Literature / Early Riser

"It doesn't matter what's true or not, it's what everyone believes that's important."

A sci-fi/ fantasy/ crime/ satirical comedy Alternate History novel by Jasper Fforde, Early Riser is set in a world where the last ice age never ended and the human population hibernates to survive. During the bitterly cold 118-day-long "month" of Standard Winter, the world is a snow-draped landscape of desolate loneliness, devoid of activity as everyone sleeps away the frigid season in a dreamless haze courtesy of the drug Morphenox.

...well, not quite everyone.

Protagonist Charlie Worthing has just joined the ranks of the Winter Consuls, a group of committed (if not mildly unhinged) misfits responsible for ensuring the hibernatory safe passage of the sleeping masses. The decision might have been spur-of-the-moment, but Charlie will get to work under the best in the industry: Jack Logan, a famed Winter Consul with over 20 years experience under his belt.

Charlie's first overwinter shift is supposed to be a safe, simple affair. Just filing and paperwork and doing laundry for the senior agents. But when Jack Logan is suddenly removed from the picture during a routine assignment, Charlie is compelled by duty to carry out Logan's investigation into an outbreak of viral dreams in Talgarth — home to Morphenox manufacturer HiberTech's headquarters, and one of the remotest regions of Sector 12.

The Winter Consul initially dismisses these viral dreams as nonsense, nothing more than a quirky artifact borne of the sleeping mind. So when the dreams start to kill people, it's unsettling. When Charlie gets the dreams too, it's weird. When the dreams start to come true, Charlie begins to think maybe they've bitten off more than they can chew.

But teasing truth from Winter is never easy. Anyone who wants to survive the 118 days from Slumberdown to Springrise will have to avoid roving Villains (with their penchant for murder, kidnapping and stamp collecting); ensure they aren't eaten by Nightwalkers (whose thirst for human flesh can only be satisfied by comfort food); and sidestep the dangers of the increasingly less-than-mythical WinterVolk of lore. Charlie will also have to contend with the minefield of allegiances out in Sector 12. One wrong move could upset the delicate balance between the Winter Consuls, HiberTech, and the assorted shamans, dreamers, drowseys, porters, and insomniacs who all have their reasons to keep active during the coldest and most dangerous time of the year.

But so long as Charlie remember to wrap up warmly, they should be fine.

---

Tropes in Early Riser:

• 20 Minutes into the Past: Acording to the Handbook of Winterology on Fforde's website, the novel takes place in an alternate 2003, but was released in 2018. The mention of Carmen Miranda being 94 years old backs this up.
• Abusive Parents: It appears that parents have the legal right to wager their children's reproductive or marital futures for their own gain, and often do so. Two of the women Charlie meets in Sector 12 are victims of this, as detailed under Financial Abuse below.
• The All-Concealing "I": The novel is written from protagonist Charlie's point of view. This allows author Fforde to keep viewers in the dark about Charlie's facial deformity for the first few chapters, and about Charlie's gender for the rest of the novel due to the gender-neutral writing.
• Alternate History:
  • The story takes place in an alternate version of the modern world, where the Ice Age still continues and the human population hibernates through winter. Humans bulk up by gorging on fatty foods before they hibernate and grow a hairy "winter coat" to survive the extreme cold.
  • The British Isles don't exist - the story takes place on the "Albion Peninsula," attached to the continent of Europia. ^{Great Britain has, in the real world, been a peninsula of Europe.} Great Britain was a peninsula of Europe during the last real-world ice age: ocean levels were much lower, owing to the amount of water locked away in glacial masses. When that ice age ended and the atmosphere warmed, the landbridge known as Doggerland flooded, creating the British Isles we know today. Wales still exists though, and is part of a political entity called the "Northern Federation." The Northern Federation appears to be in conflict with the still extant Ottoman Empire. Both male and female characters are introduced as veterans of either the first or second campaigns in the Ottoman.
  • English nobility was disbanded during the "devastating Class Wars" of the nineteenth century, with the royal family rumored to be living in asylum in British Columbia (or hiding out in a mansionette in the countryside). Other members of the aristocracy have taken to living in the wilderness beyond the reaches of society as bandits called "Villains," occasionally kidnapping citizens keep their hideouts fully staffed with butlers, maids, and pastry chefs.
  • Recognizable brands (Snickers, Jaffa Cakes, Ambrosia Rice, etc...) and cultural figures (like Tom Jones and Sarah Siddons) still exist, but James Bond is instead "Jane Bond."
  • Famous works from Shakespeare and well known Greek myths still exists, but with altered plots that reflect the fact that humans hibernate during the winter as described in Different World, Different Movies below.
  • Brazilian actress Carmen Miranda survived into her 90s in this universe; in our reality, she died at age 46.
• Alternate Techline: Due to the need for tech to survive Hibernation, there's a number of alternative technologies running around. Guns have been replaced with "thumpers" which fire off pressure waves, cars and other machines run on compressed air rather than fuel, nuclear energy is used to keep sleepers warm, and wax cylinders are still used to record sound and dreams. There's also mention of bioluminescent plankton being used as a light source.
• Ambiguous Gender: Charlie is never written with gendered pronouns, and as the narrator they never give an indication as to their gender. It’s also possible they’re nonbinary; the one time another character addresses Charlie in the third person, it's Toccata shouting "what do you want me to do about them?"
• Anyone Can Die: A large number of named characters, with varying levels of development, die throughout the novel, including Jack Logan, Moody, Jonesy, Lucy, Hooke, Foulnap, and Aurora.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: "Villains" are the deposed English nobility, who deliberately exemplify the worst of British stereotypes. They only speak English (referring to it as the speech of a "civilized" race) kidnap and enslave people to act as their domestic servants, and are incredibly pompous about their rituals and their (largely meaningless) titles.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • The novel treats "hibernation" in humans as just "a very long period of sleep" to the point where some characters are implied to be able to stay awake all summer, but it's more complicated than that— in real life, hibernation in larger animals, such as bears, is a form of topor that actually has brain activity that resembles sleep deprivation. True hibernation is only possible in smaller animals such as bats.
