THE DEMI-MONDE FALL 3

This is the third of the plates that will be included in 'The Demi-Monde: Fall' I'm not sure why I chose Edinburgh to nuke - I went their on my honeymoon and thought it a fine city - but I needed somewhere to waste so the bad guys could convince the good guys to be PINC'd.

I've been playing around with PINC thinking about building a story around it and to this end I've beefed up the definition.

PINC (Personal Implanted nanoComputer) is a neurochip developed by ParaDigm CyberResearch. When implanted in a human brain, PINC gives instant access to the databases held on ParaDigm CyberResearch’s quantum computer, ABBA, which provides each PINC-equipped individual – known as PINCs – with 3 yottaQuFlops of cybermemory, the equivalent to every book, newspaper, instruction manual and leaflet produced since the invention of the written word: PINC has been described as the humankind’s ‘sixth sense’. Additionally, PINCs have the ability to communicate, PINC-to-PINC, via the medium of the ABBA-platformed PolyNet, this communication being known as TelePathy. It is estimated that as of November, 2040, 50% of the world’s population – 4.5 billion humans – have been PINC-equipped. Since it was first trialled in 2015, PINC has been responsible for most of the major economic, political, social and cultural shifts that the world has experienced, including the development of the pan-global, anti-PINC political movement known as The Natural Mind Party. The true impact of PINC on the human brain was revealed in the Reynolds Enquiry, the findings of which were published in 2040.

noöPINC

Just finalising the artwork for ‘the Demi-Monde: Fall’. This is noöPINC – the 2^nd-generation Personal Implanted nanoComputer – that features heavily (and crucially) in the book. NoöPINC is a cyborg-virus – a virus with man-made elements incorporated into its structure – these nanocybernetic structures acting as inception points for the development of the virus. The virus grows around them and by doing so absorbs the artificial elements into its genetic structure. Artwork as always by Nigel Robinson.

 

 

Got to say I'm bloody pleased with it. Sort of captured the somewhat creepy aspect of the device. Well done, Nigel!

THE DEMI-MONDE FALL 2

Here's the second preview of the illustrations that will be going into 'Fall' (excuse the typos - they're in the process of being corrected). This bit was written four years ago (doesn't time fly ...) and as I was looking for a symbol of a re-rejuvenated Britain it seemed that resuscitating the Blue Streak was the way to go. The Blue Streak was to have been the British ICBM, a totemic symbol of Britain's might and place in the world, but the deprivations of the Second World War, the country's economic decline and unease in Washington meant that the project was cancelled. All I'm hoping is that I wasn't being unwittingly prescient when I wrote this piece ...

Invent-10n

Hard at work on a novella I'm writing for Peter Coleborn and Alchemy Press. I had originally conceived it as a cut and paste piece made up of a montage from various diaries, newspaper cuttings etc. but Ive reined back and it'll be a tad more conventional now. It's a story set in a near-future Britain and features one of my favourite characters, a reBopper named Jenni-Fur. I got interested in the 30's jazz slang of people like Cab Calloway so I decided to update it a little and jenni-Fur's patois is the result. In her own words she's lush thrush with a tight tush.

I'm quite a way into the story now but the ending is proving to be a little tricky - it's a real downer.

Anyway here's Jenni-Fur:

THE DEMI-MONDE FALL

The final edit of the last book of the series 'Fall' is now with the publishers so I had to turn my attention to the plates that I would use in the book. As some of my readers will have twigged, the 'Real World' in the Demi-Monde is out-of-kilter with our world so I thought it would be fun to show some of these counter-factual differences as newspaper cuttings.

Here's the first:

I couldn't resist the idea of the marvellous Marilyn being exiled to the UK. The thought of her starring in some of the Elstree comedies is mouth-watering!

WHO WAS AGENT ELLI?

I attended a talk on the Cambridge Five given in Oxford yesterday by Professor Christopher Andrew (author of The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5). I was keen to sit in on the talk as my new book ‘Faktion’ is currently out with publishers and Philby and Cairncross (two of the ‘Five’) feature in the story. Moreover, I hoped that Professor Andrew would speak about the mysterious ‘Elli’, the GRU agent who penetrated MI5 in the early years of the Second World War  and whose identity has never been revealed  and has been much speculated on ever since.

This is an important subject for me, given that the unveiling of the identity of Elli is the prime thrust of ‘Faktion’s’ plot and I was hoping that nothing the good Professor would say would lead me to doubt my own – somewhat radical – identification of who Elli was. He didn’t … in point of fact he hardly mentioned Elli apart from confirming – in response to my question as to how confident he was that Elli was Leo Long (his preferred candidate) – that he was ‘very confident’.

