Cold World: Building a house you can live in as is, with doors and stairways to expand up, down, or sideways

June 30th, 2023

Everything about Cold World was, for me, too big to contain in one story — whether I ever decide to write any of those other stories or not.

I knew that I wanted to tell a complete, specific tale: this chapter of Calef’s life as he explores the power of understanding, through his permanent grief and his hard-earned honesty and his relationships with his family.

But I knew there was so much more.

So, as I tell people who ask me more about Cold World, I designed it to be expanded, but not in one particular direction. No, Cold World can go up, down, and sideways.

Up: Without spoiling the end, it concludes in an open way that could easily be explored going forward. That’s not to say things aren’t wrapped up; it’s just a fact of life that things don’t ever really end, and the false endings we do get are rarely satisfying. For a hint of what that story could be: I would love to see some of our Earth characters visit Flora.

Down: I have a story outline written about the asteroid hunting team eighty years in the past who managed to save the entire planet while also dooming it to its permanent winter. Fun fact: Oscar’s mother was part of that team.

Sideways: I have made no secret of my love for The Loner, an eccentric character who briefly falls into the story to help Calef survive the Neo Atheists and disappears just as suddenly. A book about where she was before, during, and after her time in Cold World is really intriguing to me.

Will any of these other stories ever surface? I don’t know.

All I know is that Cold World is an extremely important book to me; as a writer, yes, but especially as a person and an artist.

It allowed me to get everything I was thinking and feeling on a page when I was thinking and feeling a lot, too much, and it felt more like creating a painting with science-fiction than writing down words.

It is my longest book, and it is the book where the biggest, most frequent complaint I receive about it is: it isn’t long enough.

Maybe those critics are right.

Maybe there’s more Cold World to explore.