Much of commercial fiction only remembers the last decade or so of commercial fiction. Partly this is the result of a publishing industry that asks aspiring writers to offer comparative (“comp”) titles from the last ten years (at most) in their query letters to agents — “comp” titles that are then used to produce sales pitches to publishers and executives and the advertising copy for the book.

The problem is similar for literary fiction, the kind of writing that gets awarded the Booker Prize or the National Book Award. The memory of literary fiction is not quite as short as the memory of commercial fiction, but it’s close. Much literary fiction only remembers the last twenty or thirty years of itself, or at most perhaps the fiction of the mid-twentieth or early-twentieth centuries. The literariness of contemporary literary fiction, the type of style and rhythm and shape that it aspires to, recalls at its most adventurous the work of Virginia Woolf or Ernest Hemingway and at its least courageous only Hilary Mantel and Jonathan Franzen. There is a recency bias in contemporary literary fiction — and there’s no surprise that the word contemporary comes before literary when the genre is named by trade publishers and journalists.

Self-publishing allowed me to write Aetheria on Earth in a new way: Not only is the novel commercial and literary, the book is literary in an out-of-fashion way. That’s why I think it might feel fresh to all of you. Its closest cousins are Gulliver’s Travels and Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol and Peter Pan and other fantastical Enlightment-era and Victorian fiction. It won’t win any awards in the recency-bias literary world of today. But I hope that it will delight readers with its precise and inviting use of language, its strong characterization, its free indirect discourse, its attempt to pack as much story into as tiny a space as possible.

I believe that fiction is not simply an experiment in style, but an experiment in storytelling. Much of the best storytelling in the age of television and film has naturally become storytelling for the screen. But there are aspects of storytelling — particularly internal thought process , but also geography jumping and time lapse— in which fiction vastly exceeds the capacity of television and film. (Does anyone truly enjoy montage sequences or clumsy voiceover?)

It’s these aspects of storytelling, which also happen to be essential to the representation of consciousness and ethical decision-making, that you will find on full display in Aetheria on Earth.

The novel is whimsical and cozy on the surface, with found family, gentle magic, and a mystery that unfolds at the pace of a good winter evening. And I hope it will appeal to children and their parents and teachers or really anyone who wants to remember what it feels like to feel like a child. But underneath, it asks what we owe the people who take us in, what we owe the people we come from, and what happens when those obligations collide. The Aetherian gentlemen carry a touch of Pygmalion and a hint of Beauty and the Beast: beings made of something cold who have learned, slowly, to be warm.

Purchase Aetheria on Earth here: https://amzn.to/4jhSH68