Aug 02 2018

Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries #2) by Martha Wells

I very much enjoy hanging out with the highly introverted Murderbot, and actually found this installment of the series to be a little less slight than its predecessor, as Murderbot hitches a ride with an unmanned ship that turns out to be far more clever and sentient than expected. Murderbot is looking for answers, and with the help of ART, as the ship is nicknamed, Murderbot heads back to the mining planet where a massacre birthed Murderbot’s moniker. Needing a cover to get planetside, Murderbot hires out as a security consultant to a trio of somewhat naive researchers who find themselves in a standoff with a ruthless entrepreneur. Watching Murderbot protect the trio while still digging into the past — and uncovering a whole host of interesting new complications in this fascinating universe — makes for a fun, fast read that leaves you impatient for more.

And that’s part of my problem with this series so far: the fact that each installment is nowhere near a complete book. At about 150 pages each, these novellas are wildly entertaining but not, as they’re currently priced on Amazon, $9.99 worth of entertaining. Not that I begrudge the author her due, but I’m super glad for the public library and the ability to borrow this instead of having to buy. I would definitely consider buying all four novellas, once they’re completed, in a single volume, but as it is, it seems a bit of a cynical ploy for dollars. But hey, who am I to tell people how to spend their money if they like something?

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/08/02/artificial-condition-the-murderbot-diaries-2-by-martha-wells/

Aug 01 2018

Pacific Fire by Greg van Eekhout

Pacific Fire follows its predecessor, California Bones, as an adventure caper set in a darkly magical California that is both contemporary and off kilter. Transport within Los Angeles, for example, is all on boats in canals, the city a gargantuan Venice, and the head of the Department of Water and Power is a feared water mage.

The end of California Bones saw the political order of southern California upended. By the start of Pacific Fire, ten years later, a rough replacement has emerged, but one with enough internal strife that the overall position of the magic kingdom is weakening. Three of the major mages in Los Angeles agree to bury their differences and set themselves up as a ruling triumvirate by creating and, they hope, controlling a Pacific firedrake, a magical creature strong enough to both cow their internal rivals and deter outside powers including northern California and the United States.

Daniel Blackland, the protagonist of the first book, finds out about the plans because one of the would-be triumvirs does not actually want the plan to succeed but cannot openly show his hand for fear of deepening the chaos within the city. Daniel has spent the decade between books on the run from other magicians who want to kill him and eat him — in this world magical power resides in the bones and flesh of magical creatures, most definitely including wizards, and someone who consumes them gains their powers. He has also been raising Sam, a golem created from part of southern California’s former Hierarch and thus possessed of much of the Hierarch’s magic. It’s an open question which of the two would be a more nutritious meal for any rival fortunate enough to kill them both. Their tastiness as targets and Daniel’s own disposition keep the two of them on the run, at least until word of the firedrake comes to Daniel.

He believes that the firedrake will become a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of people he knows to be ruthless criminals, and resolves to put together a team to stop its creation. Before he has taken more than the first steps toward that goal, however, an attack gets past his defenses and puts him out of commission. Sam draws on his own magical abilities to save Daniel’s life, but he is in no condition to finish the mission. Sam resolves to take on the task himself, and the caper is back on, from the point of view of a new and less-experienced protagonist.

California Bones was dark in places — with magic based on eating other magicians, that was unavoidable — but there was also a certain glee in presenting the skewed world (hints about Disney, positing William Mulholland as a magician) and relative innocence in the heist story. In Pacific Fire, the setting is established, so I found less joy of discovery in this book. By shifting the perspective to Sam, van Eekhout adds a bit of a coming-of-age narrative, elides the problem of Daniel being more powerful than almost anyone else in California, and lets readers see some of the darker sides of Daniel that he does not necessarily realize about himself. Those aspects all deepen the series as a whole, but I missed the fun and inventiveness of the first book.

