How Novelist Laline Paull Crafts Fantastical Fiction Based on Real Science

In 2015, British writer Laline Paull published her debut novel The Bees, a science-based allegory tackling themes of social hierarchy, identity, climate change and motherhood, in which the actions of a renegade worker bee are both gripping and universally relatable.

Paull released her second novel, The Ice, an environmental thriller set in a not-so-fictional future in which the Arctic has melted, last May. We caught up with the author before her appearance at Lit Fest this month to learn more about her writing process, the untapped power of science fiction to drive social change, and it how was easier to write from the perspective of a bee than a conflicted British businessman.

The Bees was acclaimed for its realistic use of science in the depiction of the beehive, and your new novel The Ice is peppered with real research about the Arctic. In what ways has it been more difficult (or easier) to craft a fictional narrative while keeping much of the story scientifically accurate?
You know that expression, 'The truth is stranger than fiction?' I believe that, and I find that even very little research yields the most extraordinary facts. Some readers of The Bees start out a bit cynical about the apparently fantastical direction of the story, so they stop reading and do a bit of research online. 

They’re interested enough in bees to want to fact check my research. So when they find out it’s accurate, they’re hooked, because they know they can relax into a very weird story that is actually based in good science. 

So in answer to your excellent question of how to craft fiction while retaining scientific accuracy, I’d say that had I ever thought this was what I had to do, I’d have shied away, because it sounds so hard!  Two books in, I’ve come up with a launch process: Something hooks my interest because it’s important and true in the real world, and it sticks in my imagination like sand in an oyster. 

I keep turning it over and considering it, and it becomes bigger and bigger in my mind. I start searching for patterns and links, at which point my husband tells me I’ve become obsessed, and I know I have a book on the go. 

Paull during her Arctic trip

You’ve spoken about how your late friend’s beekeeping inspired your first novel – was there another important moment or event that sparked your interest in the Arctic for your second novel, The Ice?
Yes. I can’t explain it logically, but I’ll tell you.  It was in 2013. I’d written The Bees, but at that time I didn’t even have an agent, let alone a publisher.  I’d been up all night because all three of my children had a really nasty virus, and I was sitting at the kitchen table exhausted and just gazing at the internet the way you do when you’re just too tired and you get stuck to your screen.

Suddenly, I found I was looking at pictures of glaciers and polar bears, and clicking on stories of people who had been killed by polar bears, which led me to Arctic explorers of the past, and then to climate change and more pictures of the ice. I had this very strong feeling that I wanted to go to this place I was looking at, which turned out to be Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago that is the closest inhabited land to the North Pole.

I clicked on a small-ship cruise going there that summer, and then almost beyond my control (and remember, I’m sitting there in my dressing gown after a sleepless night) I had my bankcard out, and I’d booked it.

Fast-forward to the summer, and my husband and I were on the deck of a ship. I saw a glacier calving, beautiful and terrible as an explosion. I heard the ice moving around the ship like some strange otherworldly music. When the voyage was over, I knew I hadn’t seen enough, I didn’t know enough, and I started to seriously research the Arctic. 

What differences did you run into when writing your human characters in The Ice versus the bee characters in The Bees?
To me, setting a story in a beehive didn’t seem at all strange, but I accept that it’s not a usual location, or cast of characters. The protagonist of The Bees is a laying worker from the lowest caste of her society, and like all her thousands of sisters, she is supposed to be sterile, because only the queen may breed. 

When she discovers forbidden mother love and must hand her child over to be killed, she finds she can’t do it, because mother love is stronger than any law of any land, and we all know it.  So Flora717, this fertility-criminal, was for me an easy character to identify with. I wrote her from the heart. And I wrote wasps and spiders and flowers, and it all seemed normal.

But to write a venal, psychologically conflicted British businessman who buys a piece of the Arctic and gets himself into serious trouble – that was another story.  Because when you write someone whose motivations are mixed; when he’s hiding things from himself and realizing he’s been living a lie, it makes him a much more troubling character than a heroic mother whose heart is clearly in the right place. 

Both of your books have made use of allegory and metaphor to illustrate environmental and societal problems. Why is this literary technique valuable for raising awareness compared to more straightforward news coverage or advocacy?
Caring about one fictional bee can change how a reader sees their world. The onslaught of news, images, sound, data and facts and horrors hits us day and night, and we get overwhelmed and confused and – in my case all too often – have to switch it all off. 

This can lead to living in a protective cocoon where the only things we care about are those things that won’t hurt us. And this leads to a compassionless society. Not because individual people don’t have compassion, but because we have to function, and we can’t do that if we’re absorbing the pain of the world, the magnitude of climate change, the statistics about animal extinctions, and so on. 

But stories get through. Stories are personal, and when you read a novel, if it’s any good, if it has any psychological truth and if that truth is backed up by good research, then you can open up. If the novel is great, rather that just good, you won’t have the choice. It will open you up and make you feel and it will empower you.

"Caring about one fictional bee can change how a reader sees their world"

Science fiction is often sidelined by the literary establishment as less worthy of critical examination than other types of literature. Why do you think it deserves more attention?
I have absolutely no idea why there is a whiff of snobbishness about anything perceived as ‘science fiction,’ but I do think you’re right. As technology develops and changes our lives and how we think (For instance, whose attention span and concentration has not been affected by their smartphone?), we will need stories to rationalize and explore – to comfort us for our gains and give form to our fears.

Photo by Adrian Peacock

Could you tell me a bit about your upcoming talk at Lit Fest?
More than likely it will be on the entirely unexpected way that writing The Bees and The Ice have changed me as a person. As a reader, you long for a book that affects you so deeply that it changes how you see the world. As a writer, however, I was completely unprepared for how writing novels about the natural world has affected me.

Mar 17, 4pm, RMB85. Glam, see event listing, get tickets here. The Bees and The Ice are available on amazon.com.