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#12: Offworld

Not a lot of people have heard of this book. Not a lot of people have read it. When I talk about it and I mention how much it inspired me to start writing science fiction, I get funny looks. How could a book that no one's heard of bring so much inspiration?

Well, that's down to the writer.

Robin Parrish 

He's a Christian writer, in case you weren't sure. I've read a couple of his other works, and they're all worth a read. But Offworld was the one that really got me into the notion of writing science fiction.

See, Parrish is really good at creating realism. So when these people get back to Earth and there's no one there, it really feels like that happened. Through his writing, I understood the characters, I knew what they were feeling and I felt for them. At no point in the story did I feel disconnected from what was going on, because Parrish kept me interested the whole way through.


Here, two specific things that I appreciated about this book, and reasons to pick it up if you're interested in writing this sort of work: 

1. Fibromyalgia

This was one of my favorite things about the book, and why I recommend it to people. Not because you'll get fibromyalgia, but because one of the characters has it. She's very strict in her routine to make sure that she doesn't feel the pain of fibromyalgia, and everything in her character development shows her degradation when that routine is disrupted and she's prevented from doing the things that keep her illness at bay.

For me, it became a lesson in how to do that, how to create a character that could be fine one minute and crying in pain the next -- all while staying within a very science fiction themed world.

Truthfully, the best way to make science fiction is to make it close to reality, almost to the point that it mirrors the world as it really is. 

2. Apocalypse

We all know how trendy the apocalypse has become these days. Parrish writes about it in a way that makes it feel real, that showed me how best to write something like that. There's desperation and confusion, there's people still trying to follow their orders and yet struggling to figure out exactly what happened and what's going on.

At no point did this novel feel like a novel to me. It was a story, told of real people in a real place.

Once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down.

And I've picked it up several times since then -- and for me, that's really saying something.

[love]

{Rani D.}