Jackdaw, Learning to Stay: So, What is Dying Ember... About?

Summarising novels can be incredibly difficult, and it's also an important skill, especially when you have a few seconds of someone's interest to try and sell it to them. If I can, I usually just pass across the blurb. I've tried a few different starting points to explain from, but there's so many plot details that it's always difficult. People have wings, okay, and it's like a dystopian modern-day city, and these three strangers have to work together in this kind of murder-Olympics, and there's a weird virtual reality fighty thing...

It gets complicated very quickly.

There's a lot of world-building to explain that sometimes is better just left to be read, but even then you have the characters and their stories. I love complicated plots and intricate world-building, but I love my characters more - yet explaining the intricacies of Kiah or the importance of Dany or the symbolism of North tends to fall flat when other people haven't met them yet.

Then someone asked me, "What is it really about?"

And I knew exactly what he meant. And I can't remember really what I stumbled out, but I know I wasn't satisfied with it.

So, what is Dying Ember... About?

I hate the word "society" because in this context it sounds... Weak. You can blame everything on society. I prefer not to use the word at all. And trying to explain what I mean in person gets difficult because I struggle to say things with the same sincerity I write them.

So Each Separate Dying Ember is about people. Not society. People.

The city is introduced as dilapidated, buildings abandoned and warehouses empty and whole districts unpoliced and lawless. In the very opening line, a teenage girl mentions shooting someone and then seeing them a week later. Secret organisations kidnap people and force them into a gladiatorial death-match that by itself seems alien. People fight to the death in a real-time, real-pain public VR system; their technology is clearly at least a little beyond ours, yet most of the characters don't even own a phone. Television, movies, and cars were never invented. The government is called the Regime, and the police, ambulance, and fire service are rolled into one militarised Enforcement.

And they have wings - and surely any society that grows with that kind of divergence from our own has to be different. That's fundamental to the whole world-building ideal: if you can say, "Everything is the same but..." you're doing it wrong, because if something as major as that is different, everything else would be too.

But then the novel goes on.

It gets frustrating trying to write things like this without spoilers, especially so soon after publication. I have things sat and scheduled that I'd love to talk about, but daren't without risking all my new readers' experiences. However, I'm going to talk about this more, and regardless of whether readers have reached that point yet, next week, so for now I'll go light with it.

Something happens just after halfway through the novel. And everything changes.

Each Separate Dying Ember isn't about winged people, or murder-Olympics, or real-time real-pain VR. It's about people. It's about children of privilege, and children of war, and children of squalor. It's about the North Yorks and Daneel Thulani Bahelehs and Jedekiah Khouries, and the Atarah Dayals and the Clay Nicholsons and the Mrs. Guleed Kamars and the Ezekiel Lachmans. It's about someone who grew up reading dystopias where everyone knew it was a dystopia and the heterosexual white girl saved the day (at the unfortunate sacrifice of the token minority friend) by overthrowing the government and making a speech about the empowerment of the people, who looked out of the window and knew that those stories don't change the world. White people hail The Hunger Games and condemn Ferguson in the same breath, call Rogue One inspiring and then say it's wrong to punch Nazis immediately afterwards.

Each Separate Dying Ember isn't about winged people living in a dystopia.

It's about us.

When you read it, or if you're reading it, or if you've read it, remember simply this: cities in Britain have Steppes, and they have Flats, and they have Old Docks. There are Flixtons, and EE12s, and 23 Hazelcrest Roads. I never meant for it to be overly political when I started, but when I was writing I knew what had to happen. And you know what? It's not even political, to me. It's just about people.

The figures North quotes in the third act were taken from the Manchester crime statistics for the last six years.

All of the names that serve as an afterword are real.

You may not agree with what the novel says, you may feel tricked into reading SJW propaganda when you were promised a tidy, non-political fiction, but do not forget:

It isn't half-humans in an unnamed city in dystopian alternate-universe Britain.
It's just people.