Picture, if you will, an alternative reality in which the groundbreaking science fiction television show The X-Files is exactly the same in every other way but features one startling difference from how it was originally presented. Imagine if every episode began with Mulder or Scully or Skinner or any other character featured in the any of the storylines entering the office of the Cigarette Smoking Man and engaging in a tense interview. And that segments from these interviews were intercut into the narrative at appropriate times in order to lend context and a sense of paranoia that is not present as the episodes currently exist.
This is essentially how the novel Sleeping Giants is structured as a work of storytelling. Although not absolutely every single chapter is literally an interview conducted by an unidentified interlocutor who enjoys some position in the government granting him power that at times seems to be exceeded only the President himself, that description does fit the overwhelming majority. And those rare chapters which are not structure in the Q&A form are still crafted in such a way as to replicate the concept. For instance, this “chapter title:
FILE NO. 161
INTERVIEW WITH CW3 KARA RESNIK, UNITED STATES ARMY
Location: Underground Complex, Denver, CO
is followed immediately in the narrative by this one:
FILE NO. 182
PERSONAL JOURNAL ENTRY—DR. ROSE FRANKLIN, PH.D.
Location: Underground Complex, Denver, CO
The significant point to keep in mind is that each of the chapters includes a file number and the one single person in charge of those files is the mysterious interview. And during those chapters in which there is give and take in the Q&A structure, it is most definitely not like those interviews often featured in works of fiction where the person conducting the interviewer is simply a “just the facts” blob of anonymity. There is interaction and he can get quite sarcastic and ironic and psychologically penetrating and even on occasion defensive.
And it is in this character that the storytelling form of the novel becomes seamlessly integrated with the content. Everything about this fascinating story is a puzzle. The overarching puzzle is the worldwide search for giant robot body parts left by ancient alien visitors to be found when human evolution had advanced enough to figure them out. But the puzzle that makes up the story is reflected in the puzzle of how the story is told. What will happen once all the parts have been collected and the giant robot is assembled is a mystery. But it is equally true that this strange man asking these questions and collecting these files is every bit as much a mystery and, even more to the point, every bit as interesting a puzzle.
Another book about robots—though not giant aliens robots, sadly—also takes a similar approach to the way it tells its story. In Robopocalypse, the actual history of the war between humans and robots is told episodically through an archival device created by the robots. It is an interesting enough choice—directly making a parallel between the robot archive and the black box that tells the story of what made an airplane crash—but ultimately it seems more of a gimmick than a seamless integration of form and content.
That weirdly compelling interviewer—this government’s equivalent of Cigarette Smoking Man—makes all the difference in the world. It is through his presence that the novel becomes a textbook example of how to take a gimmicky idea to a place where it is no longer a gimmick.
