with wide, staring white eyes. We pull back to see another fetus, then another, all immersed in the green fluid of a gen-tank.

    Note that the white eyes was how the genetically engineered slaves were identified in early script versions. Later a producer pointed out that white eyes would make it difficult for actors to convey emotions, so the identifying white eyes became a tattoo of a DNA strand of the characters’ cheek.

    Icer went through innumerable re-writes over the years as it was optioned by a couple of different production companies. That process was pretty interesting, but I think I’ll leave that story for another post.

    During the time I was writing Icer, I also played around with television scriptwriting. The usual way of things is to write a sample script for a current, very popular TV show (in my case, it was Murder, She Wrote, which was very big back then). The idea was not to sell that particular script but to use it as your calling card to get work.

    But Star Trek: The Next Generation was different. For ST:TNG, anyone could submit over the transom. I ended up writing two for the Next Gen series.  For the first of the two ST scripts I wrote, “The Children,” I plagiarized myself, borrowing the “tankborn” concept. ST scripts had five acts that were preceded by a teaser. In the teaser of “The Children,” the crew transports down to a planet to respond to a distress call and discovers something strange in a lab. Here’s how part of it reads:

    As Riker still stares, the shot WIDENS to include Tasha and Beverly, with similar expressions. Then we see what fascinates and appalls them, the source of the green glow: Five tanks, filled with an eerie green liquid. And inside each tank, suspended like a fetus in an amniotic sea, is a child, each one identified by a nameplate on the tank.

    The Trekkers out there can tell from the crew names what era of ST:TNG this episode might have fit into. An agent submitted the script for me, but sadly, they passed, saying they were working on an episode that was too similar. They encouraged me to re-submit, but by the time I wrote a second script, the original producer had departed the show, and the new one didn’t like my work.

    More later on Icer.

  • Fave Books–A Progress Report

    It’s really too early to list my favorite books for the year. But I have realized there’s one cool aspect to owning a Kindle. It keeps track of all the books in my library. And since I’ve only read a few non-e-books since I bought my Kindle, I can refer back to that list to review nearly every book I’ve read this year.

    Ranking these books in any particular way, i.e., trying to figure out which was the best book I read, then the next best, etc., is an exercise in futility. I read eclectically and there’s no way to compare a 700-page autobiography to a fun, fast-paced YA. So I decided to come up with my own “award” categories for the books I’ve read in the last ten months. Here goes:

    Most haunting book–Unwind by Neal Shusterman, both because of its thought-provoking story and the creepiest scene I’ve ever read in a book.

    Book that really lived up to its hype–The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, because this book (in fact the series) did not disappoint.

    Most moving, heartfelt book–A tie between Rules by Cynthia Lord and Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine, because I felt a personal connection to the main characters.

    Longest book that I just couldn’t put down–Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1 which was fantastic, although I have to confess, I didn’t read all the footnotes (which comprise 40% of the book).

    The hands-down most compelling first-person narrative–Room: A Novel by Emma Donoghue, which was another haunting book, but for an entirely different reason.

    The most laugh-out-loud, yet still heart-warming, book–Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan because God-I-loved-this-book.

    The book I probably recommended to more people than any other–The Help by Kathryn Stockett which made me see my own book, Tankborn, through new eyes.

    The book I was most annoyed that I couldn’t read the sequel to right away—Matched by Ally Condie because, harrumph, I want to read Crossed now!

    The funnest, coolest science fiction future–the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld, because who wouldn’t want a hoverboard?

    The funnest, most romantic books set in Europe–a tie between Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins, and by Maureen Johnson, 13 Little Blue Envelopes and The Last Little Blue Envelope, because I wasn’t sure I’d like them, but they completely won me over.

    The most mind-twisting book–Liar by Justine Larbalestier, because I never was quite sure what to believe, right up to the end.

    There are more that I’ve read, but I’m going to leave it at this. How many of these have you read? Do you agree or disagree with my “awards?” Let me know.