Post by beth on Jul 20, 2011 14:56:51 GMT -5
I like juvenile books and I like near-future sci-fi, so this one, by Saci Lloyd, is probably going to be a natural favorite for me.
'It's not squids in outer space'
"I never want to be a preacher-writer," says teen author Saci Lloyd. It's not hard to see why the accusation might crop up. Her current novel, Momentum, is a fast-paced thriller set in a post-oil age of energy crises and police crackdowns on freedom. It follows two novels, The Carbon Diaries 2015 and 2017, which tackle carbon rationing and environmental meltdown through the eyes of a teenage girl and her family.
It could all be insufferably well-meaning and doom-and-gloom, if not downright ranty. Yet, Lloyd successfully steers through the minefield of "issue writing" and uses big ideas to create entertaining reads that achieve both popular and critical acclaim. The first of the Carbon Diaries was shortlisted for the Costa prize, Momentum is in the running for the Guardian children's fiction prize, and Lloyd has a firm following among teen readers on social media sites. How does she manage it?
"I think it's absolutely legitimate to come at things with an opinion," says Lloyd, on the phone from her home in east London. "What's not legitimate is when you start making your characters into two-dimensional mouthpieces for that. What you have to do is set up a world and then you set your characters free in it. That's what I always strive to do. And characters are always misbehaving and saying 'nah, I'm not saying that, that's too po-faced…' I try to write the really big stories of the age and these big stories tend to come with an agenda. It's hard to be 'hey, it's OK' about a huge chunk of glacier that's about to melt into the sea. Hopefully my books are populated by people who are right royally pissed off by what's going on and who just want their lives back, really."
In the Carbon Diaries, Lloyd's key to weaving important messages into a gripping read is warm humour and the sarky voice of the "right royally pissed off" protagonist Laura Brown. In Momentum, it's action. This is a high octane blast of a novel, set in a London of the near future where the rich, the "citizens", live in secure, closed communities and the "outsiders", the disenfranchised who have decided to take control of their own lives, live in favelas, kept under check by gun-toting "Kossak" soldiers. As well as the backdrop of the global fuel crisis, the book also manages to pack in augmented reality, police brutality, surveillance, free running and secret codes hidden in a global communications system called the Dreamline. Oh, and a forbidden love story between privileged citizen Hunter and outsider-on-the-run Uma.
Put baldly like that, it sounds like too much for one book to pack in, too unlikely to be anything other than dystopian science fiction. Yet one of the more exciting and chilling aspects of the book is just how close to reality it comes.
Lloyd describes it as "looking at things from one degree sideways". Everything in the story could be happening within 10 years, she insists. "It's not squids in outer space but just slightly removed from today's reality so you look at something with fresh eyes. The energy crisis is not about everyone turning into zombies and walking round killing each other for oil, it's just an exacerbated version of now – longer working hours, more restrictions, more police powers, some of the way in which society is heading. The intention is that it's believable, not an insane world."
This sense that it might, just, possibly, be a future that lies in store, is helped by the way the tale is rooted in a sense of place – London and particularly the Thames. Admittedly, the Brazilian-style favelas with their free-running inhabitants, great home-grown food and "the best parties" are an unusual addition to the city but Lloyd says that she was aiming to "create a global feeling and see what happens when you mash those two worlds together".
She herself is deeply rooted in east London where she has taught at Newham sixth-form college for nearly a decade, and credits the college's diverse range of students with inspiring her writing. "It's one of the colleges most hit by the cutting of the educational maintenance allowance (EMA). Those kids' lives will be devastated and they are actively searching for stories to help all this make sense for them," she says. "I feel very enraged on behalf of young people. It's not an equal start at all and it's just not fair. It's partly from working with those kinds of kids that I write the way I do."
It's a far remove from her own upbringing as the daughter of smallholders on the island of Anglesey where, she says with a laugh, "I was a child of nature," wandering the countryside. A year studying linguistics and philosophy at the University of Manchester followed before she walked out in disgust at the ridiculousness of an exam question about existentialism ("it's both one of the most stupid things and one of the things I'm most proud of doing") and set off on a "bewildering variety of insane jobs and weirdness". She was a storyboard artist on the TV series Dangermouse, a cartoonist, a motorcycle courier ("until I broke my leg and fell in with a group of ne'er-do-wells and spent far too much time in the bookies'", she notes) and toured with a band in America, a period she drew on in the Carbon Diaries for Laura Brown's experiences in her band the Dirty Angels. She got into scriptwriting, then advertising ("the devil's work itself, I couldn't stand it") and eventually went back to college for a year to study media, animation and design, which is what she now teaches.
Lloyd is an fascinating talker, spilling over with ideas and passion for writing and politics. It's easy to see how she engages with the students she teaches and talks to about the issues in her books.
As she puts it, laughing: "There's always a certain kind of boy who I love and he's about 15 and he sits at the back swivelling on his chair with a disaffected look on his face. He's got a hoodie on and maybe a Ted Baker shirt, something like that, couple of zits and his dream car is a Lamborghini. And he hates me [laughs]. He's just like 'who IS THIS?' And by the end he is really lively and having a laugh."
