Blueprints for building a library (of construction fiction)

April 28, 2024 12:40 PM

I'm looking for stories where one or more significant characters are some kind of builder(s): a plumber, a carpenter, a pile driver, an engineer specializing in building construction, a general contractor, etc. Bonus points for stories that center autistic, neurodivergent, queer, and/or disabled characters, as well as women and BIPOC builders.

GENRE
I particularly love sci fi, fantasy, and historical fiction set in any era (ancient history and ancient building techniques are fascinating!). But I enjoy all other genres too, including literary fiction, romance (badass women builders or sexy queer construction stories, anyone?), cozy mysteries (not sure how that would work with this subject matter, but open to it), occasionally even some (creepy not gory) horror stories, etc. So while there's definitely bonus points for sci fi / fantasy / historical fiction, please don't let genre be a limitation in your recommendations.

FORMAT
I'm hoping for novels, comic books, and audio dramas/podcasts, but also open to excellent movies or TV shows (with a soft spot for animated films and series).

I'm also open to interesting video games that feature compelling narratives about builders (playable on web browser, Mac, or Switch, please). The wonderful Stay? by E Jade Lomax is one of my favorite text-based narrative games. That specific game doesn't feature construction work, but something in a similar text-based, character-focused narrative style would work well for this question.

WHAT I'M LOOKING FOR
I'm hoping to find stories where a primary character or characters are constructing the built environment, broadly speaking: homes, workplaces and businesses, healthcare facilities, places of worship, community spaces, public works projects like bridges, dams, tunnels, windmills, sewer systems, water treatment plants, and large-scale irrigation projects -- anything you can think of that qualifies as "built environment". (On the other side of the coin, I'm not looking for characters who make small items. So for the purposes of this question, no 3-D printing, blacksmithing, or tailoring stories, please!)

Elaboration of the rules: I am anticipating mostly stories about the human built environment, but that's definitely not required. Sci fi and fantasy are my jam, so the built environments of fictional non-human sentient beings are very much welcome. Similarly, if you have a story where the characters are animal builders creating animal architecture -- wow! I'm all ears!

An example: "On a Sunbeam" by Tillie Walden would qualify, because most of the main characters are on a construction crew together. They do restoration, remodels, and deconstruction. Work isn't the primary focus of the whole story, but it is significant, and there are some really stunning visual and narrative depictions of their work. Plus everyone is queer! (In case anyone is now interested, here's the webcomic. And for those of you like me who prefer to hold a book in your hands, there's a physical graphic novel version too.)

Important: "Pillars of the Earth" does NOT qualify because I tried to read it (building cathedrals! how cool! I love trans-generational megaprojects!) and was extremely not okay with the casual treatment of rape and the pervasive, gross misogyny / exploitative-porn-style objectifying descriptions and treatment of women characters -- horrible! Also extremely uninterested in anything by Ayn Rand. Putting this in small font so I don't mar too much of this lovingly crafted question with disgust.

WHAT PROMPTED THIS QUESTION
I find myself reading and watching a lot of (excellent) media where the main character is some kind of healer or healthcare provider. For example, I'm currently reading "An Unkindness of Ghosts", which is fabulously immersive and fascinating, and centers around an awesome Black queer autistic protagonist who is a healthcare provider in her community. Being immersed in too many healthcare stories makes me romanticize healthcare work above all other work, and then I find myself feeling wistful about not working in healthcare myself, which isn't, uh, healthy for me.

In the past, I was longing for healthcare so hard that I quit my job, took a year of pre-med/pre-health classes (which was amazing! no regrets! I especially loved molecular bio, microbio, and anatomy and physiology), and worked full-time for a good chunk of the year in direct patient care (which was gut-wrenchingly awful, mostly because of the pervasive and inescapable moral injury I experienced every single day in the USAian system).

Plus, I'm already a skilled journey-level worker in my trade (plumbing), and a member of my union. I enjoy my work and I'm proud of my skills. I served a 5 year apprenticeship, earned my license, and have developed expertise in several important facets of my trade. (And as I periodically remind myself, without correctly designed and correctly installed plumbing, public health suffers terribly.) And I do get excited about and feel proud of my profession when I'm working on a cool project, and when I'm exposed to stories that show how amazing it is to build structures and systems for habitation.

