Solitaire A Novel

Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times Speculative fiction — science fiction, fantasy, horror, magic realism — is special. It’s where writers get to throw the Frankenstein switch on metaphors and give them life. We can talk in more ways, at more levels, about alienation or change or having one’s world fall apart, because we can use real aliens or planetary disintegration to make our point. Sometimes heroes of sf and fantasy learn their psychological or moral lessons in very literal ways. They go places that we can’t go yet, do things that we yearn or fear to do. They live out our dreams and nightmares of what the future might be.

So they’re typically not ordinary folks with ordinary lives. It’s not easy to find science fiction novels about 25th century soccer moms, or fantasy tales where the sheepherder is still a sheepherder at the end. But surely the future won’t only be filled with deep space pilots or apprentice wizards. Even in the future, some of us will still be putting on the equivalent of a suit and going to the office. We’ll have everyday lives.

Jackal Segura, the protagonist of SOLITAIRE, is certainly not an average citizen, but her life in the book is as ordinary, as daily, as I could make it. She has a job that she worries about doing well. She buys groceries. She rides the bus. She drinks beer. And she strives primarily not for vengeance or greatness, but for connection and approval. She’s an ordinary person in an extraordinary situation. And like many science fiction and fantasy protagonists, she has a talent. Because I wrote the novel during a series of corporate jobs, her specialty became project management and team dynamics. She’s an expert at corporateconnectivity, at building cooperative communities. And because this is the genre of manifest metaphors, she discovers that her home and work influence her in some unexpected ways. Jackal is, like everyone, an ordinary person with whole worlds inside her, and she gets to explore that interior landscape in ways that are only possible in the wonderful freedom of speculative fiction.