Gene Doucette is joining us today to talk about his novel The Spaceship Next Door. Here’s the publisher’s description:
When a spaceship lands in Sorrow Falls, a lovable and fearless small-town girl is the planet’s only hope for survival
Three years ago, a spaceship landed in an open field in the quiet mill town of Sorrow Falls, Massachusetts. It never opened its doors, and for all that time, the townspeople have wondered why the ship landed there, and what—or who—could be inside.
Then one day a government operative—posing as a journalist—arrives in town, asking questions. He discovers sixteen-year-old Annie Collins, one of the ship’s closest neighbors and a local fixture known throughout the town, who has some of the answers.
As a matter of fact, Annie Collins might be the most important person on the planet. She just doesn’t know it.
What’s Gene’s favorite bit?
GENE DOUCETTE
I’ve been trying to work out the best way to answer the question before me—can I describe my favorite bit from The Spaceship Next Door—for a while now.
It’s a surprisingly difficult thing to answer, although not because I don’t have a favorite bit. The problem is that to talk about the plot of The Spaceship Next Door means dealing with a ton of spoilers. Telling someone who hasn’t already read the book what my favorite part is means giving away a lot of the plot first.
Here’s what I mean. One of my favorite bits is a dialogue regarding the nature of the aliens, but I can’t tell you who had that conversation, or where, or what I even mean by the nature of the aliens without wrecking the whole book for you.
As it is, you’ve just learned that there are aliens, which isn’t readily available news. I mean, okay, It’s implied. A spaceship does land in a small town, and then three years go by in which nothing happens. Since the events in the book—save for the first chapter—all take place after that three years has passed, it’s fair to assume that something does eventually happen, because otherwise I’d have framed the book as “and then nothing happens, ever.” It’s also not a leap to assume that when that something happens, it involves aliens, because again, there’s a spaceship, and it landed. On top of that, nobody’s exactly made a secret of the fact that this is a First Contact story. We sort of advertised it that way.
But: there are aliens, and maybe you didn’t know that.
There are plenty of other good bits though, including bits that are spoiler-free enough to talk about. One scene in particular is… well, it’s all of chapter three, and it’s also the scene I picked for auditions when I was casting potential readers for the audiobook, because I consider it the best representation of all the elements of the book that a narrator would have to get right.
(Side note: because of this, I’ve heard the chapter read back to me over forty times. I’m not saying this drove me insane, but I can still hear it sometimes, late at night.)
It’s an important scene, because it’s when the two main characters—or at least the two most significant—meet for the first time, in a diner. Those two characters are: a government analyst and certified intelligent-person, Edgar Somerville; and a sixteen-year old local named Annie Collins. Ed and Annie are in the middle of everything that follows, up to and including (minor spoiler) possibly saving the world.
So that’s what makes the scene important. What makes it fun, and why I like it so much, is that in the course of about five minutes, Ed discovers that the sixteen-year old who has just sat down across from him may just be the cleverest person he’s ever met. Basically, she talks rings around him, and he’s a pretty smart guy. Annie pulls off a dizzying series of accurate deductions about who Ed is and why he’s in town, and she does it almost effortlessly, to the degree that even if Ed refuses to confirm anything, it’s nearly impossible to deny that she’s correct about all of it. It’s impressive enough that when Ed later offers her a job, it seems like a perfectly sensible decision.
In the next chapter, an army general asks Ed if he told Annie anything confidential, and even if Ed can scarcely believe the general would question Ed’s ability keep information to himself, he also sort of understands why this would be a valid question.
Finally, from a writing perspective, getting Annie’s character right was critical to the entire story. Annie is a clever-but-otherwise-ordinary sixteen-year old, and by the end of the book she [huge spoiler deleted] while relying entirely on her wits. It’s important for Ed and the residents of Sorrow Falls to appreciate how clever she is, but the reader has to buy into it too. The dialogue scene in chapter three between Annie and Ed establishes that, and makes everything that follows work.
Also—and maybe this is only important to me—it’s a really funny scene.
And that’s my favorite bit.
LINKS:
The Spaceship Next Door Universal Book Link
BIO:
Gene Doucette is the best-selling author of the fantasy series Immortal and The Immortal Chronicles, and sci-fi thrillers Fixer and Unfiction. He is also a humorist, award-winning screenwriter and playwright. He lives in Cambridge, MA with his wife.
My favorite line is spoken by Oona, from chapter 22:
“The zombie queen’s downstairs fiddling with her magic suppository.”
It was perfect and hilarious, and in my opinion, gives away no plot spoilers.