  • One of the main advantages of Morphenox is that its users Cannot Dream, as dreaming burns calories and often leads to Death in Sleep; in reality, dreaming uses up so little caloric load that you're lucky to burn any calories as you sleep, even if you're tossing and turning due to a nightmare.
  • People who Overwinter are said to hibernate during the summer; however, this form of hibernation is called Aestivation.
• Babies Ever After: Downplayed — Birgitta and Charles go on to have two daughters.
• Baby Factory:
  • Women who don't give birth or adopt "partial custody" of a child can be prosecuted on the charge of "Evading Childbearing."
  • The Sisters of Perpetual Gestation run child rearing pools (i.e. orphanages), and their religious calling dictates they fill the pools with as many children as possible... by giving birth as many times as they're physically able to do so. Even leadership in the sisterhood seems to linked to one's ability to give birth, with Mother Fallopia claiming that her decision to step down from the position of Mother Superior is due to "slackening of fertility" (after she had given birth to 28 infants).
• Beast Man: Played with; humans in this universe have adapted to grow fur-like winter coats when they hibernate, but these are evidently shed during the summer. Some of them even have fur patterns, as Fodder demonstrates by showing off a tiger-like coat when he reveals that he was assigned female at birth.
• Big Beautiful Man / Big Beautiful Woman: Overlaps with Darwinist Desire, as those who have trouble packing on the pounds at the end of summer are pitied (due to the very real chance that they could starve to death while they hibernate) or looked down on as genetically inferior partners. Bulking up with a generous fat reserve pre-hibernation is considered a very attractive look, as it's the biggest factor in determining who survives a harsh winter. Women who want to have children in the spring have to consume even more calories in order to be at a healthy weight to conceive after hibernation — when Charlie sees one of Charles' memories of Birgitta, Charlie is struck by how beautiful and healthy she looks at a "bulked-up-make-baby-in-the-Spring" weight.
• Big Damn Heroes: Just when it seems Aurora is going to torture Charlie to death inside their own mind, the Gronk comes in, takes control, and obliterates her with the sheer shame of what she's been doing.
• Big Eater: Due to the high caloric cost of hibernation, everyone is expected to pack on the pounds before Winter, with "five times the caloric intake" being the minimum. Overwinterers are the only ones who get a break, because they hibernate in summer instead, but they are still expected to keep some contingency weight just in case. Early in the book, Charlie accidentally falls asleep for four weeks and nearly starves to death, and is stuffing themselves at every opportunity for the rest of the book.
• Braving the Blizzard: The last few chapters take place as a blizzard sweeps into Sector 12, with temperatures at -40 degree Celsius and wind gusts that can lift a man off his feet. Multiple characters are forced to travel through the cold, both on foot and in large Sno-Trac vehicles. And while Charlie might be able to negotiate with trigger-happy Consul agents or scheming HiberTech security personnel, no one can negotiate with a blizzard.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: The perks of joining the Winter Consul, as listed off by Jack Logan during Charlie's interview:
  ‘I need a new Novice with a good memory to train up. Good career path. Exciting too. Lots of challenges. Bit of cash, extra pudding. Medium to high risk of death.’
  ‘What was the last bit again?’
  ‘Extra pudding.’
  ‘And after that?’
  ‘Coffee and mints?’
  ‘I meant on your list.’
  ‘Oh -– medium to high risk of death.’
• Breeding Cult: The Sisters of Perpetual Gestation are a quasi-religious order of nuns whose stated goal is to give birth to as many healthy children as possible, and their motto is "Keeping the numbers up so you don't have to." They also run Pooled Parentage Stations for abandoned children, or for children who are adopted under the partial custody of several families.
  Brian had been the venerable sister’s twelfth Silver Stork and Gary and Lucy her joint eighteenth. The Sisters of Perpetual Gestation took their pledge seriously. The record was Sister Vulvolia over in Sector fifty-one, with thirty-four. All but nine survived their first Winter and each of them from different sires – but then Sister Vulvolia had a good eye, and took the need for genetic variation seriously.
• Bullying the Disabled: Gary Findlay, one of Charlie's pool-mates, bullied Charlie for their facial deformity until Charlie snapped at the age of nine and bit Gary's ear off.
• Cannot Dream: One of the main reasons so many people take Morphenox is to prevent themselves from dreaming, as apparently having dreams uses up unnecessary calories when hibernating. Charlie proudly says they haven't dreamt since they were eight years old.
• Chekhov's Skill: Charlie's exceptional memory, particularly the ability to remember a random string of words, comes in handy at the very end of the novel: the cylinder might have been destroyed, but Charlie can still remember what it said.
• Chemical Messiah: Morphenox, whose effects are described under Fantastic Drug below. Morphenox is so important to one's chances of surviving hibernation that doses are only guaranteed for government workers and highly trained individuals like doctors or nuclear physicists — the general public is left to scramble for the limited doses available for sale.
• Creator Career Self-Deprecation: Tacotta mentions that she dislikes gaps— gaps in windows, gaps in doors, and especially invoked Sequel Gaps; by the time Early Riser was published, Jasper Fforde's other series had entered various stages of Development Hell, ranging from Six Years with Thursday Next to over a decade with Nursery Crime.
• Creepy Souvenir: Apparently, proof of death for Nightwalkers comes in the form of severing the left thumb.
• Crossover: The "Handbook of Winterology", a bit of tie-in material on Fforde's website, states that Dormotoria are constructed from Perpetulite, a substance that also shows up in Shades of Grey. Toccata also says she hopes Aurora catches the Mildew, a fatal disease in that same world.
• Crazy People Play Chess: Aurora and Toccata have a long-distance game of chess going. They're revealed to be two halves of a Split Personality.
• Dark Secret: HiberTech is willing to murder and steal to cover up a very valuable secret: that Nightwalkers are in fact curable, and always have been. Since this would make "parting them out" murder and "redeploying" slavery, they've gone to great lengths to hide the cure and get rid of anyone who knows about it.