I'm hoping folks can recommend some stories that will help me build a rich and resonant mythos around my chosen field of work <3

posted by cnidaria to Media & Arts (22 answers total)

The Engineer Trilogy by KJ Parker suggests itself. Very strong in the area of historical engineering methods. The Engineer himself is... well, not neurotypical, IMHO.
posted by SPrintF at 12:47 PM on April 28

Best answer: Kij Johnson’s “The Man who Bridged the Mists”
posted by Darkivel at 1:12 PM on April 28 [1 favorite]

I was probably too young when I read William Golding's The Spire (1964) about the hubris and madness involved in adding a heaven-spiking spire to a medieval cathedral.

House (1985) by Tracy Kidder is the true story of building a one-off home near Amherst MA but it reads like a ripping yarn and has loadsa detail about lumber, the size of nails, and interpersonal dynamics

Plumbing? In 2003 BBC had a seven part docudrama series Seven Wonders of the Industrial World including the story of Joseph Bazalgette and the London sewers completed in 1865.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:19 PM on April 28 [1 favorite]

It does not meet any of the bonus criteria and might be coming at this from the wrong angle, but Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists centres on a group of workers renovating a house in a turn of the century English seaside town. It’s a real socialist polemic exposing the exploitative working conditions among tradesmen and labourers at the time. Bleak subject matter but it’s incredibly sharp and blackly funny in parts, and I found the descriptions of the work and working conditions of the housefitters incredibly atmospheric. It really stayed with me and I still think about it years later. Many of the workers are highly skilled craftsmen and take immense pride in their trades, which of course is not reflected in their pay and conditions as the book so beautifully illustrates.
posted by Lluvia at 1:28 PM on April 28 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: One more clarification: I am mostly seeking stories where there are depictions of builders that are primarily positive, with the characters who build things using their skills to contribute to and care for their communities.

Not that they can't be flawed/complex/human. But a major issue I run into in fiction is that whereas healthcare workers are typically depicted in a warm, positive light, often people who make things are depicted as impatient, cold, selfish, rude, hubristic, sexist, knowingly environmentally damaging, etc.
posted by cnidaria at 1:28 PM on April 28

Response by poster: So "The Spire" is likely not what I'm looking for here. And the "Engineer Trilogy" sounds like it's about building war machines and other mechanical things, not buildings?

Thanks all for the thoughts so far, I'll take a look!
posted by cnidaria at 1:29 PM on April 28

Best answer: "Tower of Babylon" by Ted Chiang is a story from the perspective of a construction laborer/engineer building a tower up to, and then digging through, the solid celestial sphere in his civilization's sky. The other stories in his collection Stories of Your Life and Others, are also quite good. He also has a story "Exhalation" in his collection Exhalations, which is more about pneumatics than hydraulics but you may appreciate it!
posted by panhopticon at 2:02 PM on April 28 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Interesting question! I'm racking my brains for things I've personally read. In the meantime, the results of some quick searches with some potential good recs (which you might already have seen, so feel free to ignore):

Stories about building spaceships on /r/printSF
Could you recommend a book about building a space colony? on /r/printSF
Novels about restoring houses from the green
posted by fight or flight at 2:11 PM on April 28

There is a sub-genre of romance novels about house restoration - see my question linked by fight or flight above. Tribute is a good example.
posted by paduasoy at 2:18 PM on April 28

Nonfiction but reads like a novel: Brunelleschi's Dome by Ross King tells the tale of the design and construction of the enormous dome atop the cathedral in Florence, Italy in the 1400s.
posted by heatherlogan at 4:13 PM on April 28 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Whispers Under Ground by Ben Aaronovitch, book 3 of the Rivers of London series, involves a magical-realist portrayal of a people who take care of the sewers and subway system under London. Due to the serial nature of these books, you'd probably want to start from the beginning of the series though.
posted by heatherlogan at 4:26 PM on April 28

Best answer: The Disposessed (Le Guin) centers a physicist who, by virtue of living in a utopian collectivist society, spends a non-trivial amount of time engaging in building/manual labor in a way that is depicted extremely positively. If not exactly what you’re asking for, I feel like it does a good job removing some of the classical hierarchy between thinking and building jobs and might contribute well to your project.

Fountains of Paradise (Clarke) is entirely about an engineer’s quest to build a space elevator. He’s not exactly warm - I feel part of the message of the book is about the way that people who want to achieve great things make compromises in their lives - but he is reasonably positively portrayed.

