FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

1. FICTION

1.1 General

1.2 Faction Paradox

1.3 Time Hunter

1.4 Bernice Summerfield

1.5 Iris Wildthyme

1.6 Doctor Who

2. CRITICISM

2.1 Thesis

2.2 Other

1. FICTION

1.1 General

1.1.1 Why has all your writing been for series?

A good question. Certainly in the long run I have aspirations to writing standalone science fiction (or even mainstream fiction) as well as series material – but there are a number of distinct advantages to the shared-universe format which shouldn’t be dismissed.

One is that the characters in such series, being already extensively developed by their creators and others, have the scope to become more complex and nuanced than a single story or novel can make them. Another is that the ‘backstory’ of a fictional world allows for a kind of subtle allusion (immediately recognisable to readers in the know, but near-invisible to new readers) which is all but impossible in standalone fiction (except by often obtrusive references to well-known external narratives such as the Bible, classical myth or Shakespeare). A third is the enjoyment to be had in collaboration, building upon what other authors have created and having one’s own work incorporated into future creations. This is particularly rewarding when the other authors involved are of the calibre of Paul Cornell, Paul Magrs et al.


1.2 Faction Paradox

1.2.1 So, what’s your novel about?

Read my page on Of the City of the Saved... and see if that answers your questions. The setting is a secular / technological Heaven, a City the size of a galaxy where every single member of the human species has been resurrected after the end of time. The larger setting is the Faction Paradox universe.

It’s about cycles of violence, and the temporary nature of peace and prosperity. It’s about gods, and cultures, and families, and identities – those which we evolve for ourselves and those which are imposed on us. It’s partly a reaction to (the Western governments’ reaction to) the events of 11 September 2001, but what isn’t these days?

1.2.2 What’s the deal with The Book of the War?

The Book of the War is fiction, but it’s written in the form of an encyclopedia. It’s not (for the most part) a guide to the pre-existing elements of the Faction Paradox universe, since most of the material is entirely new: instead it constructs that universe by the process of recording it, a very Factionesque concept. It’s more a collaborative novel with ten authors than an anthology – although as editor and most prolifically-contributing author, the Faction’s creator Lawrence Miles was very much its helmsman.

1.2.3 Faction Paradox? Isn’t that a Doctor Who spinoff?

Erm. Sort of. Yes and no. The Faction is a time-travelling voodoo sect, whose members practice a form of situationist performance art based on manipulating the fabric of space and time. Lawrence Miles, who created the Faction, first used the concept in his Doctor Who novels Alien Bodies and Interference, before going on to develop it as a fictional milieu in its own right. Certain recurring characters in the Faction universe have also made appearances in Doctor Who novels.

1.2.4 Do I need to have read the previous Faction Paradox material to understand Of the City of the Saved...?

Certainly not. Like all good novels (which I aspire towards it being), Of the City of the Saved... gives you all the information you need to understand its plot. It would be a pretty shabby treatment of the reader if it didn’t.


1.3 Time Hunter

1.3.1 Peculiar Lives – what’s that all about, then?

Peculiar Lives is a science fiction novella, mostly set in 1950 and narrated by Erik Clevedon, an elderly author whose glory days were as a writer of ‘scientific romances’ between the World Wars. It aims to foreground some of the more disturbing elements of that era of British S.F. (the intellectual elitism, the calls for programmes of ‘benevolent social planning’ and of eugenics, and the preponderance of misunderstood supermen who want to destroy society) and to question their implications in the real world – not excepting the Nazi programme in Germany which attempted to put into practice many of the same principles.

The character of Clevedon is loosely based on Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950), the author of Last and First Men and Star Maker and the most influential figure in British S.F after H.G. Wells. Stapledon was possessed of an incredible imagination, and was one of S.F.’s few true geniuses. His work perfectly embodies many of these fascinating contradictions.

Peculiar Lives is also the seventh novella in Telos Publishing’s Time Hunter series.

1.3.2 And what’s the Time Hunter series?

Time Hunter is a series of novellas about two time-travelling detectives from the year 1950. The central characters are Honoré Lechasseur, a black American ex-serviceman living in London since the War, and Emily Blandish, a mysterious amnesiac woman whom he befriends. Each has certain unusual abilities which, in conjunction, allow them to travel through time. Prior to Peculiar Lives, they have visited other eras from 1805 to 2020, including a trip to George Orwell’s 1984 in Lance Parkin’s The Winning Side.

