“My friend Sarah Vowell once looked at my bookshelves and asked, in that voice of hers, ‘Do you have any chapter books?’” Oh, burn, Sarah Vowell! Apply ice directly to the burn. You’ll know what I mean when you see it.Ībrams says he’s a fan of Michael Crichton, Stephen King, Harry Potter, and Chris Ware, but also that his bookshelves are mostly filled with “ridiculous volumes” of magic books, how-to guides, and science texts. Abrams’ first stab at the franchise, 2009’s Star Trek, was much like his first Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, in that both took pains to establish new heroes in new worlds. It felt less like film or TV, and more like concocting something insane and very special. So there were many characters and points of view to balance. Then, there is the editor of the book, who appears in an introduction and in footnotes. That is, there is the novel itself (“Ship of Theseus”), which stands alone as its own story, and then there are the notes in the margins: a conversation and investigation and mystery and love story between two people, which is both connected to and separate from the central text.

The multilayered conceit of the thing almost makes it a play interacting with a book. It is also Abrams and Dorst’s love letter to the written word. “To be clear, Doug Dorst is the writer of S,” Abrams reminds the Times.īut working on this project was different from anything I’ve ever been involved in. Abrams and written by award-winning novelist Doug Dorst, is the chronicle of two readers finding each other in the margins of a book and enmeshing themselves in a deadly struggle between forces they don’t understand. Abrams, world’s most productive human, collaborated on an upcoming book called S. Mystery abounds, of course, but now Abrams has explained a little more about the concept behind the story.

S by jj abrams