• Darwinist Desire:
  • Sister Vulvolia (of the Sisters of Perpetual Gestation) gave birth to thirty-four children, all by different fathers. She picked the men to sire her children based solely on their genetic fitness, and is said to have a "good eye" for genetic variation because all but nine of her children survived their first winter (giving her something close to a 75% batting average for infant survival, which is considered above average).
  • Men and women who are classified as "genetically tier one" or "alpha" can make lucrative careers out of siring children for the discerning customer. Eddie Tangiers was a professional sire-for-hire; Jack Logan "could have charged eye-popping siring fees" (but didn't, to his credit); and Birgitta was offered a five-figure, two-child deal by a pair of surrogacy scouts.
• Dead Guy on Display: All the criminals who are publicly executed by Frigicution are left in the town square until they thaw or are eaten by wild animals, and a famous bandit's freeze-dried corpse is an exhibit at the Talgarth Museum.
• Deadpan Snarker: Charlie is usually quite polite but whenever a stranger makes a rude comment about their facial deformity, the response is generally a snappy retort that turns the rudeness back against the original commenter.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: The Ice Age never ended in this world, and humans have evolved to hibernate during the winter, which has had a knock-on effect for the rest of society.
  • Due to so many people dying in the middle of winter, marriage is considered an out-of-date practice, as opposed to siring children and giving them up for adoption. Children rarely know their biological parents, and aren't even named until they survive their first winter.
  • Dreaming is considered a wasteful use of calories over the winter, and one of the main draws of Morphenox, despite its side effect of potentially turning 1 in 3000 users into a Technically-Living Zombie, is the fact that the user Cannot Dream. Those who do dream, or worse, stay awake during the winter without reason (referred to as "winsomniacs") are treated as drains upon society, as over-winter food supplies are meant to be used for those who are members of the Winter Consulate, HiberTech employees, or other critical functions, such as the porters among Dormotoria.
  • It's mentioned at one point that projectile weaponry (i.e. guns) are seen as a more humane alternative to certain applications of "non-lethal" pulse weaponry.
• Devoured by the Horde: The fate of anyone unfortunate enough to encounter a group of Nightwalkers who have "gone pack", or reverted to their cannibalistic instincts after running out of comfort food. Nightwalkers will just as easily turn on one of their own as they will a non-afflicted person. Also Exploited — Aurora makes this a specialty, as out of all the nightmares she can inflict on the subjects of HiberTech's interrogations, this is the nastiest.
• Different World, Different Movies:
  • A chapter header discusses the differences between two extant versions of The Mona Lisa, with the one at the Louvre noted to be skinny and unattractive while a second copy of the portrait is said to look plump and healthy.
  • Famous works of theater like Romeo and Juliet and Agamemnon have slightly altered plots that reflect the fact that humans hibernate during the winter. Both the Zeffirelli's film adaptation and Baz Luhrmann's version of Romeo and Juliet are mentioned, in the context of how the respective directors handle Romeo's awakening in Spring (expecting to be met with Juliet asleep beside him, but finding instead the desiccated corpse of his beloved).
  • James Bond is now Jane Bond, with Charlie musing on how the one guy who played the role was controversial at the time.
• Dismemberment Is Cheap: Due to the large supply of Nightwalkers who are "parted out" when their usefulness is up, there's a high availability of spare organs (for those who need a transplant) and entire limbs (for those who need a replacement). When Charlie strikes up a conversation with an overwinter performer whose husband "Nightwalked" some winters ago, the woman muses how her husband's "legs are on a gardener in Stourbridge right now, and his eyes are currently looking across the Sound of Mull."
• Dream Sequence: Several chapters take place inside dreams.
• Dream Walker: The Gronk is what remains of Gretl Block, who turned into a viral dream after her father murdered her and hops from host to host killing the unworthy.
• Dream Weaver:
  • Aurora specialized in interrogating the targets of HiberTech's security team, racking up hundreds of hours poking around in the dreams of her victims. She eventually developed the ability to mold their dreams to her will and used it to torture confessions and information out of suspects.
  • Don Hector helped to develop the technology, and was able to use his dream-shaping powers to booby-trap all his own dreams, knowing the HiberTech would record them. His traps render the recordings functionally worthless for extracting information.
• Dreaming of Times Gone By: Invoked — part of the viral dream infesting the Sarah Siddons involves the dreamer dreaming that they've become Don Hector (the inventor of Morphenox) sitting on a pile of boulders at the base of a huge oak tree. As Charlie discovers, this isn't just a dream but an actual memory of Don Hector's that became a dream-trap for anyone trying to explore Don Hector's recorded dreams. It's those recorded dreams/memories that HiberTech is playing back, projecting them into the minds of the sleepers at the Sarah Siddons.
• Eerie Arctic Research Station: Zig-Zagged — Sector 12 isn't in the Antarctic, it's in Wales. But the encroaching ice sheets from the north result in regular blizzards and -40 degree temperatures that make the land little better than the arctic in winter time. HiberTech's research facilities and manufacturing plant are situated in Sector 12, far from the prying eyes of competitors, the machinations of political extremists, or government oversight.
• Encyclopedia Exposita: Chapters are prefaced with quotes from in-universe books, pamphlets, speeches, and other media.
• Eunuchs Are Evil: Downplayed; Porters are said to be traditionally eunuchs, and while Lloyd isn't evil, his tendency to gossip without concern for consequences makes Charlie's life a lot harder.
• Even Evil Has Standards: The Villains are willing to take a deal involving them getting a healthy child in exchange for Charlie's life, and are willing to wait two years if the mother is Laura, because she's not yet an adult and 'one does not approve of child with child.'.
• Fantastic Drug:
  • Morphenox (and its counterpart "Juvenox" for the under-12 set) is the recently developed drug that puts humans into a deep, dreamless hibernatory state and prevents them from accidentally waking halfway through their hibernation. Before the introduction of Morphenox in 1974 (several decades before the start of the book), there was a much higher death rate among hibernators. Waking up early or dreaming too intensely could cause hibernators to burn through too much of their body fat reserves, leaving them to starve to death before spring. The side effect of Morphenox is that 1/3,000 overwinter users suffer a neural collapse while asleep, ending up as mindless cannibals. These "Nightwalkers" are declared legally dead and either killed outright, harvested for their organs, or reprogrammed to perform menial labor for a few years and then harvested for their organs.