The Time Hunter range is a Doctor Who spin-off, although rather tenuously so: Honoré and Emily were originally characters in Daniel O’Mahony’s Doctor Who novella The Cabinet of Light, published by Telos in 2003.

1.3.3 But isn’t Peculiar Lives the name of your blog?

It used to be. Prior to that, it was the name of a short story I wrote which was set in a village full of bookshops, and of the bookshop owned by the narrator in the story. (The short story ‘Peculiar Lives’ – which had nothing whatever to do with the novella – was never published. I may yet rework it with a view to publication.) It’s a title I’ve had knocking around in my head for a while: at least using it for a published book should prevent me from reusing it again.

The blog has now been renamed Peculiar Times.


1.4 Bernice Summerfield

1.4.1 So tell me about ‘Sex Secrets of the Robot Replicants’ / A Life Worth Living.

‘Sex Secrets of the Robot Replicants’ is an intellectual farce of academic fraud and mistaken identity, featuring various characters from Big Finish Productions’ Bernice Summerfield range. It appears in A Life Worth Living, an anthology of short stories edited by Simon Guerrier.

1.4.2 Why was ‘Sex Secrets of the Robot Replicants’ reprinted?

‘Sex Secrets of the Robot Replicants’ features a character called Jason Kane, created by Dave Stone in Death and Diplomacy (1996). Dave enjoyed my treatment of Jason, describing the story (and me) as ‘very fine and funny’. When he was asked to write a novel centring around Jason’s character, he chose to make it a sequel to ‘Sex Secrets’, and the story is reprinted as a prelude in the novel.

1.4.3 How come you’ve got so many stories in Collected Works?

Essentially, because they’re mostly rather short.

The situation with Collected Works was that Nick Wallace, the editor, asked me to come up with some posthuman characters around whom one of the anthology’s two main subplots could be constructed. This I did, in a document which I’ll be adding to this site once people have had a chance to read the book.

I then wrote five short pieces under the umbrella title ‘Perspectives’, progressing that particular subplot (though the characters in question crop up in other contributors’ stories throughout the collection), and Nick and I co-wrote a finale, ‘Future Relations’, which brought it to a cconclusion and tied everything together. I'm terribly pleased with how it all came out.

1.4.4 Talk to me about Nobody’s Children.

Well, if you insist. Nobody’s Children is a collection of three interconnected novellas, one of which is entitled ‘Nursery Politics’, and is by me. The other two are ‘All Mimsy Were the Borogoves’ by Kate Orman and ‘The Loyal Left Hand’ by Jonathan Blum.

I was privileged to be working with authors of the calibre of Kate and Jon, a wife-and-husband writing team whose work I have admired for many years. A previous novella which written jointly by them, Fallen Gods, won the Aurealis Award for the best Australian science fiction novel (slightly paradoxically) in 2004.

Nobody’s Children is about the aftermath of an interstellar war between two alien species, the Draconians and the Mim. In particular it focuses on one particular catastrophe and the fate of the war orphans it has created. The exact nature of the children’s predicament depends on where the characters are standing and which side they were on, and our plan was that the reader’s sympathies and viewpoint would shift similarly.

My story, the last in the book, attempts to tie up several disparate strands while introducing new ideas of its own. ‘Nursery Politics’ is a story about family, about parenthood and partnership, about the value of children and the atrocities some people will commit to protect them.

1.4.5 ...and then a bit about The Vampire Curse. To be honest, I just like to hear your voice.

Stop it. The Vampire Curse is another collection of three novellas – ‘The Badblood Diaries’ by Mags L. Halliday, ‘Possum Kingdom’ by Kelly Hale, and ‘Predating the Predators’ by me. Mags and Kelly are both wonderful authors whom it was a pleasure to work with, although this time the work was rather less collaborative.

The Vampire Curse is more of an anthology than Nobody’s Children, being three stories of Bernice’s encounters with vampires at different points in her life. ‘Predating the Predators’ is set later than any previous Bernice Summerfield story, featuring as it does an aged Bernice. It’s about vampires infiltrating an Interdisciplinary Conference on Vampirology, with predictably bloody results.

In addition to Bernice and a young woman named Elanore Summerfield, it features a physicist and a Catholic priest through whose eyes we mostly see the action unfold. As the title would suggest it’s about predators, and about the impossibility of living except at the expense of others. It’s also about faith and reason, and what happens when people who work with ideas are faced with the irrational. It’s one of the most explicitly religious things I’ve written, oddly enough.

