By Dan Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Rori Shay’s first book, Elected is a Young Adult (YA) genre sci-fi/cli-fi hybrid novel, part of a projected trilogy she is writing, and it’s being followed up with a second book, Suspected, due out this month.
In a recent interview with San Diego Jewish World, debut novelist Shay, 36, was kind enough to take some time out from her busy life and answer a few of our questions.
When asked how a Jewish writer tackles climate change issues in a YA novel for teens, Shay said that while her series does not have any specifically Jewish themes or characters, there are Jewish lessons that can be learned from the ongoing climate debates worldwide.
“I think that in general Jews are a curious and questioning group of people,” she told me. “We are raised to think about consequences and devise alternative solutions. The holiday of Passover, for instance, includes a tradition of the youngest child asking questions — The Four Questions — about the holiday to his/her parent.”
“Since we’re raised to question the society around us and to think freely, perhaps that makes Jewish people open to thinking about climate change as a challenge we can overcome,” Shay added. “While we value traditions, we don’t stick with the status quo. We’re always changing and growing. Furthermore, as a group of people who’ve been persecuted throughout history, perhaps we are also more sensitive to the thought of a survivalist future, as is shown in the dystopia world of Elected.”
A 36-year-old East Coast native, Shay now lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and two children. Elected was released in April 2014 and is her first published work. she said.
“I was raised in New Jersey and ended up in Maryland for an undergrad degree in business and public relations from the University of Maryland,” Shay told this reporter. “Elected is out in major bookstores now, and Suspected goes up for pre-sale on February 16. Then it gets published across all retails on April 22, which is ‘Earth Day’. Each of my books releases on ‘Earth Day’, each subsequent year. Perfected, the third book in the series, is what I’m currently writing.”
The stories Shay tells? It’s a never-ending story, three novels in all, but it goes something like this.
“The novels are about an 18-year old girl who takes over her country’s presidency in the year 2185 after the world is devastated by an eco-crisis,” she said. “However, she has to masquerade as a boy (Mulan-style) to do so. Thus, ‘The Elected Series’ is about the environment, but it also delves into issues such as gender, tolerance, and equality.”
When I asked why she chose the year 2185 to set the story in, Shay replied:
”The year worked out for my timeline. I had the eco-crisis occurring around 2100. Then four ‘Accords’ are signed by countries around the world as a way to stop the spread of the environmental damage. One of the Accords stipulates that a family takes each country’s presidential role for 100 years, turning over the presidency to each ruler’s first-born male when he turns 18. The Accord was supposed to guarantee stability. And for the ‘Elected’
story’s timeline, I needed about 85 years of the first presidential family’s reign to have passed.”
The “Elected” series is a dystopia, and there is also a romantic storyline — and a unique one since the love triangle involves a male and female character who are both interested in a female character.
When asked how she came up with that particular theme of a love triangle and gay identity, Shay replied:
”I wanted to focus on gender issues and what tolerance and homosexuality would look like in the future. I thought it would be a pretty complicated topic, considering that in this future society women are asked to focus on pregnancy as a way to increase the world’s vastly diminished population. However, couple that need with a society that has tolerance for whom people love (gay/straight/whatever), the idea of marriage and duty is complex.’
As far as how to shelve the books or which genre to put them in, Shay said she likes the cli-fi term and considers Elected as part of that new category.
“At the same time, I think Elected is also a subset of sci-fi. So it’s some of both,” she said.
The idea for the series came to Shay in 2011, when she was on maternity leave with her first child. When I asked her what kind of world she hopes to leave to her children and grandchildren, she had a good answer.
“My husband and I have two children now, Both of the first two books’ first drafts were written while on maternity leave with my kids. The third — well, I just have to find time to fit that in while also maintaining a full-time job. I want to be optimistic about the future, but I do think Earth will be greatly affected by climate change, pollution, etc in the future. It’s impossible to maintain the rate of harm humans are doing to the planet, the depletion of natural resources, etc, without the earth becoming damaged in some way. I think that at some point in the future, there will be a catastrophic environmental event, and it’ll force us to take preservation of the environment much more seriously. However, I don’t think that event will happen in our lifetime or even in our children or grandchildren’s lifetime. I think it’ll be years and years from now. I just hate that we can be helping prevent it for our descendants in that far away future now, and we’re not doing enough. One of the reasons I wrote Elected
is to shed some light on the topic of environmental preservation.”
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Bloom, based in Taiwan, is an inveterate web surfer and an originator of the term ‘cli-fi.’ Your comment may be posted in the space provided below or sent to dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com