Spotlighted Book: The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau

[Prof. Sky Alton]

Our next recommendation for world-building, The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau, is a speculative sci-fi novel that takes place in a grittier kind of world. It plays with the question of what happens when the place that you’ve always known begins to die a slow death around you.

Synopsis from Goodreads:

Many hundreds of years ago, the city of Ember was created by the Builders to contain everything needed for human survival. It worked…but now the storerooms are almost out of food, crops are blighted, corruption is spreading through the city and worst of all—the lights are failing. Soon Ember could be engulfed by darkness…

But when two children, Lina and Doon, discover fragments of an ancient parchment, they begin to wonder if there could be a way out of Ember. Can they decipher the words from long ago and find a new future for everyone? Will the people of Ember listen to them?

Here are some discussion prompts to help you frame your response. Feel free to totally ignore them – we’d like to hear what you think!

• Do you think hearing the everyday facts of people’s lives in a strange world is the best way to get to know it? Or does it start to get in the way of the plot after a while?
• Do you think solid world-building is enough to make you suspend your disbelief about something unlikely? Is it less of a problem when there is magic or very advanced science to explain things away?
• What differences do you think there are between creating a world for a fantasy novel and one for a sci-fi or speculative fiction novel?

Please use spoiler tags if you’re discussing specific parts of the plot.

[Phoenix Hale]

I feel like learning the everyday tasks and life really helps the reader understand the world better. Like in the beginning of the book when Lina is worrying about her job assignment that she'll have forever, that worldbuilding of how their society is set up has always stuck with me. Having everyone's futures chosen through fate and not their desires explains why everyone is mildly complacent to not ask questions, but also shows that the society is as rusty from thinking out of the box as Ember is.