THE NEXT BIG THING
What is the working title of your next book?
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!
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.
