Some years ago I took a workshop with Kim Stanley Robinson in which he pointed out – referencing criticisms of his books for being too expository – that one of the things a novel does is give you room to put all those details in.
Short stories are best when they leave out everything that isn’t essential. Flash fiction is the most extreme version of this. But novels can be expansive.
In keeping with this, I remember a concept that I believe I first heard from Vonda N. McIntyre: there are rules for writing a novel but no one knows what they are.
Of course, Vonda didn’t ever write the same book twice. Neither, by the way, does Karen Joy Fowler, but I’m thinking about Vonda today because her last book, The Curve of the World, just came out from Aqueduct Press.
It’s a fabulous book, but it doesn’t fit easily into people’s preconceptions about what a novel ought to be.
Vonda always described herself as a science fiction writer, even when some people persisted in calling The Moon and the Sun “fantasy.” In the chat on the online launch of The Curve of the World last Saturday, John Berry observed that Vonda didn’t consider the book to be alternative history.
I’d call it speculative history, but I’m pretty sure Vonda thought of it as science fiction set in the past – speculation about what those cultures and lives might be.
As someone who has read David Graeber and David Wengrew’s The Dawn of Everything, I think Vonda’s speculation about the past is, at its core, as true to what might have happened as it can be for a time about which we have little information. Things could have happened the way Vonda imagined them.
I know I have no trouble believing that earlier peoples explored much of the world, because it’s very clear that a lot of people didn’t stay in one place.
I mean, if they’d stayed in one place, there wouldn’t have been anyone living in the Americas or Australia (and that’s 40,000 years or so ago).
Or, for that matter, most of Europe and Asia. If it took really advanced technology to explore the world, we humans would have all stayed in Africa until sometime after the tenth century or so. And we didn’t.
We don’t have enough facts to write true histories of a lot of formative times in our past, but speculating creatively on how those times and places might have worked is something that fiction can do.
And novels give authors room to do that expansively, building worlds that might have been instead of, as in most science fiction, worlds that might come to be. If these people had sailing ships, how far could they have sailed? If they lived in places with unsettled geology, how did they cope with earthquakes and volcanoes?
How were different societies structured? This is a major part of The Curve of the World, because the story revolves around the Idaean people (likely Minoans) meeting up with many different cultures.
The Idaeans are matriarchal in structure, though men have a strong place in their society. The People, another group, are even more matriarchal, with men more sidelined.
There are pirates and slavers who represent very toxic masculinity, and other cultures with a balance or with a more reasonable patriarchal one. There is more than one way to live on this planet, and Vonda uses this novel to introduce us to a large number of them.
Fiction makes them more real than anthropology, in my opinion.
This is not precisely a review of the book. I read it before Vonda died, because she gave me the honor of critiquing an early version. I have not yet finished the final one, and am looking forward to savoring all of it. I may write about it again when I do.
But I love what she did with it. In this day and age, when we’re struggling to save our democracy from the ravages of billionaires and right-wing extremists, it’s good to remember that there are many ways to build a good society and to deal with others on this planet.
We need more books that open up those possibilities.
If you want your own copy, you can order it directly from Aqueduct Press in either ebook or print.