  • D-reem is an illicit drug Shaman Bob and his coterie of winsomniac dreamers take to enhance their dreams.
• Feghoot: A rather elaborate one involving Mrs. Tiffen, a "tricksy" nightwalker who is capable of playing songs by Tom Jones; she starts out only being able to play "Help Yourself", but after an attempted kidnapping, she's only able to play "Delilah". When Charlie asks a member of HiberTech if this sort of behavior is typical in nightwalkers, they're told "It's Not Unusual" before Mrs. Tiffen gets taken away.
• Fictional Holiday: Fat Thursday, which takes place two months before the beginning of the unforgiving, 120-day-long "month" of Winter:
  Fat Thursday had been long established as the first day of serious gorging, the time to indulge in the latest faddy get-fat-quick diets and to take a vow of abstinence from the mass-stealing sin of exercise. Yesterday you could run for a bus and no one would turn a hair, tomorrow it would be frowned upon as almost criminally irresponsible. For the two months until Slumberdown, every calorie was sacred; a fight to keep every ounce. Spring only ever welcomed the mass-diligent.
• Financial Abuse: Overlaps with Parental Abuse, as parents in the world of Early Riser have can buy, sell, or wager their children's reproductive and/or marital futures for their own gain:
  • Laura's parents sold the genetic options to her firstborn child in order to pay off their gambling debts. Laura has a rare thyroid condition that makes her unable to sleep most of the time (and unable to hibernate like the rest of the population), which makes HiberTech very interested in her genes and the genes of any of her prospective children. The debt was eventually sold to Jim Treacle the bondsman, but not before the courts capped the legal cost of her child-bearing debt at 50,000 euros — making it possible for her to "buy back" the debt (albeit at an exorbitant cost). Laura is so desperate to escape from under that debt that she wagered the genetic rights to her second child to the same Jim Treacle, just for the chance keep her future children free. Charlie tells her that things could have been worse, as her parents could have legally harvested and sold her eggs when she turned 16 and no-one would have batted an eye.
    '—when I was two my parents sold the option on my firstborn to Partwood Associates to pay off their gambling debts. The option was resold several times before being packaged with other subprime child options and eventually on to Jim Treacle as part of a collateralised child obligation. My genetic sleep disorder means I possess a genome in which HiberTech have a great deal of interest. I've chosen not to license my genetic rights, and my unborn should have that right, too. I don't want them to go to HiberTech to be some kind of — I don't know — lab rat.'
    'How much is the firstborn child option worth?'
    'Treacle has told HiberTech he wants two million euros at my eighteenth.'
    'You'll get half. That's the deal.'
    'It's not about the money, and they can't force me to have children — but I think I want to, and if I do, well, I want them to be born unencumbered by legalities.'
    'Okay, but you've got a buy-back clause. Legally, there's always a buy-back clause.'
    'Precisely, but it was pegged a fifty thousand by the courts and I barely have a grand.'
    'So if you lose the wager,' I said slowly, 'you lose the genetic rights to two children, Treacle and you make a fortune, — but HiberTech obtains legal access to a couple of kids with a potentially valuable genome?'
    'Pretty much. But if I win the wager," she added, 'I get no money but retain my children's rights.'
  • Jonesy's mother bartered away Jonesy's hand in marriage to Jim Treacle as collateral for a loan. Jonesy has been trying to avoid a direct proposal from Treacle, because if she denies him her mother's house will be forfeit.
    'I'd sooner marry Agent Hooke, but it's complicated: my mum borrowed lavishly from Treacle to bag a rich widower from Sector Fifteen. That didn't work out, so Treacle transferred the loan to my hand in marriage. Not sure how that happened. Anyway, we're trying to spin out the Hard No for as long as possible, otherwise it's a loan default and he can take my mum's house.'
• Flesh-Eating Zombie: Nightwalkers turn to cannibalism if they aren't fed an adequate supply of comfort food like Snickers bars or Ambrosia Rice Pudding. It's mainly that they'll eat any available source of protein, including the kind that's still alive and screaming.
• Flip Personality: Whenever Aurora and Toccata switch control, the dominant eye switches.
• Global Warming: It's mentioned that this is being actively encouraged in an effort to shorten the winter, with coal being a primary power source to try and trap greenhouse gases and melt the ice; however, an Encyclopedia Exposita excerpt shows that due to a lack of coordination in efforts to induce climate change, it's speculated that the entire northern hemisphere will be an ice sheet by the end of the 2200s.
• Glorified Sperm Donor: Jack Logan resembles several of the children from Saint Granata's Pooled Parentage Station (and he is intimate/ familiar with Mother Fallopia). It's strongly implied that he's their biological father, and that he donated his genetic material out of a sense of duty.
• The Glomp: The "Winter embrace", an incredibly close and well-enclosed hug made for sharing body heat between overwinterers. There are a few people you don't want to embrace, i.e. children, but otherwise people aren't shy about giving them to strangers to keep warm.
• Gollum Made Me Do It: Played With; Aurora and Toccata are aware of each other, but believe they're separate people. Aurora has a grudge on Toccata and vice-versa. To make matters even more complicated, Toccata is working for La Résistance and is one of two surviving members of it by the end of the novel, and Aurora is working for the MegaCorp Big Bad HiberTech; The Campaign for Real Sleep keeps Toccata in the dark for fear that Aurora could somehow become aware of what Toccata is doing.
• Good All Along: The Gronk might be a bit more simplistic than most, but it turns out she only goes after people who are truly "unworthy": her murderous father, Lucky Ned, Hooke, and then Aurora. Charlie spends most of the book worried that the Gronk will come for them due to their guilt over causing Logan's death, but she helps them instead, understanding that their guilt is misplaced.
