Tell Me a Differently Shaped Story: SFF That Plays With Form

Sometimes, it helps to outsource your reading selections. A few days ago, deep in a reading slump, I texted two friends a photo of my alarmingly overfull TBR bookcase and asked for advice. (I have been trying to only read books I already have, so I needed on-hand recommendations.) One replied immediately: “Read Several People Are Typing.”

I was wary of this book for a petty reason: It’s an incredible title, and I would have been wary of whatever book snagged the phrase, which crops up on Slack when everyone tries to share their thoughts at once. Could any book live up to such a recognizable, specific, overload-implying sort of name? 

The answer is yes. Calvin Kasulke’s novel-in-Slack-messages is exactly the book that deserved—that needed—this title. And what’s more, it’s a speculative novel. When someone becomes disembodied and trapped inside Slack, that’s speculative. There are other peculiar elements, too, some of which are spoilers, and one of which is an incessant howling that only one Slack user can hear. The story is workplace comedy, satire, darkly funny, unexpectedly sweet, and just perfectly… bite-sized.

This is not damning with faint praise; this is genuine, heartfelt praise. I read Several People Are Typing in less than 24 hours because it was swift, it was creepy, I needed to know what was going to happen—and because it wasn’t a traditional sort of novel, narratively speaking. It did not contain sentences that built into paragraphs, or chapters that grew into sections. It contained only message after message, some long and thoughtful, some merely emojis. Some disturbing emojis, degrading into warped versions of themselves.

I love a novel that plays with form. And I’ve come to think that maybe form is one of the keys that can unlock a reading slump. Sure, you can switch genres, you can change format, you can reread—or you can take a few steps outside the realm of traditional narrative form. I’ve done this before and not realized it: Last time I had COVID, I struggled to do anything but play The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Books were hard. And then I picked up Eden Robins’ Remember You Will Die, a novel told largely in obituaries.

At first, I was not sure I could handle that much awareness-of-death while ill and shut up in a small bedroom for days on end. But then the obits started connecting, and the story began to take other shapes: dictionary definitions, missives from an online group, other sorts of intimate clippings from wildly varied lives. Bigger stories emerged in the places the obituaries overlapped, art began to be central, the whole thing veered off into alternate history for a minute, and some people got sent to Mars. The book began to feel not as if it stared at death, but like it had found a way to show how the tendrils of each life reach out and find their way into so many other lives. It was, in the least hokey way possible, life-affirming. And also just brilliantly put together.

Also brilliantly put together: Catherynne M. Valente’s Radiance, which is for my money easily one of her most wondrous books. A novel about movies told in part in screenplays, it is also about mysteries, and space whales, and fathers and daughters, secrets, and endings. There are conversation transcripts, gossip columns, switching genres, radio plays—when I think of Radiance I think of narrative abundance. And also of cocktails. It’s glamorous, intimate, and emotional at once, which might be one of Valente’s specialties.

Olga Ravn’s The Employees takes the form of reports from the beings on a spaceship, some human, some not. They have petty complaints and squabbles, and they have existential crises. Some objects on the ship have inspired some crew members to peculiar behaviors. It’s funny because of all the corporate language; it’s disconcerting for reasons hard to pin down. Part of this, I think, is the form: My brain is so used to parsing how I feel and think about narrative that when a book breaks out of the expected shape, it’s harder to immediately understand exactly what I think about it. And perhaps that’s part of the fun—and the challenge.

Oliver Langmead’s Calypso does the seemingly impossible and blends a generation ship story with poetry, creating a novel in verse that runs rampant across the page, like the flowers blooming on a distant planet. Geoff Ryman’s mostly grounded 253 uses 253 words on each page to tell the stories of 253 passengers on a London train; the book was originally published online, where you might leap from one passenger to the other with a click, arbitrary and nonlinear. This Is How You Lose the Time War is a futuristic epistolary novel; the incisive (and funny) Interior Chinatown takes a screenplay form that is the richest of texts.

Sometimes the form-bending is a bit more subtle. SFF is full of novels in linked stories; recent favorites on that front include Arboreality, Rakesfall, and the unnerving Under the Eye of the Big Bird, in which stories leap decades, generations, into the future of an Earth that seems to be dissolving at the seams (it has that in common with Rakesfall, actually). Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox is largely a straightforward narrative, but framed in a slightly futuristic, eerily dystopian story that plays out in footnotes. We can go all the way back to Dracula, the form of which Alexander Chee called a “folio novel,” a collection of different letters and papers and narrative bits that builds to a well-known whole. You can bring up House of Leaves, sure, but I’m too much of a wimp to read it.

I want more. I want books told in documents, emails, files, letters, texts; I want disjointed tales we hear in snippets and whispers and have to piece together. I would like fictional oral histories of imaginary planets, more screenplays, more stories told in memos. Give me a novel in the form of a dictionary, a book told in encyclopedia entries. I love a long, dense, straightforward narrative, but when my brain is overwhelmed, when my attention is being pulled in ever more infuriating directions, sometimes I want a really delicious snack. A narrative I can bite off in little nibbles, but that adds up to something unusually satisfying. 

And maybe another novel told in Slack messages, too, while we’re at it.