The best books to lose yourself into character dynamics

I read this book on its release, and it blew me away. I’d always been a SciFi fan, but this was the first time I’d read an ‘alternative history’ book with science fiction leanings. It took a historical event, like WWII, and threw an invasion into it.

I love ‘what if’ scenarios. Most first contact books look at aliens arriving on a united Earth, but what if extraterrestrials arrived at a point where the world was most divided? It was my first time reading a book with multiple character perspectives. What did this invasion look like from an Allied or Axis perspective? How did it differ from the soldier to the civilian? This was a form of writing that became heavily influential to my writing.

I love this book as it’s a classic masterpiece in beautifully concise storytelling. There’s not a wasted word in this fantastic novel that was way ahead of its time. It boggles my mind that this book was published in 1898 and deals with an alien invasion. Just think, there would be no Alien, ET, or Independence Day without War of the Worlds blazing the trail over 100 years ago. 

There’s a place in literature for the sprawling epic, but as an author, I can’t tell you how hard it is to tell a complete story in so few words. To give a story a solid beginning, middle, and end. Wells accomplishes it beautifully, telling a story of wonder, horror, and triumph in less than 65k words. Genius.

There are two things I love about the books in this series. Characters and lore. George RR Martin weaves a dense tale in both, sometimes to extremes. It’s a template I’ve followed (albeit more simply) in my own Songbird series, and attempting it only gave me an exceedingly deep admiration for how Martin pulled it off. Maintaining consistency in the lore from chapter to chapter and book to book when juggling dozens of different characters is a hugely complicated task.

All the characters also have distinctively different voices, giving you insight into their motivations and an inkling into where they sit on the forever-shifting spectrum. There’s very little black and white in this world, just many shades of grey.

This one has all the geopolitical shenanigans that I adore in a book. To love a book or series, there has to be more than just narrowly drawn black-and-white hats. I need shades of grey. Yes, I may disagree with what a character does or find him/her to be the bad guy, but I need to understand why.

This book ostensibly presents three political alignments: Earth, Mars, or the Belters. It then throws in a game-changing macguffin that all sides want. From there, the book (and the series) evolves, showing why each side has a vested interest in this item and what lengths they’ll go to to get it. As a reader, you understand it.

Oh, my! The writing in this book is beautiful. As an author myself, I find this book to be one of those that makes me want to stop writing, as I’ll never write anything as horrifically beautiful as this. This is a Grimdark book, and the books in this series are dark with a capital D, so be warned, they are not for the faint-hearted.

The book follows two protagonists, Kyder and Rune, who are flip sides of the same coin, and the chapters alternate as you follow their parallel and tragic journeys. Be prepared for some utterly gorgeous prose. Scot writes with a sense of rhythm and timing that you ordinarily don’t see in books. It's art in written form.