• He Knows Too Much:
  • Don Hector not only figured out that Nightwalkers were retrievable, he found a way to do it, and he created a version of Morphenox that creates no Nightwalkers at all. HiberTech couldn't have that, so they sent Aurora to kill him.
  • They're after the Campaign for RealSleep for the same reason, killing everyone who knows of the cure's existence. They kill Logan, Jonesy, and Foulnap throughout the novel and come close to killing Charlie.
• Incongruously-Dressed Zombie: Some of the Nightwalkers show up wearing strange clothes, or nothing at all. Eddie Tangiers was naked when he suffered neural collapse in his sleep, so when he's discovered he's both totally nude and "displaying a tumescence of considerable size and rigidity." Carmen Miranda, who in this Alternate History did not die in 1955, shows up as an aged woman in a ballgown and a Tutti Frutti Hat. Carmen keeps the fruit hat even after she's been cleaned up and put in a pair of standard coveralls by the Campaign for RealSleep .
• Inhumanable Alien Rights: Once a person suffers neural collapse during hibernation and becomes a "Nightwalker," they're declared legally dead and stripped of all rights. All Nightwalkers can move around and feed themselves, several can speak, and "tricksy" ones can perform skills they possessed before neural collapse (like playing the bouzouki, sketching scenes from life, or translating speech into Morse code), but in the eyes of the law they're either the property of HiberTech or vermin to be eliminated for a bounty.
• Inspirationally Disadvantaged: Discussed — Charlie has largely made peace with the facial deformity they were born with, but some of Charlie's old poolmates just can't let it go, even as adults:
  ‘I always really admired you growing up. Always smiling through your unhappiness. A real inspiration.’
  ‘I wasn’t unhappy.’
  ‘You looked unhappy.’
  ‘Looks can be deceptive.’
  ‘All too true,’ she said, ‘but I meant what I said: inspirational in a sort of tragic way, like you’re the failure in the family, but always looked on the bright side of everything.’
  ‘You’re very kind,’ I said, long used to Megan’s ways, ‘but it could have been much worse: I could have been born without tact or empathy, and be shallow, self-absorbed and hideously patronising.’
• Intentional Weight Gain: Overlaps with Big Beautiful Man / Big Beautiful Woman and Big Eater — Since humanity hibernates through the winter, gorging oneself on food before hibernation is considered socially acceptable, with exercise being shunned for fear of running out of fat-reserves mid-winter and subsequently starving to death. Charlie mentions "the latest faddy get-fat-quick diets" that crop up after Fat Thursday (the start of the feasting season) since "-for the two months until Slumberdown, every calorie was sacred; a fight to keep every ounce."
• Laser-Guided Karma: Don Hector created a form of Morphenox with no side effects, but HiberTech made so much money off Nightwalkers (i.e. those who suffer neural collapse during dreamless Morphenox-induced sleep and are turned into zombified slave labor) that they decided to murder him and cover it all up while making a second, more risky batch instead. Then the Nightwalkers are woken up and nearly everyone abandons Morphenox entirely. HiberTech is left trying to replicate Hector's version after having destroyed all evidence of it.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: While Toccata is the good half of a Split Personality, Aurora is an out and out sadist torturer, so it comes out to her being "barely tolerable" at best. Jonesy casually mentions that she beat her into a concussion for a week for some slight or other.
• Mad Dreamer: The viral dreams afflicting the overwinter crowd who take berths on the 9th Floor of the Sarah Siddons end up driving the dreamers mad. Suzy Watson snapped, attacking customers in the Mrs. Nesbit's tea room and ending up "thumped" by Toccata. Roscoe Smalls walked out into the winter and froze to death to avoid the dreams. Moody snapped and attacked the façade of Mrs. Nesbit's with an axe, ending up "thumped" by Agent Hooke.
  'They all had a dream of such fearsome reality that it flooded from their subconscious and invaded their waking hours,' said Fodder. 'The dream grew, it took them over. It devoured them.'
• Mammoths Mean Ice Age: The work takes place in an alternate present where ice age megafauna like mammoths, glyptodonts, giant tree sloths, and saber-tooth tigers never died out because the last ice age never ended.
• Mandatory Motherhood:
  • The "wastage" of citizens who don't make it through the winter results in constant public panic that the population will die off faster than it can be replaced. Women are encouraged to have as many children as possible, and each successful birth results in a "Silver Stork" award. The government is split over whether they should offer more benefits/ subsidies to mothers and families (the liberal position), or shame the barren and enforce stiffer penalties for women who don't produce (the conservative position).
  • "Childbearing Evasion" is a crime. Paying "offsets" for partial custody of a child in a pooled parentage station (i.e. an orphanage) can reduce a sentence to "childbearing avoidance," which isn't quite a crime so much as a misdemeanor.
  • Fodder is transgender and has been living as a man for years, if not decades. Despite this, he offers to personally carry a child for the Villains in order to uphold the truce between Sector 12 and the deposed English nobility, rather than stealing a child from one of the Nursitorium.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Charlie Worthing, the protagonist, spends a large part of the novel worried that they're unworthy— i.e. a drain on resources during the winter. Their encounter with the Gronk in the penultimate chapter puts these concerns to rest.
  • "Toccata" is a term most famously associated with Johann Sebastian Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D minor"; a Fugue is a musical term, but it can also refer to a state of dissociation or lost identity, which is exactly what Toccata goes through every time she becomes Aurora.
  • "Brigitta" is a derivative of "Bridget", which can mean "exalted one"; Charlie falls in love with her over the course of the novel.
• MegaCorp: HiberTech is the sole producer and provider of Morphenox, the wonder drug that puts humans into a safe, dream-free hibernatory state and lowers the risk of dying overwinter from early waking and overtaxing neural activity. They've also taken responsibility for managing the unfortunate 1-in-3000 Morphenox users who suffer a total neural collapse during hibernation, turning the mindless, cannibalistic Nightwalkers into productive menial laborers and plentiful organ donors (an industry that generates a considerable amount of value).
