After finishing the first 100 pages or so of The Hands of the Emperor I mentioned to my partner that I'd just started a book where the private secretary to the God-Mage Emperor convinces the emperor to go on his very first vacation to a beautiful remote location with only his closest staff on hand. "Then everything goes wrong!" my partner said, with a smile, to complete my sentence.
Well, no. Not in this extraordinary book. That's not what happens at all. In fact, you could say that nothing much actually happens in the next 638 pages. And yet I was grabbed by this book in a way that I haven't been grabbed by the three most recent SFF novels that I've read (The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, The Terraformers by AnnaLee Newitz, The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison). I read for hours every day, stayed up late to finish chapters, kept reading when I should have been doing something else.
What gives? How on earth does that even work?
As a writer, you're told about the three act structure -- the bones of storytelling that apply to screenplays, novels, short stories. It's the basic structure of story that makes a narrative feel satisfying: Act 1 introduces us to our hero and the challenge that launches them into action. Act 2 exposes the true nature of the threat, forces the hero to make choices, and ends at a dark point. Act 3 is where the hero takes charge, makes sacrifices, and then triumphs (or fails). Formulaic? Yes and no. There are lots of templates, analyses, and formulas out there, but the best of them acknowledge that there are many ways to meet these milestones, and many ways to tell a story. Their point is that this basic structure is engrained into how stories are told in Western societies, and that by paying attention to this structure you can make your story better in the same way that getting the balance of salt, sweet, acid, and unami right in a recipe can make the food you cook more appealing.
However, The Hands of the Emperor does not follow three act structure. Neither do Becky Chambers' books. The Goblin Emperor (by Katherine Addison) doesn't so clearly set aside the three act structure, but definitely falls into the category of 'A book where nothing bad happens'.
What on earth gives?
Well, spoiler, it's Character. It comes down to character. Becky Chambers writes characters that people love in a society that people love, and despite the fact that her people live in a complicated ever-changing interstellar space opera universe, the challenges her people face are fundamentally personal. For example, in The Galaxy and the Ground Within, a group of travellers is temporarily stranded at what amounts to an interstellar truck stop, and the book is about discovering what personal challenges these odd assortment of characters are facing (and how they resolve them). The Goblin Emperor has a clearer narrative arc -- our exiled hero is called back to the palace to become emperor when his father and all four of his elder brothers are killed in an airship accident. But that's only the first chapter! The bulk of the book is about Maia overcoming the trauma of his isolated upbringing to become a good emperor by being true to himself (transforming his society in the process).
The Hands of the Emperor is about Cliofer (Kip) Mdang, who begins the novel as private secretary to the all-powerful, magical, and semi-divine emperor and ends as Viceroy to that emperor, just before the emperor leaves on his magical quest to find his successor. This isn't a startling transformation: Cliofer is the emperor's most trusted advisor and head of the imperial bureaucracy at the beginning of the novel, and takes on (vaguely defined) additional responsibilities as the book progresses. The actual events of the book simply explain how Kip has become who he is, explores his relationship with his emperor and with his family, and shows how Kip transforms his society through his steadfast adherence to the fundamentals of the culture of his isolated provincial home province.
Why is the book gripping-ish? Despite being too long, and despite some tedious repetition? In the end, because you care about Kip. He's both immensely competent and immensely modest, so modest that it takes you a long time to see how improbably much he's accomplished. Much like the Goblin Emperor, Kip is decent in every way, always does the right thing, and triumphs over his not-very-threatening adversaries.
I've heard books like this called "competence porn", and "hopecore". I believe they're popular because in this broken world of ours, who can resist a fantasy world where someone decent put things right?
Victoria Goddard is self-published (successfully!). Becky Chambers started self-published, and was so successful that she was picked up by a major and has since won a Hugo. Addison is traditionally published, at perhaps the cost of including more plot in her books.
I think the distinction is important. I don't think that any traditional publisher would take a book without (much) plot, particularly one as long as The Hands of the Emperor (738 pages in paperback, in case you aren't clear on the math). But I wonder if at some point that might change: Becky Chambers has sold a lot of books, and it seems that Victoria Goddard is doing well. If they do, in 10 or 15 years, will all those internet pages on novel structure look different than they do today?
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