The entire Mars trilogy (Robinson) is about terraforming Mars and has many awe-inspiring, multigenerational, planet-scale building projects. There is a large cast of characters and a lot of internal politicking, so I’m pretty sure most representations get some time.
posted by A Blue Moon at 4:31 PM on April 28 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Not quite a builder, but the main character in Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist is a the first Black female elevator inspector in an alternate reality, slightly noirish metropolis who is investigating an elevator crash in a building she inspected.
posted by brookeb at 4:34 PM on April 28

(Also if you’re interested in nonfiction, you might be interested in my previous question.)
posted by A Blue Moon at 4:37 PM on April 28

It's been a long time since I read Slow River by Nicola Griffith so I'm not sure if it ticks all your boxes but I have to recommend it, with a lesbian protagonist who spends a big chunk of the book working in a sewage treatment plant. My hesitations: I'm not sure if the protagonist also displays too many of those stereotypical negative characteristics of makers you're seeking to avoid; I'm not sure if the descriptions are too much from the perspective of working as a technician rather than building (although this blog post from the author that I found while trying to research and remember indicates that there may be at least a bit of background description of larger engineering); and if I recall correctly it's also pretty bleak at points with descriptions of abuse and sex work, though it certainly doesn't treat them casually. But so much of the premise is so near to what you're asking that I had to put it out there.
posted by sigmagalator at 5:09 PM on April 28

Very old now but might still be what you're looking for: They Shall Have Stars by James Blish; the first (according to the internal chronology) of his Cities in Flight series. At least part is about a group of engineers who are building a "bridge" for research purposes on Jupiter.
posted by Logophiliac at 7:34 PM on April 28

Architects and town planning in non-fiction, or do you want builders only? Kate Colquhoun's biography of Joseph Paxton. A short book about Herbert Collins, architect and worker for peace. Rosemary Hill's biography of Pugin. I don't think there is a full-length biography of Jane Drew, but the podcast She Builds had an episode on her. And I wondered whether you would be interested in histories of council housing or new towns, of which there are several good ones. Council housing list, also Municipal Dreams, blog and book (two books now, but I haven't read the second one). New Towns.
posted by paduasoy at 11:35 PM on April 28

Nora Roberts' "Inn Boonsboro" trilogy centers about a family construction business restoring a local inn. It's Nora Roberts, so it is extremely heterosexual, but the other side of the coin is: it's Nora Roberts, so it's excellent.
posted by pollytropos at 6:24 AM on April 29 [1 favorite]

Best answer: As far as I remember, none of the characters in Jane Rule's work are professional builders, but there is an awful lot of home construction, and it is often explicitly framed as an act of love and community building--I'd recommend starting with The Young in One Another's Arms, where a group of young people are re-building a rickety old house together, and/or Memory Board, in which an extended family is reunited in part by acts of love that include building a fence. Rule was a lesbian, and her books always center lesbian characters, but she's also very interested in disability and in social justice in general. Really just highly recommend these lovely, understated, and deeply radical novels.
posted by dizziest at 8:20 AM on April 29 [1 favorite]

Oh, also: The Cook and the Carpenter!
posted by dizziest at 8:23 AM on April 29

Response by poster: Thanks all for the new titles to explore!

I found another link on Reddit and got a few more titles to investigate as well:
- A Succession of Bad Days by Graydon Saunders ("described as 'a fairy-tale lost in a civil engineering manual' " -- sounds fantastic to me!)
- The Sarantine Mosaic books by Guy Gavriel Kay ("the main character is a mosaicist and there's a fair amount of interesting architecture in the two books")
- All the Paths of Shadow by Frank Tuttle ("A fun book in which a mage is asked to move a tower's shadow so the king can give a speech in the light. I don't remember the details but I know it was fun, focused on the character's problem solving for this more complex than appears problem, and was entirely unique")
- Old Domes by JY Yang -- not sure if it's quite what I'm looking for, but can't resist including this extremely weird short story about a person whose job is to assassinate... buildings?
posted by cnidaria at 8:05 PM on April 30

Response by poster: Oooh, I'll add one more of my own for anybody else who is interested: Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree. It's an awesome fun queer fantasy book, and includes a fabulous carpenter character named Calamity who's hired to remodel an old stable into a coffeehouse, in a city that's never heard of coffee:

“Cal held out his hands as though to catch a toss, but she deliberately placed it in one palm. He pursed his lips and bounced it in his hand. “So. Why me, exactly?” He made to hand the coin back to her, but she declined.
“Like I said, I watched you work. Sharp tools. You clean as you go. Your mind’s on your business.” She looked around at the conspicuous absence of men nearby. “And you do it even when some might say it’s wiser not to.”
posted by cnidaria at 8:14 PM on April 30