Pacific Fire is still a brisk caper, a tightly-wound adventure full of obstacles and reversals. Indeed, by shifting emphasis to Sam while keeping Daniel still in the mix, van Eekhout has given himself room for seriously changing one or both of his protagonists without prematurely ending the trilogy in its second book. The novel also gets stronger when Daniel recovers enough to set off in Sam’s wake to add his own abilities to the efforts to stop the creation of the firedrake. Fittingly, the book’s closing scenes are its best. Readers learn that some things were not as they seemed, while other truths were hiding in plain sight. It’s a fine ending for Pacific Fire and a good setup for the third book, Dragon Coast.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/08/01/pacific-fire-by-greg-van-eekhout/

Jul 30 2018

Talon of Scorpio (Shadowstorm #3) by G.T. Almasi

I love love love Alix Nico and her hilariously idiosyncratic voice and the crazy alternate universe she lives in (well, I love the rampant violence less, but it’s a nice reminder that our own world could always be worse, so.) She’s witty and damaged and reckless and loyal, and she’s a great person to hang an action-packed series like this on. I do rather wish that there hadn’t been four years between the pub dates of this and the preceding novel, as I feel like I forgot a lot more than in the two-year gap between the first two books in the series, but I did love so much how getting back into Alix’s first-person narrative was like slipping into a dress that still manages to be comfy despite being sexy as hell.

What I didn’t love was how prolonged some of the fighting got. I really do appreciate that G. T. Almasi is doing different styles of thriller with each novel in this series, but war chronicles, as this one was, can often drag as we race from battle to battle. While Alix’s personality and resilience are enough to keep you going, things start to feel a little repetitive even with the myriad inventive ways Mr Almasi dreams up to spatter gore across the page. On the plus side, he’ll be doing something different with Book 4! Which I assume is coming given the ending of Talon Of Scorpio? I’m really looking forward to it.

Oh, and kudos also to the way Mr Almasi deals with Alix’s ongoing PTSD, as well as to the adorable relationship she has with Patrick. I haaaaaaaate how crappy and superfluous love triangles are thrown into popular fiction for fake emotional tension, so the strength of the bond between Alix and Patrick feels refreshing even as it convinces. More more more please!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/30/talon-of-scorpio-shadowstorm-3-by-g-t-almasi/

Jul 25 2018

An Interview With Nick Setchfield, author of The War In The Dark

Q: I was dead impressed by your idea to fuse the Cold War spy and occult horror genres, a concept I had yet to come across before reading your book. How did The War In The Dark evolve?

A: As I discovered I’m actually following in the footsteps of a few people – Tim Powers, for one, who wrote Declare around 20 years ago. I didn’t know that book when I began writing The War in the Dark – I remember my heart plummeting when a friend told me about it! – but luckily the spy/occult genre’s still a relatively untapped seam, rich enough for many different stories and styles. The central idea of War came to me a while ago but adding the espionage element really made it catch fire in my imagination. I’m a huge Bond fan and I had so much fun blending that kind of vintage spy story with a demonic conspiracy. They fitted together beautifully.

Q: Karina is such a strong character in The War In The Dark. I’ve read that you were inspired to write her by the spy-fi heroines of the 1960s. If you had to pick just one, who would be your favorite spy-fi heroine and why?

A: It has to be Emma Peel in The Avengers. She was so ahead of her time – while also embodying her time. Deadly, accomplished, proactive, and yet killingly funny, too, brought to life with such wit by Diana Rigg.

Q: Do you write with any particular audience in mind? Are there any particular audiences you hope will connect with this story?

A: No particular audience in mind – just anyone who enjoys a good thrill ride and some scares in the shadows. I’m actually quite excited to discover some friends are taking the book on their holidays this summer. A beach read is a very noble calling, I think. Come on, get sand in my pages! But no Cornetto stains, please.

Q: What is the first book you read that made you think, “I have got to write something like this someday!”

A: I’m not sure I could pin it on a specific book, but as a kid I devoured the Doctor Who novelisations by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke. There’s such a wonderful clarity and simplicity to those old Target paperbacks. I think they probably served as useful blueprints of how a story is constructed. I was absorbing their schematics at a tender age and it must have helped shape The War in the Dark.

Q: We usually like to ask writers what made them choose x genre as their means of expression, but The War In The Dark defies such categorization. Instead, I’ll ask which process you prefer: writing longform fiction or the articles you compose in your day job as editor/writer for, among other publications, SFX magazine?