"I refuse to let these big issues be in the hands of the dullards and the worthy people," she continues firmly. "These are the great heroic stories of the age and I don't think anyone is talking about this stuff in a really exciting way. I want to breathe life into the whole thing, and make it dead exciting."
www.guardian.co.uk/childrens-books-site/2011/jul/15/saci-lloyd-squids-outer-space
'It's not squids in outer space'
"I never want to be a preacher-writer," says teen author Saci Lloyd. It's not hard to see why the accusation might crop up. Her current novel, Momentum, is a fast-paced thriller set in a post-oil age of energy crises and police crackdowns on freedom. It follows two novels, The Carbon Diaries 2015 and 2017, which tackle carbon rationing and environmental meltdown through the eyes of a teenage girl and her family.
It could all be insufferably well-meaning and doom-and-gloom, if not downright ranty. Yet, Lloyd successfully steers through the minefield of "issue writing" and uses big ideas to create entertaining reads that achieve both popular and critical acclaim. The first of the Carbon Diaries was shortlisted for the Costa prize, Momentum is in the running for the Guardian children's fiction prize, and Lloyd has a firm following among teen readers on social media sites. How does she manage it?
"I think it's absolutely legitimate to come at things with an opinion," says Lloyd, on the phone from her home in east London. "What's not legitimate is when you start making your characters into two-dimensional mouthpieces for that. What you have to do is set up a world and then you set your characters free in it. That's what I always strive to do. And characters are always misbehaving and saying 'nah, I'm not saying that, that's too po-faced…' I try to write the really big stories of the age and these big stories tend to come with an agenda. It's hard to be 'hey, it's OK' about a huge chunk of glacier that's about to melt into the sea. Hopefully my books are populated by people who are right royally pissed off by what's going on and who just want their lives back, really."
In the Carbon Diaries, Lloyd's key to weaving important messages into a gripping read is warm humour and the sarky voice of the "right royally pissed off" protagonist Laura Brown. In Momentum, it's action. This is a high octane blast of a novel, set in a London of the near future where the rich, the "citizens", live in secure, closed communities and the "outsiders", the disenfranchised who have decided to take control of their own lives, live in favelas, kept under check by gun-toting "Kossak" soldiers. As well as the backdrop of the global fuel crisis, the book also manages to pack in augmented reality, police brutality, surveillance, free running and secret codes hidden in a global communications system called the Dreamline. Oh, and a forbidden love story between privileged citizen Hunter and outsider-on-the-run Uma.
Put baldly like that, it sounds like too much for one book to pack in, too unlikely to be anything other than dystopian science fiction. Yet one of the more exciting and chilling aspects of the book is just how close to reality it comes.
Lloyd describes it as "looking at things from one degree sideways". Everything in the story could be happening within 10 years, she insists. "It's not squids in outer space but just slightly removed from today's reality so you look at something with fresh eyes. The energy crisis is not about everyone turning into zombies and walking round killing each other for oil, it's just an exacerbated version of now – longer working hours, more restrictions, more police powers, some of the way in which society is heading. The intention is that it's believable, not an insane world."
This sense that it might, just, possibly, be a future that lies in store, is helped by the way the tale is rooted in a sense of place – London and particularly the Thames. Admittedly, the Brazilian-style favelas with their free-running inhabitants, great home-grown food and "the best parties" are an unusual addition to the city but Lloyd says that she was aiming to "create a global feeling and see what happens when you mash those two worlds together".
She herself is deeply rooted in east London where she has taught at Newham sixth-form college for nearly a decade, and credits the college's diverse range of students with inspiring her writing. "It's one of the colleges most hit by the cutting of the educational maintenance allowance (EMA). Those kids' lives will be devastated and they are actively searching for stories to help all this make sense for them," she says. "I feel very enraged on behalf of young people. It's not an equal start at all and it's just not fair. It's partly from working with those kinds of kids that I write the way I do."
It's a far remove from her own upbringing as the daughter of smallholders on the island of Anglesey where, she says with a laugh, "I was a child of nature," wandering the countryside. A year studying linguistics and philosophy at the University of Manchester followed before she walked out in disgust at the ridiculousness of an exam question about existentialism ("it's both one of the most stupid things and one of the things I'm most proud of doing") and set off on a "bewildering variety of insane jobs and weirdness". She was a storyboard artist on the TV series Dangermouse, a cartoonist, a motorcycle courier ("until I broke my leg and fell in with a group of ne'er-do-wells and spent far too much time in the bookies'", she notes) and toured with a band in America, a period she drew on in the Carbon Diaries for Laura Brown's experiences in her band the Dirty Angels. She got into scriptwriting, then advertising ("the devil's work itself, I couldn't stand it") and eventually went back to college for a year to study media, animation and design, which is what she now teaches.
Lloyd is an fascinating talker, spilling over with ideas and passion for writing and politics. It's easy to see how she engages with the students she teaches and talks to about the issues in her books.
As she puts it, laughing: "There's always a certain kind of boy who I love and he's about 15 and he sits at the back swivelling on his chair with a disaffected look on his face. He's got a hoodie on and maybe a Ted Baker shirt, something like that, couple of zits and his dream car is a Lamborghini. And he hates me [laughs]. He's just like 'who IS THIS?' And by the end he is really lively and having a laugh."
"I refuse to let these big issues be in the hands of the dullards and the worthy people," she continues firmly. "These are the great heroic stories of the age and I don't think anyone is talking about this stuff in a really exciting way. I want to breathe life into the whole thing, and make it dead exciting."
www.guardian.co.uk/childrens-books-site/2011/jul/15/saci-lloyd-squids-outer-space