Making 'The Expanded Earth' by Mikey Please
'Mikey Please has one of the most brilliant minds I know; the perfect combination of science, philosophy and madness'
- Daniel Kwan, Oscar-winning director of Everything Everywhere All At Once
'The Expanded Earth genuinely changed the way I look at the world around me. I loved the fantastic, horrifying, heartwarming, mind-boggling adventure of it. Mikey Please is a singular breed of genius and this book proves it yet again'
- Emma Hooper
The first of a trilogy that promises to be a mind-bending, fantastical work, The Expanded Earth is the tale of mad scientists, vengeful phytoplankton and improvised survival you've been waiting for. Here, accompanied by sketches and the finished artworks that illustrate the novel, Mikey Please explores the influences and thought-processes behind The Expanded Earth
Making The Expanded Earth
by Mikey Please
THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, I threw He-Man out of a tree and watched him spin violently through the branches, hurtling towards a garden path where he would surely shatter. At the last possible moment, a hand snagged the scrub, and there he hung, dangling stupidly, an inch from the concrete. He’d got away! This time.
That memory – the fall, the branches, the narrow escape, and hundreds like it, are the unremarkable source material from which my absolutely remarkable and brilliant and did I mention very-good-you-should-probably-buy-it debut novel, The Expanded Earth, grew.
My fondest childhood memories were ones like these – lying nose-deep in the dirt, pushing figurines through the undergrowth, transforming lawn into jungle. As an adult, watching my toddler build block cities and crash toy cars, I understood that I was not alone in my fascination with scale. Being small, surrounded by a world too big to comprehend, my son seized the opportunity to flip the roles of small person and giant, and grip the tiny grownup in his hand.
For most of my adult life, I have tried to recapture that transformative feeling by finding ways to create and control small worlds – through a career in animation, writing stories and puppeteering my own children, to their great distress. Scale, as a theme, pops up in my film work. The Eagleman Stag sees an ageing taxonomist struggle to find a cure for his quickening perception of time, as each new moment feels smaller compared to the volume amassing behind him. By building cities for ants, sitting on oversized sculpture-park benches, collecting A5 ring-bound folders and noticing how large my hand looks when drinking a half-pint, I have been constantly delighted by the contrasts and conflicts of things that appear to be the wrong size, when put next to other normal-sized things.
I can’t claim to have read every book where shrunken protagonists traverse a land built for giants, but I’ve given it a bloody good shot. The big hitters – The Borrowers, Gulliver’s Travels, Terry Pratchett’s Truckers, and BB’s The Little Grey Men. The lesser known The Mount and Fantastic Planet, I’ve loved them all. Nothing could separate me from The Land of the Giants every Sunday morning on Channel 4. But despite the wealth of takes on the subject, I’ve struggled to find a story that told the truth, as I see it, about this world seen from a low vantage point – that it is a terrifying, beautiful and utterly alien place. In short, I longed, even as a kid, for a story about little people geared towards adults. A world filled with everything you’d find in the undergrowth – beauty, death, mystery, adventure. As a voracious consumer of stories in all their forms, I searched hungrily for this one and couldn’t find it. The world was missing a story! What choice had I, but to write it myself.
Questions pinned above my laptop: How would it feel to be shrunken? Would it hurt? What happens to my fillings? What if I shrunk at an inconvenient moment, while carrying a cupboard? Would the world look better if seen at an impossibly high resolution? Or would it look worse? I have acquired many a microscope, borescope and endoscope researching that last one. Quantum mechanics have taught us that scale transforms the nature of objects and that the same-thing-but-bigger is not the same thing. So, would the same rules of physics apply when little? And most importantly – What if everyone, everywhere, shrunk all at once?
With The Expanded Earth, I hope to offer something new to the genre of little people in a world of giants, by treating that familiar situation with a grandness of scale, a shovel of grit and a healthy dose of weirdness, all under a postapocalyptic umbrella. In doing so, I owe a substantial debt to the survivor stories of John Wyndham, the audacious science fiction concepts of Kurt Vonnegut and the body horror of David Cronenberg.
I love this world. I always have, and though I’ve lived with the book idea for longer than I care to admit, I am still prone to daydream about the visual extravagance that comes from humanity’s abrupt reduction to a handspan’s height. I imagine The Expanded Earth to be a place of vast landscapes, populated with satisfyingly repurposed everyday objects and characters sporting a flamboyance of oversized costumes. An armour of thorns. Roller-skate pull carts. Drainpipe walkways. Ad-hock treehouses connected by washing-line rope bridges. Banquet feasts on confectionary-aisle floors. Cocktail-umbrella umbrellas. Snap-blade scalpel swords. Beds of moss. Bloodstained flowers. Characters battling the recalibration of life by mountaineering a rug-pulled motorway. Escapees blocked by the unfathomable domestic door. I see this place as a Mad Max of invention, a brutal and beautiful micropocalypse.
The Expanded EarthMikey PleasePrice: £22.00In the first of a trilogy that promises to be a mind-bending, fantastical work that redraws the boundaries of imaginatio... See moreIn the first of a trilogy that promises to be a mind-bending, fantastical work that redraws the boundaries of imagination itself. One morning, all humankind is 'reduced to the height of a ha... See more
The Expanded EarthMikey PleasePrice: £22.00In the first of a trilogy that promises to be a mind-bending, fantastical work that redraws the boundaries of imaginatio... See moreIn the first of a trilogy that promises to be a mind-bending, fantastical work that redraws the boundaries of imagination itself. One morning, all humankind is 'reduced to the height of a ha... See more
Mikey Please is a Bristol based BAFTA-winning and OSCAR-nominated writer, director, animator, and illustrator. An alumnus of the Royal College of Art (MA Animation) his music videos and short films have garnered over 60 international awards. In 2023 he was appointed as a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Cafe at the Edge of the Woods (HarperCollins), his critically acclaimed debut picture book, has been published in a dozen languages. A career in making and animating miniature puppets makes him particularly well placed to write a book about tiny people. The Expanded Earth is his first novel.