Under the Skin

"It’s a book that’s set on Earth—right now, I would say—and it’s imagining that the aliens are already here but have been surgically altered to look like us. On their home planet, they look a bit more like sheep, so they feel that they have more of a bond to sheep than they do to us. And they bring their preconceptions to our world, about how we can’t be very intelligent or important because we’re hairless, two-legged weirdos. It’s a brilliant reflection of our preconceptions about bodies, and what we think other forms of life may be capable of or how important we think they are, in terms of whether or not they look like us. The novel is written from the point of view of an alien who has a particular job to do, which involves rounding up humans (while trying to fly under the radar and go unnoticed), and then processing them for a particular use back on her home planet. It’s about her struggle to decide whether humans have thoughts and feelings, and if we’re worth trying to save in any way at all. Yes. I really love the way Faber uses language in the book to do this: the alien refers to people of her own kind as human , and to us as animals . It’s just a great reflection within the language of how they think; it’s so beautifully written throughout. There is a film adaptation, which I really like, but it doesn’t go into why the alien is collecting these lonely hitchhiking humans. The book goes into much more depth that brings it into the category of sci-fi body horror for me. What possible use could we be to them if we’re considered such a lesser form of life? It’s quite hard to take in its final pages, but it opens your mind so well to looking at the situation in a different way. Challenging our preconceptions of what otherness looks like, of how it might act, is a big part of my own work. I’ve imagined aliens in all sorts of ways. If you make them like us, a mirror of us, that raises its own questions. If you make them very different, as in Butler’s Bloodchild , where they’re giant insects, then that’s a new level of repulsion that the reader has to deal with. It’s a question of deciding to what extent you want the reader to feel connected to or separate from those beings, and then, how you can play with the distance you have from them. Three Eight One is a fantasy adventure. A young woman has to embark on a quest and discover herself, and some very strange, weird things happen on the way. That’s what usually happens in my books, so it’s no different in that regard. But this was an attempt to try something quite different: all the sections of the book are 381 words long. I really enjoyed it. I was surprised that it started to come naturally to me at some point. I would just read the word count at the end of each section and think, ‘Oh, I’m about right.’ It was loads of fun to do."