As first lines go, The Girl in the Road’s is a good one: “The world begins anew, starting now.”

A few random thoughts on these six words:

1. The statement is Meena’s—but my first thought is that this could be the first line of any number of books. Perhaps all books. What is a novel, after all, but the creation of a world? It’s said that fiction must reflect reality, but most writers, I think, know better: language creates its own reality. “Call me Ishmael,” “It is a truth universally acknowledged,” “A screaming comes across the sky,” “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”—these words call worlds into being, worlds that don’t exist until writers and readers conspire to create them.

2. The notion of world is especially fraught in science fiction, however. Fans frequently speak of “worldbuilding” as a thing distinct from character and plot: “Great story but the worldbuilding could have been better,” or “I hated the characters but wow, the worldbuilding!” Recently, a friend was reading Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, the recent Nebula winner, and I asked him how he liked it. He responded by saying that he was a bit confused, at sea—but he said it like it was a good thing. The temporary sense of dislocation one gets when stepping into a fictional world that has been created anew between your mind and a printed page is a pleasurable one. It’s part of the point.

3. There’s dislocation in The Girl in the Road, too—flavored, for this reader at least, by the dislocation of stepping also into a culture that is not my own. This world is foreign to me in more ways than one.

4. Any disorientation I feel is what connects me, in the first instance, with Meena. It wrests me into sympathy with her. After her encounter with a poisonous snake in her bed, she’s disoriented too. Was it Semena Werk that tried to kill her? What’s with that barefoot girl following her? What about the explosion—does that have something to do with her as well? “The world begins anew, starting now.” Meena’s actions are impossible to understand without that first line. The beginning of a new world for Meena implies the destruction of her old one. She emerges from the crisis of her attempted assassination into a world remade by the trauma. There’s something infant-like about the way she stumbles from one encounter to the next, from one emotional reaction to another. She wanders in front of a train; she goes home with a man she knows is potentially dangerous to her.

5. The question at issue in the chapter is: What kind of world is this? Is this new world a world Meena wants to go on existing in? As Meena says late in Book 1, referencing a completely different trauma: “After a thing like that, why live?”

6. And yet there’s something hopeful about the first line of The Girl in the Road. “The world begins anew, starting now.” Meena’s new world is beautiful and ugly in equal measure. It contains hope as well as trauma, and when she stumbles into the HydraCorp museum the danger to her life is forgotten, momentarily, in euphoria at what humankind’s technological ingenuity can achieve. I was reminded, in this section, of Monica Byrne’s caution in our interview that her novel is not dystopian or postapocalyptic. The technology that will provide the core of Meena’s story is not dystopian but utopian: it represents the promise of a world powered by renewable energy. Says Meena: “Despite the snake, despite the terror, overall the world is only getting better.” (Though the terror, the trauma, remain very real.)

7. Then she says: “Now is the time for me to undertake a great journey.” Time, in other words, to seek a new world?

What do you think? Any thoughts on that first line of The Girl in the Road, or the first couple chapters? Let us know in the comments, or tweet at us with the hashtag #thegirlintheroad.

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