How Cloud Atlas Is Shaping a Generation of Authors - Reactor

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell is one of the most influential books of the 21st century—it looms so large, in fact, that it’s hard to believe it’s only been around for 21 years. My own novel All the Birds in the Sky boasts a front-cover blurb comparing it to David Mitchell’s masterpiece, something I’m super proud of. But lately, I’ve been thinking that Cloud Atlas has grown beyond being simply an influence and become something more like a genre.

In case you’ve somehow missed hearing about it, Cloud Atlas is an audacious book that weaves together six storylines about oppression and discovery. One of them is in the mid-nineteenth century, two are in the twentieth century, and a fourth takes place in the early twenty-first. Two more storylines are set in the future, including a very distant post-apocalyptic future. The storylines are linked by a comet-shaped birthmark that someone has in each of the timelines, and by characters reading each other’s writings across time.

That structure—weaving together past, present, and future in storylines that are linked thematically—had a huge impact on a lot of people, though I’m sure Mitchell wasn’t the first to do something along those lines. Lately, I feel as though I’m constantly seeing books that are described as “Cloud Atlas meets ———.” And I’m also coming across a steady flow of books that use that time-spanning structure, though not always with six whole storylines. I also feel like Cloud Atlas has become a shorthand for “genre-hopping novel with literary aspirations.”

As I’ve said before, this is how genres happen: a book comes along that everybody loves so much, they want more of the same. And “more of the same” leads to the use of tropes or devices that are reminiscent of that influential work. 

To find out more, I talked to four authors of recent books that seemed to bear a clear influence from Cloud Atlas. Here’s what they told me.

Conscious influence

“I conceived of Down in the Sea of Angels as Cloud Atlas meets X-Men,” says Khan Wong of his brand-new novel. Down in the Sea of Angels is about Maida Sun, who can touch any object and see the stories of anyone who’s interacted with it in the past. Maida’s story in 2106 becomes intertwined with stories of a girl in a 1906 brothel and a tech worker in 2006. Wong describes it as “a time-hopping dystopian fantasy about psychic powers, liberation, and our interconnectedness through time.”

Wong says that he started out doing something more similar to Cloud Atlas’ format of six storylines spanning vast periods of time. But as he developed the novel, he “scaled it back, both in terms of the span of time and the number of storylines and genres.”

“I’ve been reading and loving David Mitchell’s fiction ever since Ghostwritten—he’s one of my biggest influences as a writer,” says Charles Soule, author of The Endless Vessel. “The fingerprints of Cloud Atlas are all over The Endless Vessel.” The Endless Vessel weaves together a near-future plague of nihilism, a terrorist organization called Team Joy Joy, and an 18th century project to create a ship that sails forever.

Soule adds:

Some folks hadn’t read Cloud Atlas yet

“Often, when a writer is asked about influence, they will scoffingly reply that they have no influences; they are sui generis, thank you very much; utterly original; totally unique,” says Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift. (And then, she adds, people will usually point out an obvious antecedent, at which point the author will grudgingly concede that perhaps there was a precursor after all.) For her part, though, Serpell “happily and publicly calls Cloud Atlas an influence” on The Old Drift. Her award-winning novel follows three generations of three interwoven families in Zambia, through the early days of colonialism into the near future where a totalitarian regime deploys tiny “microdrones.”

And yet, says Serpell, “I read Mitchell’s novel after I had already conceived my own multigenerational and multigenre structure.” She started working on The Old Drift when she was in college, back in 2001, a few years before Cloud Atlas was published, and her earliest drafts already “had this formal play with time and genre.” She adds, “My notes date a complete outline of the whole to 2005, and I remember reading Cloud Atlas in my Berkeley apartment, which means some time after 2008.”

Similarly, Roisin Dunnett says, “When I first started writing A Line You Have Traced, I had not read Cloud Atlas, although I’m certain that as such a well-known multi-genre speculative fiction work… its influence had trickled down to me.” A Line You Have Traced takes place in 1920s London, where a young Jewish wife sees ghosts; present-day London, where a young queer person believes time travelers are visiting; and the far future, where a collective are planning to use time travel to avert humanity’s end.

“While I was writing my first draft I decided to read Cloud Atlas as part of my research,” adds Dunnett. She says she was “genuinely surprised and intrigued by the book’s structure, the exploding and imploding, the unfolding and folding up again.” She says she found Cloud Atlas “straightforwardly very enjoyable to read. It always felt like a wrench to leave one voice and section, before being drawn into (or back into) the next.”

Why Cloud Atlas holds such sway

Science fiction has been obsessed with the grand sweep of history forever: see The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, but also Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon and other huge future histories. Where Cloud Atlas feels innovative is in wrapping together past and future and making them both feel foreign and thematically linked.

Says Soule, “Cloud Atlas is about the way ideas move and change over time, over generations, over millennia, creating unbroken silver threads of thought that tie us back to our earliest versions of ourselves and who we’ll eventually become. We are all connected by the things we think, the things we create, the things we lose and the things we fight to keep. I think all of Mitchell’s work is about that basic concept, one of the truest ideas of all—we’re all from the same place, and we’re all going into the future together.”

Says Wong, “The most significant Cloud Atlas element for me was the way it used these period-specific and personal stories to look at the grand arc of history.” This is elevated, he feels, “by the use of different genres for each character/time period, and the sort of mosaic approach to the storytelling.”

“Stories about people in the past, present, and future gain their power from showing the long-term impact of decisions and actions taken even by ordinary people,” says Wong. “And, in the contrasts and echoes of their different realities, even if they exist in the same place, meaning arises. Such stories are also powerful for showing, whether implicitly or explicitly as I attempted to [in Down in the Sea of Angels], how we all exist in an eternal Now.”

“I found that way of looking at cause and effect through history quite depressing, which I’m certain was the author’s intention,” says Dunnett. She adds that she takes “a more ‘optimistic’ view with my own interlinked timelines in A Line You Have Traced.”

Even though Serpell discovered Cloud Atlas long after she started The Old Drift, it’s still the book that “sealed my relationship with my agent” of the past fifteen years. “We discussed it at length over a lunch, and I knew we were a perfect match.”

And Serpell found Cloud Atlas helpful as she revised The Old Drift—and for explaining to other people what her own book was about. “When revising, I was often trying not to be like Mitchell,” she says. “Sometimes trying to avoid what I saw as flaws (the birthmark link), sometimes trying to lean into them (exaggerated, even “bad” genre tropes).”

Serpell adds:

For my part, I’m grateful to Cloud Atlas for pushing the conversation about literary-genre hybrids forward and proving that literary fiction and speculative fiction exist in one ecosystem and can influence each other. But please sound off in the comments: what’s your favorite Cloud Atlas-inspired book?

This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.