A: Same process, different muscles and impossible to choose between the two, I’m afraid! I get a certain buzz from writing up an interview (especially if the subject’s as compelling as someone like Neil Gaiman or Russell T Davies, two of my favourite people to talk to) or riffing on a movie I love – and an equal satisfaction from digging into my headspace to write a piece of fiction. But it’s all putting words on a screen, praying they hit it off together.

Q: How did you learn to write?

A: I’ve always written: in school, at home. I used to borrow my dad’s manual typewriter and bash out science fiction stories on the kitchen table. I still have the muscle memory of hammering the keys and winding the page through the roller until the heart-filling satisfaction of a finished page. Seeing my words set down in type, and not my usual scrawl, was a potent thing. It made a book seem vaguely possible.

Q: Do you adhere to any particular writing regimen?

A: Given the day job I have to carve out time in the evenings and at weekends. I’m still typing at the kitchen table but here’s a peculiar psychological wrinkle – I have to sit in a different chair to the one I use when I’m eating. Ah, the brain, in all its mystery and majesty…

Q: Are you a pantser (someone who writes by the seat of their pants) or a plotter?

A: Always a plotter. I think that’s essential with thrillers. They need to be precision instruments. But while I had the broad strokes set down before I started writing this book I kept myself very much open to possibility, and there were a few detours along the way that I’m really glad I took. I think they enriched the story in the end.

Q: What can you tell us about your next project? Will it continue in the same vein as The War In The Dark?

A: It’s another adventure for Christopher Winter so yes, essentially the same vein as The War in the Dark – but a different year, different locations and some very different antagonists…

Q:  Given your experience in scriptwriting, would you consider pulling a Gillian Flynn and adapting The War In The Dark for the screen yourself?

A: Ha! I think the book as it stands is the movie in my head. And I’m way too attached to it! I’d love to see someone else take my story and make it work on the screen. That would be preposterously exciting – to see a whole team descend on it, from set designers to soundtrack composers. They’d have to throw me off the set.

Q: What are you reading at the moment?

A: Just about to begin Forever and a Day, the new Bond novel by Anthony Horowitz. And I’m also dipping into a collection of the great old Black Panther stories from the ‘70s (I’m an old school Marvelite!).

Q: Are there any new books or authors that have you excited?

A: I do like the sound of Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi, which is also a fantastical spy story – and one that has such a wonderful idea at its core. And I’m hearing good things about Rosewater by Tade Thompson.

Q: Tell us why you love your book!

