Beyond Selidor

Today we had a burst of sunshine, and Matthias and I took advantage of what is likely to be the only nice weather this week to go out walking. We wandered around the cathedral, and down by the river, soaking in the sunlight. All the trees and plants in our garden are about to burst into flower, or are already in bloom.

The fourth day of the book meme ask for the following:

4. A book with a worldbuilding detail that has stuck with you



There are any number of books I could list here — if a book is memorable to me, it's likely there is some clever element of the worldbuilding that makes it so. But I'm choosing to answer with a series of books that I first read when I was six years old, and although their individual plots have faded (as have the names of the characters), the worldbuilding was so vivid, and so clever (at least to my six-year-old brain) that I've remembered them always. I don't think I've read them in at least twenty-five years.

The series is Australian author Jackie French's Children of the Valley middle grade five-parter. Like many Australian children's books of the 1990s, it's a dystopia, and it draws heavily on both the thread of Australian fiction that reflects an unease in the land, a sense that people are living in a hostile, malevolent landscape that will punish them for the sins of colonisation, and on the growing awareness that the climate crisis was not going to be kind to Australia. (The existence of so many dystopian novels for children exploring anxieties about climate change is why I have no patience for arguments that people weren't aware of the science until recently: it was well known enough to be a part of Australian popular culture at least thirty years ago.)

This series of books imagines a burnt, blasted landscape, with weather so hot that being outside during the daytime is unbearable and life-threatening. Most forms of transport seem to have fallen into disuse, and big cities have been reclaimed by the land. Any human communities surviving remain scattered and isolated from one another, and various different ways to deal with the hostile climate have emerged.

The point of view characters are a pair of children who live in a community that has gone back to more of a subsistence way of life. There is some cultivation of crops, and if I recall correctly people have chickens for eggs, but it's on a small scale. They also eat a lot of food typical of Indigenous cuisine, foraging for edible native plants, insects and so on. But the worldbuilding detail that has stayed with me all these years is the fact that this community became nocturnal — sleeping during the day, and only emerging from their houses at dusk, with most activities taking place at night.

To six-year-old me, this made perfect sense: not only would it be cooler at night, it evoked the fact that most native Australian marsupials are nocturnal themselves, so it signified the fact that these human communities were enlightened and living in a way that suited the habitat in which they found themselves. I still remember these books fondly, all these years later.


5. A book where you loved the premise but the execution left you cold

6. A book where you were dubious about the premise but loved the work

7. The most imaginative book you've seen lately

8. A book that feels like it was written just for you

9. A book that reminds you of someone

10. A book that belongs to a specific time in your mind, caught in amber

11. A book that came to you at exactly the right time

12. A book that came to you at the wrong time

13. A book with a premise you'd never seen before quite like that

14. A book balanced on a knife edge

15. A snuffed candle of a book

16. The one you'd take with you while you were being ferried on dark underground rivers

17. The one that taught you something about yourself

18. A book that went after its premise like an explosion

19. A book that started a pilgrimage

20. A frigid ice bath of a book

21. A book written into your psyche

22. A warm blanket of a book

23. A book that made you bleed

24. A book that asked a question you've never had an answer to

25. A book that answered a question you never asked

26. A book you recommend but cannot love

27. A book you love but cannot recommend

28. A book you adore that people are surprised by

29. A book that led you home

30. A book you detest that people are surprised by