Very confident he may be, but I also think he is very wrong.

First, perhaps, a brief summary of what is known for certain about Elli (much of this coming from the defector Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet cipher clerk who gave himself up to the Canadians in September, 1945, rather than be shipped back to the USSR):

·         Elli was a man;

·         He was a GRU agent who had access to MI5 intelligence (that he was a GRU agent is important, the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye being the foreign military intelligence directorate of the General Staff of the Red Army. The Cambridge Five were run by the NKVD, the Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs, Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, which was the forerunner of the KGB and the secret police organisation that implemented the orders of the Soviet Communist Party. The rivalry between the NKVD and the GRU was long and bitter);

·         He had access to sensitive government policy documents (it was Elli who tipped Stalin off about the Quebec Agreement, signed in August 1943, under which the UK and the US agreed to collaborate on the building of the atomic bomb);

·         Gouzenko first heard of Elli when on a cipher course in Moscow in 1942, so Elli must have been active before this date;

·         He is described as ‘ou nego shto-to Russkoe’ … having something of the Russian about him; and,

·         He was active during the 1940’s, dropping off the intelligence radar circa 1950.

Pretty poor pickings information-wise to identify an agent who was, perhaps, the most important of all the Soviet agents – and there were a lot of them – to have penetrated Britain’s intelligence community.

And this paucity of information has, as might be expected, stimulated a great deal of controversy regarding the identity of ‘Elli’. That’s why I went to Professor Andrew’s talk: to see if I had gone wrong in my own surmising as to the identity of Elli.

Christopher Andrews claims Elli was Leo Long, who he describes as a ‘sub-agent of Anthony Blunt’. In support of this contention he cites the un-corroborated testimony of Oleg Gordievski (a Soviet defector) and the ‘fact’ that ELLI in Russian translates as the plural of the English letter ‘L’. (I am reliably informed by my in-house Russian expert – Nelli – that this is ‘bollocks’: no Russian would ever refer to double-L as Elli. And, anyway, I doubt the Soviets would have been so stupid as to give their most important agent a code-name made up of his initials). But of equal concern is that as Leo Long was a sub-agent of Anthony Blunt’s he would have been run by the NKVD. Elli was run by the GRU. No … the Leo Long hypothesis is weak to the point of unsustainability.

To my mind, the journalist Chapman Pincher has a more coherent set of arguments when he suggests that Elli is Roger Hollis – Hollis worked for MI5 from 1939, eventually becoming Director-General in 1956 (see Pincher’s Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders, and Cover-ups: Six Decades of Espionage Against America and Great Britain for details). A large part of Pincher’s ‘evidence’ supporting the ‘Hollis is Elli’ conjecture is persuasive but circumstantial. For instance, he refers to the ‘ou nego shto-to Russkoe’ description of Elli as inferring that Elli had pre-Revolutionary connections with Russia (Nelli disputes this: in her opinion the phrase is so ambiguous as to invite several, equally plausible, interpretations) and apparently the Hollis family is able to trace its lineage back to Peter the Great. But my biggest problem with the ‘Hollis is Elli’ hypothesis is that Hollis would have been too junior in the period running up to 1942 (when Gouzenko first heard of him) to be regarded as the Soviets’ most important intelligence asset in Britain (apparently Elli’s intelligence was so highly thought of that it went straight to Stalin). Moreover, Hollis’s Russian antecedents were tenuous to say the least and I am doubtful they would have stimulated gossip in the GRU’s Moscow cipher school, where Gouzenko heard the rumour.

So, if Elli is neither Long nor Hollis, who was he?

We are looking for a man who had access to important intelligence (the sort not available to junior agents in MI5); was so highly regarded that he was run separately from all the other first-rank Soviet agents in Britain; was active before 1942, leaving the stage around 1950; had pre-existing connections with Russia; AND whose identity is so sensitive – embarrassing? – that it has been very effectively protected by both the Russians and the Brits from enquiring journalists and historians ever since.

And I think I know just the man who ticks all these boxes. Elli isn’t anyone the historians or the journalists have ever flagged. Yeah, I know who Elli was.

Sorry … but you’ll have to read ‘Faktion’ to find out who my candidate is!

THE NEXT BIG THING

I was invited to do this promo-thingy by Ian Watson, so here it is!

THE NEXT BIG THING

What is the working title of your next book?