A: I finished writing it!

~~~

Author Links:

Twitter

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The War In The Dark was published on July 17th 2018, and is available from all good booksellers. My review of the book itself may be found here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/25/an-interview-with-nick-setchfield-author-of-the-war-in-the-dark/

Jul 24 2018

The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II by Svetlana Alexievich

I can’t even imagine the amount of work Svetlana Alexievich put into writing this book: not just tracking down, transcribing and editing the testimonies of these brave, undervalued women, but also the sheer weight of bearing witness to so much courage and heartache. The Unwomanly Face Of War is an exceptionally moving historical document written over the course of decades, and I’m pretty sure that’s the only way she could have borne it: by having time blunt the edges of all the emotion these women poured into her, allowing it to distance her enough to keep working and collecting and reading and writing this almost overwhelming deluge of valor in the face of tragedy.

When Germany broke their treaty of non-aggression with the USSR, the vast majority of the Soviet people thought the war would be over quickly. They didn’t know how badly Stalin’s purges had crippled the military, and as the war progressed, more and more women — who’d been raised all their lives to not only fervently love the Motherland but also to consider themselves equal in capability to men, regardless of what the men thought — seeing that their menfolk weren’t coming home, enlisted and demanded to be sent to the front, too. The USSR, as a matter of fact, had one of the highest percentages of women in the military in the 20th century, and certainly in World War II. Women were famously used as snipers and pilots, but were also active in every front-line military branch and specialty, from anti-aircraft artillery to armory to laundry, from medical aid to tanks to sappers who worked at demining long after the war was over. Women were also important elements of the partisan and underground militias as the Germans occupied more and more territory. These women were a crucial part of the Soviet Victory, but their stories were too often obscured and untold. They faced discrimination getting to their posts and discrimination coming home. Ms Alexievich set about fixing at least one wrong done to them: the feeling that they had to keep quiet about their wartime efforts, as if they had anything to be ashamed of simply for picking up the arms of their fallen comrades and fighting on to victory.

TUFoW is simultaneously an extremely readable book — credit to Ms Alexievich’s editing and prose — and a difficult book to get through. I cried a lot. It’s a terrific historical document that absolutely deserves a Nobel prize for its author. Personally, I’m not the biggest fan of the Russian literary style, but if you are more into it than I am, you will absolutely love this book (*cough*Doug*cough.) But if you have any interest in war, or in history, or in feminism, then I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Our interpretations after may be different (I do feel that Ms Alexievich was very gently disproving her interviewees’ ingrained sexism by giving a platform to the many different voices that showed, collectively, how important their femininity had been to preserving their humanity and fighting spirit) but I’d be greatly surprised if reading this oral history wasn’t a revelatory experience for everyone.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/24/the-unwomanly-face-of-war-an-oral-history-of-women-in-world-war-ii-by-svetlana-alexievich/

Jul 18 2018

Viva Warszawa by Steffen Moeller

Quite by accident, Steffen Möller has found himself one of the most famous contemporary Germans in Poland. He moved there in the mid-1990s for no particularly profound reasons — looking for work, looking for things to be slightly different, looking into a society that was changing rapidly, looking at a place that was at once nearby and distant — and fell into a role in the long-running soap opera “M jak Milosc” (L for Love).

He was cast as the unassuming German next door, and appeared in seven seasons of the show. He did not become a household name, but most definitely a familiar face for a large segment of the Polish population. (The show has run since the year 2000, and as of the end of May this year, 1377 episodes had been broadcast. By some measures, it is the most-watched drama on Polish television.) It was quite a change from the anonymous language teacher he was when he first came to Poland, but it does not seem to have affected the affable persona he shows in Viva Warszawa, his third book and his second about Poland.

As the title implies, the book is a very fond look at Warsaw, where he has lived for most of his time in Poland. Roughly speaking, he alternates between historical bits and chapters about particular areas or themes, with those largely based on his personal experience with the city. In contrast to many people born and raised in Poland, he not only loves the country, he quite likes it as well. After roughly two decades there, at the time of publication, he has seen considerable change and relates the continuities along with the new developments, helping the book live up to its subtitle Polen für Fortgeschrittene (Poland for Advanced Learners). For example, when he first moved to Warsaw, bicycling in the city was considered strange, dangerous, and possibly suicidal. Having biked from the city center into the countryside and then back again at the end of a two-week tour across northern Poland in 1997, I can attest to two of those three. In recent years, however, bike lanes have been added to the streets, and bike-sharing schemes have gained significant numbers of riders. Public attitudes have changed as well.