• Mundane Object Amazement: In a world where everyone hibernates, Laura has what we'd consider a normal human sleep cycle, 8 hours a day all year round. This rare genetic disorder has a lot of people eager to study her genome and Charlie is absolutely fascinated.
• The Needs of the Many: Deconstructed. This is HiberTech's rationale for everything that they do, creating "the greatest good" for the "greatest majority". Ergo, poisoning, enslaving, and murdering hundreds if not thousands of people by turning them into Nightwalkers is okay because the majority will benefit from having an oppressed underclass to do labor and farm organs from. In their opinion, the convenience of the many outweighs the basic human rights of the few: as long as more people benefit than suffer, you can do anything you want no matter how immoral.
• Non-Lethal Warfare: Pulse armaments are supposed to be this, but in practice, all but three on-screen deaths in the story are due to someone being hit with a pulse weapon and either turning into Chunky Salsa from the force of it, or hitting a barrier at speeds the human body can't handle.
• No Party Like a Donner Party: Referred to as "Winter Cutlets", the last resort for overwinterers if food supplies run out and they have to feed their charges. It never actually happens, but it's threatened and joked about often, including the recurring joke that Toccata eats Nightwalkers with mint sauce.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Notable Goodnight gets a nice long Motive Rant about how the creation, slavery, and murder of hundreds of Nightwalkers is ultimately for the greater good, since it'll create a social revolution by making a permanent underclass for humanity to use, and that letting them continue to exist is noble and good. And hey, if HiberTech just happens to be making a great deal of money off exploiting them, all the better. Charlie sees right through it.
• Oh, My Gods!: Downplayed; several Greek and Roman gods, particularly Morpheus, God of Sleep and Dreams, are invoked throughout the novel, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence of the Christian faith.
• One-Steve Limit: Charlie's name is similar to Birgitta's husband, Charles Webster. When Birgitta turns into a Nightwalker, she's only able to say the phrase "I love you, Charlie," as "Charlie" was her nickname for her husband. It gives protagonist Charlie quite a shock to hear the supposedly brain-dead Birgitta declare her love for them, before Charlie realizes the origin of the phrase.
• Only in It for the Money:
  • HiberTech only cares about their bottom line. And if that means letting hundreds and then thousands of people die each year from a curable condition so that they can make money off their labor and organs, so be it.
  • Bondsmen, and in particular Jim Treacle the Bondsman, are active loan sharks using the Winter to squeeze every last euro out of the desperate.
• Pantomime Animal: A running joke:
  • Charlie strikes up a conversation with an overwinter performer on the train, and the woman describes meeting her late husband when they performed as the "front and back halves of a pantomime horse."
  • Later, when Charlie need a plausible excuse to be on the elevator to the 21st floor of a Dormitorium while holding a bouzouki, Charlie claims that they're the back-end of a pantomime horse in an overwinter talent show.
  • Even later, when Jonesy asks Charlie to come up with a romantic Meet Cute for their invented relationship, Charlie cribs the pantomime horse story from the woman on the train.
• Parental Abandonment: Charlie's parents hired a surrogate to carry Charlie to term, but dumped the infant Charlie in a child rearing pool due to Charlie's facial deformity. Charlie wasn't expected to survive past a second winter, so everyone involved got an insurance payout for their trouble.
  'No sir. I'm a... surrogacy that turned out wrong.'
  'On account of your head?"
  'Yes, on account of my head. I was transferred to St. Granata's with half the insurance payout. The rest went to my bios as compensation.'
  'Worthing is an insurance write-off,' said Mother Fallopia, 'and one that is still paying off our kindness.'
• Perception Filter: Any time Aurora and Toccata find evidence that they're actually the same person, they write it off or ignore it. They go so far as to complain that the other is "avoiding" them.
• Phlebotinum Pills: Morphenox is the drug that grants most users a safe, dreamless hibernation.
• Preserve Your Gays: It's low-key, but the trans character Fodder is one of very few named characters who survives to the Epilogue.
• Public Execution: "Frigicution" is a form of execution where the condemned is chained up in a town square to freeze to death. Upon waking up from an accidental hibernation, Charlie sees that a criminal has been executed in just such a manner (for smuggling drugs out of HiberTech) in the month or so Charlie was asleep. The punishment is still widely employed throughout Wales (and possibly the rest of the Northern Federation), as the chapter header for "The Wincarnis" reads:
  '...In the main square of every town there would be a large block of stone, inset with a bronze ring. Capital offenders would be stripped, shackled to the ring, then abandoned. Below the survival threshold of minus ten, the offender would last between two and six hours...'

  —Law and Order on the Winderlands, by Idris Roberts
• Recurring Dreams: The viral dreams affecting sleepers at the Sarah Siddons all involve boulders, blue Buicks, a belligerent Mrs. Nesbit (of Mrs. Nesbit's Tea House), and a swarm of disembodied hands that attack the dreamer. Turns out this trope is Invoked by HiberTech, who are broadcasting a recording of Don Hector's last dream into the minds of the Sarah Siddons residents. The repetition of the dream, night after night, causes the sleepers to become Mad Dreamers.
• Repressive, but Efficient: The government's tight control of both schooling and technical progress makes it so that anyone with a high school diploma has the necessary training to fill any job designated a "Skillzero" position - from a fast food restaurant manager to a filing clerk. Virtually all vehicles are required to have the same set of controls, so anyone who can drive a golf cart can also drive a truck. As described in the supplemental Handbook of Winterology published on author Fforde's website:
  "Due to the random nature of Dying in Sleep events, skill retention can be a problem, so the Skillzero protocols are to ensure that all systems are designed to be intuitive and easily mastered by anyone with no more than a pass in General Skills."
• Rip Van Tinkle: Hibernation doesn't stop the kidneys from working, just slows them down — and anything that sits in the bladder for that long becomes horrifically potent. Charlie wakes up from four weeks of accidental hibernation and stumbles to the bathroom to relieve themself of "something that smelled of overripe silage, looked like yacht varnish and felt as though it were burning a new way out."