‘The Demi-Monde: Summer’ it’s the third title in the Demi-Monde series and it’s out in the UK at the end of December.

The guys at Quercus have just sent me a mock-up of the paperback cover (which won’t be out until mid-2013) and I think they’ve done a terrific job capturing the flavour of the book.

Where did the idea for the book come from?

I designed the Demi-Monde (which is a virtual Victorian-esque dystopia) so that I could have some of my favourite characters from history come out to play. In ‘The Demi-Monde: Summer’ these include Empress Wu (the only female Empress of China), Mao Zedong and Lucrezia Borgia.

What genre does your book fall under?

Difficult to say; it’s a bit of a mash-up of genres with cyber-fiction, steam-punk and even vampires making a house-call. Basically though it’s a science fiction thriller. The Demi-Monde series has been described as ‘Discworld’s savage noir cousin’ which I think is about right.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Toughie this. In a world without temporal boundaries my picks would be:

·         Ella Thomas (feisty African-American): I’m leaning towards Zoe Saldana, though maybe Dorothy Dandridge would be in with a shot.

·         Vanka Maykov (a Russian rascal: utterly immoral and without conscience): it has to be Errol Flynn.

·         Trixie Dashwood (English aristocrat and spoilt brat): Vivien Leigh.

·         Burlesque Bandstand (English low-life, pimp and petty criminal): Oliver Hardy.

Give a one sentence synopsis of the book.

Impossible, so I’ll cheat. ‘Set in 2018 the Demi-Monde is the most advanced computer simulation ever devised, a virtual world locked in eternal civil war – thirty million digital inhabitants living and dying in Victorian cyber-slums and led by some of history’s most vicious tyrants – Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust; Beria, Stalin’s arch executioner; and Aleister Crowley, black magician and ‘the wickedest man in the whole world’ – but something has gone badly wrong and the US President’s daughter has become trapped in this terrible world – it falls to 18-year old Ella Thomas,  black student and sometime jazz-singer, to rescue her – once Ella has entered the Demi-Monde she finds that everything is not as it seems, that its cyber-walls are struggling to contain the evil within and that the Real World is in more danger than anyone realises.

All that and only one full-stop!

 

How long did it take to write the first draft of the manuscript?

I guess I spent a month researching the historical characters I was going to use and then another couple of months reading up on the elements I needed to incorporate into the story: artificial intelligence; the origins and spread of the proto-Indo-European Language; the ironclad battles of the American civil war; the concepts under-pinning radical feminism and so on and so on.

This world-building lark ain’t easy folks!

Once I had all this organised I started to write. I generally aim to average 2,000 words a day, so a 200,000 word first draft will take three months. Then I spend another three months reworking, remodelling, reshaping and getting rid of the crap I’ve written the only purpose of which is to slow the pace of the story. So … from start to finish, nine months, a natural gestation period, methinks.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

The trouble I have with this question is that (shamefully) I read very few contemporary novels, but ‘The Demi-Monde’ has been influenced by any number of books – we all stand on the shoulders of giants – so incorporated into the DM’s DNA are:

·         ‘The First Men in the Moon’: in my humble opinion Wells was the greatest SF writer of all time. ‘Etirovac’, which features heavily in ‘The Demi-Monde: Fall’, is the antipode of Wells’s ‘Cavorite’.

·         ‘The Man in the High Castle’: Philip K. Dick’s masterpiece was the first time I encountered a counter-factual story and I guess the idea of bringing disparate historical characters together came from this book.

·         ‘The RiverWorld Series’: Brilliant story and marvellous storytelling, the only regret is that Philip Jose Farmer got to Richard Burton (the Victorian explorer and linguist, not the film actor!) before I did. I’d have loved to have featured him in the Demi-Monde.

Who or what inspired you to write the book?

As an admirer of the writers of Classic SF and fantasy, I have always thought that attempts to update, or, as Tim Burton would have it, to re-imagine these stories have invariably been poor. But the nadir had to be the BBC’s ‘Jekyll’ which managed to eviscerate the story whilst simultaneously making it risible. Worse: it didn’t ‘honour’ the story. Sitting watching that muddled mish-mash I had the same feeling every writer since the dawn of time has had at one time or another: I can do better than that!

What else about the book might pique the readers’ interest in it.

As the books have a Victorian feel to them, for ‘Spring’ I’ve included plate illustrations of the various fashions sported by those living in the five sectors of the DM. Here’s one of them.

This is what the dissolute and erotically-charged citizens of the Quartier Chaud are wearing this season.