Möller is a genial companion as he ranges across the city, and lightly back and forth in time. He does not shy away from the many difficult issues in German-Polish relations, but he always addresses them in the context of specific people, and is generally optimistic about present and future. As with Viva Polonia, the book’s short sections and breezy tone make it fun to read. He wears his learning lightly, showing why he likes Warsaw so much, and inviting readers to join him in pleasure and exploration. Viva Warszawa!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/18/viva-warszawa-by-steffen-moeller/

Jul 18 2018

Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente

What if all of those 19th-century notions about the nature of the solar system were true? Venus is swampy and rainy, Mars is mostly dry but turns out to be good country for kangaroos, Neptune is covered by an immense and stormy ocean, the moon really does have seas. And more: the moons discovered by modern science are all present, most of them inhabitable, plenty of them inhabited by larger or smaller groups of humans. There are currents in the luminiferous aether that whisk ships to the outer reaches of the solar system in mere weeks. And still more: Pluto and Charon are joined by great, void-leaping vines, while nearly all of the worlds support indigenous life, if not life that the humans recognize as sentient. And yet still more: the people of all the worlds are crazy about movies, with Earth’s moon replacing Hollywood as the industry’s home, but the Edison family have locked down all the patents on color and sound, so most movies well into the 20th century — decades after the first crewed rocket flight in 1858 — are still black and white silent pictures.

That, more or less, is the setting of Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente, a book that is ultimately about transcendence, but along the way touches on filmmaking, gossip culture, growing up in an artistic family, growing up in a ruthlessly commercial family, art, truth, fiction, conventional morality, metafiction, and a few other things as well. There isn’t really a plot, or rather there are several and they add up to the story that Valente is telling about the setting she has devised and some of its most emblematic people. The book comes together like a documentary film, which is entirely fitting because one of Valent’s main characters is the documentary director Severin Unck, who is the daughter of the commercially renowned director Percival Unck.

Valente skips around in the timeline, with some scenes set just after the turn of the 20th century and others as late as the 1960s. She likewise jumps among numerous narrative forms: interviews, movie scripts, meeting transcripts, and several others in addition to narration that appears straightforward genre fiction at first but turns out to be something different entirely.

Severin is dead, or thought to be dead, presumed inhumed, at the book’s opening, although for much of its course she is a little girl navigating the moviemakers’ worlds from an unusual perspective. For what turns out to be her final project, she brings her regular crew of filmmakers to the site of a settlement on Venus whose settlers all vanished simultaneously. Similar things had happened on Mars and Pluto, decades earlier. Severin wants to unravel the mystery or, failing that, she wants to make a movie to show the rest of the worlds what they found when they went to have a look.

Radiance spirals around the time on Venus, showing it bit by bit, but showing the decades before as well as the effects of that visit on the survivors’ lives. Or possibly showing those effects; there are indications that some of the sections of the book are actually a movie (or movies) that characters in other sections are talking about making. The stories within the book are also about reaching toward transcendence, one of the things that can happen when that barrier is crossed, and the near impossibility of communicating back across it. It is a radiant ending to a book that isn’t quite like anything else.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/18/radiance-by-catherynne-m-valente/

Jul 17 2018

The War In The Dark by Nick Setchfield

I cannot get over how stunning that cover is.

Anyway! This is a really cool mash-up of old school James Bond and what I feel is best described as Lovecraftian horror, with demons and cultists and sorcerers galore. It is 1963, and British Intelligence agent Christopher Winter is set to complete the assassination of a traitor, a priest named Father Costigan. Winter feels a bit badly about going after a man of the cloth, then doesn’t know how to feel when the priest turns into a flesh bag of murderous insects. Winter’s echo man (which is a term I’d never heard before for cleaner — I learn a new thing every day) goes missing and the next thing he knows, Winter is being hauled in for a debriefing that seems to involve a lot of drugs. Winter’s life very rapidly goes to shit, and he’s soon run away to Vienna, pursuing the only lead he has to the nightmare his life has become: the name of a broker in the occult, as well as a national secret that is his only currency in his search for answers.

In Vienna he meets the deadly and self-contained Karina Lazarova, whom he discovers is more than just a double agent. They wind up going on the run together, evading capture by both sides as they strive to collect all the pieces of a book written in a language of fire that could hold the key to not only ending the Cold War but, if they’re not careful, all life as they know it.

