Aug 30, 2015

Both Sides. NOW! is the fourth novel I have written. Because I don’t write traditional heroic narratives, one of the things I find is that each work has a structure suited to the story I want to tell.

For example, Both Sides. NOW!, which is about what happens when everybody in the world changes sex, contains five chapters, each timed to the event. The first takes place the day of the change, then one week, one month, one year and, finally, one century later. The first chapter was meant to show how disruptive the change was; the second to fourth chapters were meant to show how people slowly adapted to the change, and; the final chapter, which takes place much later, was meant to show how traditional sex roles began to reassert themselves when most of the people who had lived through the change had died.

The structure of the novel is more complicated than that, though: each of the first four chapters is divided into ten sections. Each section within a chapter contains a different set of characters in a different place (to help unify the novel, some of the characters and motifs appear in more than one chapter). There were a couple of reasons for choosing this structure. The obvious one is that I wanted to capture as many different responses to the change as I could (since there would be as many responses as there are people living on the planet). Even so, I feel I have only scratched the surface of this fascinating subject.

The other reason has to do with a failing that I have found in some science fiction. Have you ever noticed that stories that deal with worldwide phenomena tend to focus almost entirely on North American or European characters and settings? The fact that people from other cultures would likely have different reactions to SF premises seems quite interesting to me, but we rarely see that in fiction written by western authors. The complex structure of Both Sides. NOW! allowed me to set parts of the story in places like Japan, China, India and Israel, in addition to a wide array of North American and European countries.

I think of Both Sides. NOW! as a kaleidoscopic novel, one that reflects this way or that depending upon which facet you’re reading at the time. It’s an odd structure, but one that I believe results in a very rich reading experience.