Kenneth Oppel and sci-fi go hand in hand. Perhaps that’s due to his bestselling Silverwing series, which has sold more than one million copies. “It’s funny,” says Oppel upon hearing this classification of his work, “I never think I write in sci-fi.”

He sees sci-fi as “people living in futuristic cities, on other planets, or on spaceships. Not taking place on Earth unless it’s set in an obviously far-flung future.” And a closer look at Oppel’s titles reveals that it isn’t sci-fi that’s the shared thread, but rather adventure. “I feel they’re all adventure stories. They’re all thrillers,” Oppel says. “With one thing in common, an element of the fantastic that exists within a largely realistic world.”

Best of All Worlds (Penguin Canada, June 3) is no exception. The young adult novel opens with 13-year-old Xavier Oaks, his dad, Caleb, and his dad’s pregnant new wife, Nia, waking up to find their cabin has been moved. They’re trapped and alone until another family appears three years later. Oppel describes the story as “a domestic family drama that happens to take place in a dome.”

The goosebump-inducing premise of people being trapped or captured and put in an alien zoo came to Oppel like most concepts for his books do: “a bright, sparkly idea [I’d] written down in one of [my] notebooks that had enough gravitational pull to attract other ideas and images to it.” Those other ideas ranged from the Oaks family being one of many exhibits in this zoo, to what kind of creatures they might encounter, and whether the exhibits would interact with each other.

“It would be an alien Jurassic Park, which is a fun idea, but I’d written the Bloom series, which had a lot of aliens in it, so I was a bit bored by that prospect,” confesses Oppel. “Aliens are hard to do in an original way. We’ve seen so many of them, and they all start to resemble each other.” So he set out with the proscription that neither the reader nor any of the characters would ever see aliens. It became about two questions that Oppel found far more intriguing: Is the family actually in an alien zoo? And are there aliens at all?

Oppel wrote Best of All Worlds coming out of the pandemic. One of the things he reflected on was society’s willingness and ability to act collectively. Bearing witness to how so many actions, including wearing a mask, became politicized made him both sad and worried about our future as a society and as a planet. “When I wrote this book, I was definitely angry and fed up with science deniers, climate change deniers, misinformation, and the idea of freedom being mangled into impunity,” Oppel says. “It seemed to me the idea of freedom was totally misunderstood. To do whatever we want regardless of whether it tramples over other people’s rights.”

Oppel admits he has very firm opinions about what should have been done during the pandemic, and one of the challenges in writing the book was to keep the perspective from being entirely one-sided. “It was important in a work of fiction that the characters avoid outright stereotypes,” Oppel says. “I wanted there to be some nuance in the characters. I think Riley [part of the new family] is a good dad, pays attention to Xavier, and loves his family. All these are good qualities. But underlying them are ideas that are odious and intentions that aren’t helpful.”

That being said, Oppel wants readers to know that Best of All Worlds is also kind of a funny read. In fact, he found himself chuckling quite a lot while writing it. “I felt like there was a bit of satire because in another mode it could almost have a sitcom dynamic to it,” says Oppel. “Just imagine that the people you least like end up in the dome.”

This political and social subtext is all wrapped up in what Oppel does best: a thrilling adventure readers won’t soon forget. “It’s a very exciting story,” says Oppel. “It has a Great Escape element to it. So I hope people interact with it and argue about it.”

Photo Credit: Mark Raynes Roberts.