So here’s the thing with both the works of Fleming and Lovecraft: the characterization isn’t the greatest. Nick Setchfield stays true to his predecessors in putting together a thrilling, macabre tale of espionage, reliquaries and demonology, but I couldn’t help feeling as if our characters had only the barest traces of personality, and then usually in relation to a loved one (e.g. Winter with Joyce, Malcolm with Tobias.) Defining a character by their external relationships is fine, but I really wanted more interior life. Why, for example, had Tobias and Karina become the persons they were? Oh, sure, we had a brief sketch of Karina’s background, but why was she so willing to let Winter go with her? It’s a little weird when the most understandable characters on the page are a near-cadaver (Kelly) and a soulless killing machine (the Widow.) I literally had no idea what drove Malcolm or Karina to do the things they did. That said, I was pleasantly surprised at Malykh’s reasoning: even if it was wrong/flawed, it was still very consistent for that character.

This was a really fun concept novel that fell short — perhaps deliberately given its source material — on characterization. It had as many cool occult twists as it did spy thrills, and it’s pretty great to go along with Winter as he slowly unravels the web of deceit that’s been spun around him. I’d love to read more novels set in this world and am honestly rather surprised that I’ve never encountered anything like this before.

(Edited to add that yes, I have read and love Charles Stross but the few stories I’ve enjoyed were more FBI than CIA, so clearly, I need to read more of his work!)

The Frumious Consortium is participating in a book tour for The War In The Dark, so stay tuned for our author interview on the 25th! In the meantime, check out some of the other tour dates in the infographic to the right.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/17/the-war-in-the-dark-by-nick-setchfield/

Jul 16 2018

Die Jungfrau von Orleans by Friedrich Schiller

At the opening of The Maid of Orleans, as Schiller’s five-act verse tragedy is known in English, France is divided among three parties: English troops who have taken Paris and the north in pressing their king’s dynastic claim to the French throne, southern lands held by the Valois king Charles VII, and Burgundy in the middle ruled by Philip the Good. Philip is also a Valois but has sided with England because men of Charles VII murdered his father. Thibaut d’Arch, whom Schiller describes as a wealthy landowner, has three daughters: Margot, Louison and Johanna (Joan). In the initial scenes, Thibaut laments France’s division and the likelihood that war will soon come to his area. In advance of that probable catastrophe, he consents to the marriage of his two older daughters to their intendeds.

Joan, however, worries him. She is young and should be full of life, but she is not like the other young women. Raimond, her admirer, defends Joan, saying she loves the mountains and the outdoors, that she is attuned to higher things, that she could have come from another age. That’s precisely what worries her father, who has had a prophetic dream three times of her on the throne of the kings in Reims, wearing a diadem, with all bowing to her. It foretells a steep fall, he says. Raimond defends her, saying she is the most talented of all, that everything she creates pours forth happiness.

Joan has been on stage through these two scenes, but silent and still. She does not move until Bertrand, another landowner, joins the party and relates the curious story of how at the market earlier a Bohemian woman had pressed a helmet upon him before vanishing into the crowd. “Give me the helmet!” are Joan’s first words in the play. Bertrand replies that it is nothing for a maiden. She tears it from his hands, saying “Mine is the helmet, and it belongs to me.”

History turns.

Bertrand says that a knight is about to tell the allied English and Burgundians that Orleans is prepared to come to terms. Joan counters immediately, “No agreements! No surrender! … The enemy’s fortune will shatter at Orleans … He is ready to be harvested. With her sickle the maid will come,/And mow down his proud stalks.” Bertrand says miracles don’t happen anymore, and Joan basically tells him to hold her beer.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/16/die-jungfrau-von-orleans-by-friedrich-schiller/

Jul 13 2018

An Interview With Daniel Godfrey, author of The Synapse Sequence

Q: Every book has its own story about how it came to be conceived and written as it did. How did The Synapse Sequence evolve?

A: I find a few different ideas have to come together before I’m able to write a novel, otherwise I don’t have the critical mass to get beyond short story stage – or have something that runs out of gas far too early.

I had in my mind that an air crash investigator would make a great detective, and a plot relating to a foster child. Both of these things had to snap together with the idea of having a technology that could be used to explore witness memories. The decision to run a separate (but connected) storyline relating to the main character (Anna) looking back over events came much later, but seemed a good thematic fit.

Q: I enjoyed the push-pull nature of humanity’s interdependence with Artificial Intelligence throughout The Synapse Sequence. Do you consider the novel a cautionary tale regarding human rights vs the safety and convenience provided by modern/future technology? If so, how do you believe we should draw the line between the rights of the individual vs the collective?

A: The increasing use of artificial intelligence is undoubtedly going to generate positives and negatives for society, and politicians will likely be forced to decide where it can and can’t be used (as is alluded to in The Synapse Sequence). However, I don’t believe ‘the line’ is static. For instance, I recently visited a reservoir that had been created by flooding a valley that had once contained several villages. “Imagine them doing that now,” someone in the visitor centre remarked. At the moment, the rights of the individual are probably given higher priority than ever before. How long this will last – in the face of global pressures, including climate change – is up for debate.