• Room Full of Zombies:
  • Porter Lloyd has been storing Nightwalkers in the basement of the Sarah Siddons Dormitorium to make a bit of extra cash. The canned nightwalkers (whose cravings for human flesh can only be sated by high-calorie junk food) are fed a handful of turnips every few days in order to keep them alive. When Charlie needs to get to the Sno-Trac vehicle in the parking garage, they have to navigate six hungry Nightwalkers in the dark.
  • The Giraldus Cambrensis was supposed to be emptied out following a boiler meltdown that would have destroyed the miniature nuclear power plant in the basement, leaving the building frigid and highly radioactive. When Charlie takes shelter from a blizzard there, they find it's full of Nightwalkers. Campaign for RealSleep agents Jonesy and Toccata were harboring them in the supposedly abandoned building, rather than killing the Nightwalkers or turning them over to HiberTech to be parted out.
• Rummage Sale Reject: The Villains, being deposed English aristocracy who have taken up banditry and kidnapping to maintain their illegal estates, dress in a combination of stuffy "upper class" duds (tweed, High-Class Glass, etc...) and warm winter gear. When Lord Farnesworth first threatens Charlie, his outfit is described as such:
  He was dressed in the mismatched blend of clothes that was the adopted uniform of the Winter Villain: much-mended ski salopettes with a mammoth-wool tweed jackets under a down-filled puffa, criss-crossed with belts of thermalites. He had large boots, again mismatched, a sturdy tea cosy for a hat which was embroidered 'A gift from Whitby' and was missing his nose — frostbite, I figured. There was also a scar the thickness of a little finger that ran from his forehead to his chin by way of his left eye — which held a cracked monocle.
• Safely Secluded Science Center: The HiberTech facility does its most dangerous and illegal work during the Winter, when they're safely snowed in and most of the population is asleep.
• Secret-Keeper: After the negotiation with the Villains, Charlie is the only one that knows that Fodder is trans. Given how seriously childbearing is taken in this world, they keep their mouth shut about it and even help Fodder hide his pregnancy. It's implied that Toccata is a Secret Secret-Keeper, as she doesn't question why Charlie wants to give up their reward for killing Lucky Ned to Fodder.
• Secret Relationship: Birgitta and Charles were in a committed relationship and considered themselves married, but because of their involvement in the Campaign for RealSleep it would have been too dangerous to have their union legally recognized.
• Sexual Euphemism: Intimate activities are referred to as "bundling", and enjoying one's own company is called "bundling with yourself." Partners for such activities can be referred to as the genial sounding "bundlechums," or the less generous "dumbundles."
• Shared Dream: The ability to record and play back dreams allows multiple individuals to experience the same dream scenario. One of HiberTech's interrogation techniques is to put victims in a shared dream with Aurora, whose powerful Dream Weaver skills allow her to turn innocent shared dreams into nightmarish torture chambers.
• Shout-Out:
  • Nightwalkers who have been repurposed for domestic servitude are called Janes and Edwards.
  • The character of Mrs. Nesbit, a mascot for a chain of restaurants, is said to regenerate every few years a la Doctor Who.
  • Most of the Dormotoria are named after famous people; two of the most important ones in the novel are the Sarah Siddons and the Geraldus Cambriensis.
• Sizable Snowflakes: When a blizzard rolls in, there are snowflakes "the size of dinner plates" flying about. Even with the exceptional cold, it's hard to believe they could get that big.
• Skeleton Key: When Charlie becomes an official Novice Consul, they receive an "omnikey," which will allow them to open any lock on any door, in any Dormitoria or building. Locking hardware was standardized some time in the 1930's to allow for the production of just such a type of universal key, so anything older was "grandfathered in." Of course, when Charlie finds a mysterious steamer trunk on the 9th floor of the Sarah Siddons it has an old-style lock that renders the omnikey useless.
• Skyscraper City: Due to the vast amounts of Dormotoria that people sleep in over the long winter, several places in the novel are this. Supplemental material states that standard Dormotoria in the United Kingdom are 480 feet tall, about the height of the Park Row building in Lower Manhattan.
• Smart People Play Chess: Aurora and Toccata are playing a long-distance game of chess, and are both invested in obscure strategies that they hope will pay off and allow them to outmaneuver the other. Because they never seem to run into each other, they have to relay their moves through the various agents who act as go-betweens for HiberTech and the Winter Consul office. Overlaps with Crazy People Play Chess, since Aurora and Toccata are the same person — or at least two personalities sharing the same body.
• Snowy Sabertooths: Zig-Zagged — the work takes place in an alternate present where ice age fauna like mammoths and saber-tooth tigers did not die out due to climate change. They survived up till modern times in the ongoing ice age, though the saber-tooth tigers are endangered and possibly extinct due to conflict with human settlements. It's mentioned that the fifth-to-last saber tooth tiger was killed when it was hit by a bus (and the remains are on view in Talgarth's museum).
• The Social Darwinist: The majority of the population would prefer to see Morphenox (the drug that increases one's chance of surviving hibernation by turning off the ability to dream) made available to everyone once HiberTech's infrastructure has the capacity to produce enough doses for every man, woman, and child. But there are also those who espouse the belief that hibernation weeds out those who are unfit to survive, and call for Morphenox's distribution to be purposefully restricted even when there's enough to go around. The chapter header for "Over the Hump" provides one such example:
  'The Winter is a necessarily harsh gardener. It weeds out the weak and the elderly, the sick and the physically compromised. Inroads have been made towards "Proactive Winter Support" to increase survivability of those with high intellect but low constitution, but for large numbers of the population it is both impractical and expensive. Only the strong and the wealthy should ever see the Spring...'

  —James Sleepwell's speech defending denial of Morphenox rights to all
• Sound Stone: Everyone in the novel is chasing after a wax cylinder with a pattern of words recorded on it that has the capability to cure Nightwalkers of their condition; HiberTech wants to destroy it, and the Campaign for Real Sleep wants to use it.
