Early Riser

Winter is coming.

No, not Westeros, but Wales. And the author is Jasper Fforde, back with another quirky novel. Winters are severe in the ice age climate. What are humans to do? Prepare to hibernate! That’s the setup of Early Riser. It has similar wackiness as the Thursday Next series. The story is immersive with clever twists and turns, combining, recombining, or completely mashing up tropes from sci-fi, literature and dystopia. That’s what you can count on from Jasper Fforde.

Instead of white walkers, there are nightwalkers – zombie-like denizens that might be a byproduct of hibernation gone wrong. There’s certainly something strange going on in the neighborhood out in the boonies at Sector Twelve. The main protagonist, in over her head, is the plucky Charlie Worthing – in the mould of Thursday Next. She is thrown into an investigation involving the world of sleep, trying to solve a strange mystery involving what seem like viral shared lucid dreams. Nothing is as it seems. Shades of Inception abound.

Having recently read The Three-Body Problem, I see analogies between the dehydration storyline to survive a chaotic era on Trisolaris, and the hibernation storyline of surviving the bitter cold of Wales. Even the woolly megafauna have a tough time of it. Most folks start bulking up a couple of months before winter, and the economy abounds in finding the most boring activities to help you doze off to conserve your energy and body fat. You can also dose yourself with the drug Morphenox, product of the pharmaceutical giant HiberTech, but not everyone has equal access to it.

But a small number of folks stay awake through the Winter, to keep things going, to keep civilization alive, and to ward off strange winter denizens. That’s the job of the Winter Consul. But their numbers are low, and it’s not easy to find recruits. At least modern technology exists and you’re not just dressed in black huddling over a fire with your comrades guarding a Westeros wall. But if you’re caught outside in the blizzard of winter, it’s just as harsh. After all, you’re only human.

Fforde immerses the reader immediately in his winter-world. There isn’t a Hagrid or Hermione to help explain things to Harry Potter about the magical world he is thrust into. However, Fforde cleverly includes book excerpts at the beginning of each chapter that explain a little of what’s going on – a narrator breaking into the story line. Sort-of. For example, you don’t want to get up too early when hibernating, per Winter Physiology for the Consul Service. It also explains the book’s title.

‘… Among Early Risers, the wake failure rate hovered around thirty per cent, even amongst those who had been doing it for decades. About a third would simply pull off the Taser, roll over, grunt, and not stir until their contingency was burned away and hunger brought them floundering back to the surface. Early rising wasn’t for the weak-hearted …’

As to one of the problems of hibernation, there’s an explanation of where ZeroSkill protocols come from in the Handbook of Winterology, 6^th edition.

‘… Skill erosion due to hibernational mortality could be disastrous to complex manufacturing, infrastructure and management systems, so almost every job was devised with ZeroSkill protocols in mind. Anyone who achieved an 82% pass or higher in General Skills could run anything from a fast food joint to a Graphite Reactor …’

There’s more to the book than solving a mystery in a familiar, yet unfamiliar, setting. The socioeconomics of winter-Wales is dystopianly fascinating. The pulse-weaponry employed is pressure-based, detectable by barometer-like devices. Saying more about Early Riser would give the game away. It’s an ingenious tale, in a setting that blends the familiar and the alien. I particularly enjoyed how it delves into the mysteries of sleep and dreams, weaving together science and science-fiction. I conclude cryptically by highly recommending Early Riser as a catch of ‘winsomnia’!