Q: Do you write with any particular audience in mind? Are there any particular audiences you hope will connect with this story?

A: I describe my writing as an ‘out of control’ hobby, which I’m pleased has found a home at Titan Books. I don’t like to get bogged down in the technology and instead focus on forward momentum. Hopefully this means it will reach a wide audience.

Q: The Synapse Sequence is, at its heart, an exploration of the link between time and memory. You also explore time travel in your previous books in the New Pompeii series. What drives your fascination with the mutable nature of time?

A: I suppose the fascination is more with non-linear narratives rather than time or time travel. The non-linear approach allows you to approach a story from a few different angles, which can be run at different paces between the crossing points.

Q: What is the first book you read that made you think, “I have got to write something like this someday!”?

A: I’m going to have to be slightly controversial here: what fires up my creative side more than anything else are movies, and growing up when I did, I am very much influenced by what came out in the 1980’s. Empire Strikes Back, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters. I really like seeing how the plot strands start to weave together as events build to a climax.

Q: I really enjoyed your writing tip for new writers on your website, which is essentially “Finish your book.” How long did the process of learning this take you, and is there any other advice you’ve learned since that you’d like to impart?

A: I see and hear this a lot actually: that writers have this new idea and they’re so keen to get going on it that they set off and soon come to a halt – they’ve burned through that initial enthusiasm – and then instead of focusing on why it went wrong it’s easier to start on the next shiny new thing.

The turning point for me came when I set myself a challenge that I could not start the next thing until I finished what I was writing, even though I knew it wasn’t good enough. It’s the only way to learn about structuring the all-important mid-section of the book.

The only thing I think I would now add to this is that it’s very useful to know (roughly) what your key beats are: how does your story start, what kicks off the main action, what happens in the middle to up the ante, how do you progress to the end, and how do you finish? You then have something to aim at as things are being written.

Q: Do you adhere to any particular writing regimen?

A: I have a full time job so 90% of my writing is done on a Sunday, and I aim for about 2,000 words on that day. I do editing (which can include re-writes) at other times, but only when on deadline.

Q: Are you a pantser (someone who writes by the seat of their pants) or a plotter? Given the structure and twists of The Synapse Sequence, would I be wrong in betting it’s the latter?

A: The Synapse Sequence was the first book where I’ve agreed an outline with my publisher prior to starting work. It was interesting to learn that process, but mainly I just like to have my key story beats and work between them as I’m going along. New Pompeii (my first published novel) was written very much in my spare time as a hobby (before getting an agent, let alone a publisher), and I’d started Empire of Time (the sequel) prior to it being signed to the publisher: so I just needed to give a brief description of what I’d already written.

I must say though that the outline was useful: it kept me focused and reduced the amount of aborted time going down plotting dead ends. It also made the editing much, much easier.

Q: What can you tell us about your next project?

A: I have a few promising ideas, but am looking for the final piece to make them work.

Q: What are you reading at the moment?

A: I’m sort of between books at the moment. I’m just about to start Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill. It’s on the shortlist for the Clarke Award, and I’ve heard a lot of good things about it. The book I’ve just finished was The Midnight Line by Lee Child.

Q: Are there any new books or authors in science fiction that have you excited?

It’s great that there’s such a lot of variety at the moment: books I very much enjoyed last year included Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit, Natasha Pulley’s The Bedlam Stacks and GX Todd’s Defender. From this year’s selection, the top two have both been space operas: Gareth Powell’s Embers of War and Dominic Dulley’s Shattermoon.

Q: Tell us why you love your book!

A: Aside from the amount of time and emotional investment I put into it? ☺ I suppose the risk with near future science fiction is that things can happen as your writing, and it takes a long time to get a book written and published. It’s been quite fun to see a lot of stuff in the book start appearing in the mainstream media; whether that be the use of AI in the police force, better understanding the mechanics behind memory, or the policy responses to automation (the most high profile of which is Universal Basic Income). I think the book has come out at the right time, so hopefully it will resonate with those who pick up a copy.

Thank you so much for having this discussion with us! 
Thank you for inviting me to be interviewed on your website!

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Author Links

Daniel Godfrey
Twitter

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The Synapse Sequence  was published June 19th 2018 and is available via all good book sellers. My review of the book itself may be found here.

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