• Split Personality: Aurora Toccata was originally the head of HiberTech's security and their most effective dream interrogator. She inflicted countless nightmares on hundreds (if not thousands) of sleepers in order to get information out of them. Eventually the cruelty of her actions caused her mind to fracture into the distinct personalities of Aurora, the remorselessly cruel chief of HiberTech security, and Toccata, the no-nonsense Chief of Sector 12's Winter Consul (who eventually joins the underground Campaign for RealSleep to help protect nightwalkers).
• Split-Personality Merge: Discussed — this is what Charlie hopes to Invoke in order to distract or defuse Aurora by forcing her to confront all her good instincts that splintered into the Toccata personality.Instead the Gronk kills the Aurora personality, leaving Toccata the only one in control.
• Taking You with Me: After Jonsey gets mortally wounded by Lucy, Charlie helps her get her hands on a pulse charge that's strapped to her, which she detonates when Lucy comes out of the Dormotoria to finish her off.
• Talking in Your Dreams: The "Dreamspace", technology that allows people to share dreams. HiberTech had plans to use it for social reasons, but it wasn't viable, so instead they use it to interrogate. Aurora and Charlie share a dream at the end where Aurora pries the location of the cylinder out of Charlie and then tries to torture them, but is stopped by the Gronk.
• Tall, Dark, and Handsome: Jack Logan is introduced as a man who "was tall, dark, and had matinee idol good looks."
• Teen Pregnancy: Discussed as one method to stem the "wastage" that happens every year when young children and able-bodied adults die during hibernation. One character mentions that this would mean redefining who counts as a "child," as pregnancies are frowned upon until women turn 18. Even the capital-V Villains (who have no compulsion against kidnapping, murder, and theft) look down on teen pregnancy, with the outlaw Lady Farnesworth quoted saying "one does not approve of child with child."
• Technically-Living Zombie: "Nightwalkers" are the result of neural collapse due to Morphenox use during hibernation - for every 3,000 people who sleep peacefully through the winter in a dreamless, Morphenox-aided slumber, there will be one who turns into a mindless, hungry husk of the person they used to be. For this reason, they're declared legally dead and shipped off to HiberTech headquarters in Sector 12 to be "parted" (broken down for organ and limb donations) or "redeployed" (reprogrammed to handle simple tasks like washing plates or opening doors). Regardless of whether they've been redeployed or not, all Nightwalkers will turn to cannibalism if they aren't fed an adequate supply of comfort food like Snickers bars or Ambrosia Rice Pudding.
• Theme Naming:
  • The Sisters of Perpetual Gestation all take on monastic names relating to fertility, genitalia, and parturition. Mother Fallopia runs the pool where protagonist Charlie was raised, alongside Sister Contractia, Sister Fertizilia, Sister Placentia, Sister Zygotia, and Sister Umbilica. There's also Sister Vulvolia in Sector fifty-one.
  • Several characters are also named after motifs dealing with sleep, such as Lucy Knapp (nap) and Charlotte Goodnight.
• Translation Convention: It's revealed when Charlie encounters Lucky Ned that up until that point, everyone in the novel had been speaking Welsh translated into English.
• Tutti Frutti Hat: The Technically-Living Zombie of Carmen Miranda is spotted wearing a ballgown and one such fruit hat.
• Two-Faced: Charlie, who has one eye a few inches below the other due to a deformity in their skull. While it doesn't reflect on their morality, as they're a good, prinicipled person beneath it all, it does influence others' perceptions of them, particularly Aurora (who can only see the normal side) and Toccata (who can only see the disfigured side).
• Undeath Is Cheap: Foulnap was once a Nightwalker, but woke up one day, letting the RealSleep people know the condition was curable. Don Hector found a rhythm of words to wake up Nightwalkers and recorded it on a cylinder, which HiberTech are searching for to find and destroy. In the end, Charlie recites the cylinder's contents for all to hear and wakes up the Nightwalkers of Sector Twelve, leading to a mass curing and the end of Morphenox.
• Undercover as Lovers: In order to not break an Oath he made to Aurora, he tells Toccata that the two of them are bundling; Aurora has a great deal of fun trolling Charlie with this once she finds out.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Downplayed — Charlie was born with an extensive facial deformity which is hinted at, but not explained until several chapters in. Strangers who would have otherwise commented on it simply don't, until Charlie describes it, at which point Toccata, the Notable Charlotte Goodnight, and Shaman Bob all bring it up in conversation.
• Vomiting Cop: When Charlie investigates the body of one Winter Consul agent who'd been killed by pulse weaponry, they end up throwing up in the snow next to the crime scene. A senior agent rebukes them for carelessly expelling calories, and suggests Charlie bag up the vomit in case they need it later.
• Worthless Yellow Rocks: Money has no value over the winter, as there's hardly anything to buy; instead, food, favors, and debts are considered far more valuable currency. However, those who do Overwinter work (such as the Winter Consuls and HiberTech agents) are still paid in actual Euros to use during the rest of the year.
• You Are in Command Now: After all the other RealSleep individuals (sans Toccata, who is not reliable) are killed, Charlie is left as "Kiki" for the final showdown. It gets close, but they are able to defeat Aurora and broadcast the signal.
• Zombie Advocate: If any citizen holds the belief that Nightwalkers are anything more than the brain-dead, cannibalistic husks of the people they use to be, they're not stupid enough to publicize the fact. But there are those who risk execution to harbor their loved ones after they turn, hiding the Nightwalkers away and keeping them fed on illegally obtained foodstuffs. The Campaign for RealSleep is full of individuals who go out of their way to protect and rehabilitate Nightwalkers, including Jack Logan, Bronwyn "Jonesy" Jones, Toccata, "Hugo Foulnap"/ "Danny Pockets", Birgitta, Charles Webster, and eventually Charlie. The Campaign fakes the meltdown of the nuclear reactor at the Giraldus Cambrensis at the beginning of winter, with the Campaign members who are part of the Winter Consuls ordering the site evacuated so that they can have a safe place to house the Nightwalkers they've rescued. Josh-the-secretary-from-HiberTech defects to the Campaign for RealSleep, bringing a Nightwalker named Wendy with him.

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