1.4.6 And who exactly is Bernice Summerfield, anyway?

Professor Bernice (or ‘Benny’) Summerfield is a 26th- / 27th-century archaeologist, adventurer and diarist, created by SF author Paul Cornell and described most succinctly as ‘Indiana Jones meets Bridget Jones– in space!’ Her adventures were first chronicled by Virgin Publishing in their New Adventures series of novels, and later by Big Finish in a series of novels, anthologies and audio dramas which complement their Doctor Who range.

The Bernice Summerfield ranges are another Doctor Who spinoff – Bernice’s first appearance was in Paul Cornell’s Love and War (1992), when the New Adventures were still Doctor Who tie-in novels.

Other regular characters who appear in my Bernice stories include Jason, Benny’s (technically ex-) husband, created by Dave Stone; Peter, her half-alien son (born in Jacqueline Rayner’s novel The Glass Prison); her father Admiral Isaac Summerfield (introduced by Kate Orman in her Doctor Who novel Return of the Living Dad); her urbane yet machiavellian employer Irving Braxiatel (created by Justin Richards in the Doctor Who novel Theatre of War); Bev Tarrant, a jewel thief turned museum curator (introduced by Mike Tucker in the Doctor Who audio CD The Genocide Device); Adrian Wall, an alien construction worker and Peter’s father (created by Justin Richards in the Benny novel The Doomsday Manuscript); and Parasiel, one of Benny’s students (introduced by Paul Cornell in A Life Worth Living).


1.5 Iris Wildthyme

1.5.1 And who’s Iris Wildthyme, when she’s at home?

A time-traveller, raconteuse and occasional nightclub singer, Iris Wildthyme was created by Paul Magrs for his magic-realist novel Marked for Live, published by Vintage in 1996. She travels through time and space in a double-decker bus, and in her riotous irresponsibility is an obvious parody of the more strait-laced Doctor Who. Magrs later had the opportunity to introduce the character to her illustrious original in a number of Doctor Who novels and short story collections published by the BBC, as well as some of the Doctor Who audio dramas produced by Big Finish Productions.

1.5.2 What are ‘Minions of the Moon’ and Wildthyme on Top?

Wildthyme on Top is a return to Iris’s postmodern roots – a short-story collection edited by Paul Magrs for Big Finish, in which Iris visits various times, places and literary genres accompanied by her friend Tom, a gay black literature student from turn-of-the-millennium London. In my story ‘Minions of the Moon’ she joins a diplomatic delegation from the court of Queen Elizabeth I to a utopian society of semi-angelic beings living on the Moon. It’s part Shakespearian pastiche, part political thriller, and partly an attempt to construct a ‘hard alchemical fiction’ story based upon the science of the Renaissance.

1.5.3 And Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus, and ‘Battleship Anathema’?

Edited by Paul Magrs and Stuart Douglas, Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus is the début short-story anthology from Stuart's publishing house, Obverse Books. The format is similar to that of Wildthyme on Top, except that Iris’s companion now is – for never fully explored reasons – a pompous, opinionated ten-inch-tall stuffed panda named Panda. My story, ‘Battleship Anathema’ sees Iris revisiting the scene of a series of space-opera adventures she enjoyed in glorious technicolor some thirty years ago, and finding that things have changed significantly in her absence.

(Although for the record, I’m very fond of modern Battlestar Galactica. Views expressed by Iris Wildthyme are not necessarily those of her authors...)


1.6 Doctor Who

1.6.1 What’s the deal with ‘The Long Midwinter’ in Short Trips: The History of Christmas?

I’m going to assume that everybody reading this has heard of Doctor Who.

‘The Long Midwinter’ is my first piece of licensed Doctor Who fiction, and appears in the short story collection Short Trips: The History of Christmas, published by Big Finish Productions. My story is set on an alien world in the distant, posthuman future. It’s partly a response to a challenge from the editor, Simon Guerrier, to write a ‘far future’ story which was convincingly alien rather than relying on familiar human elements: however, since The History of Christmas is a Christmas-themed anthology, the inhuman Yesodites turn out to have a Midwinter Festival of their own, in which certain familiar symbols have taken on an altogether stranger set of meanings.

1.6.2 I’ve never heard of Samson and Gemma.

I’m not entirely surprised. Samson and Gemma Griffin are companions of the eighth Doctor (Paul McGann), introduced in Joseph Lidster’s audio drama Terror Firma. I was asked to include them in ‘The Long Midwinter’ in order to tie in with Joe’s story and with the wider Big Finish universe. As the story explains, Samson is a librarian (as I was myself when I wrote the story), and Gemma is his teenage sister. You can read more about them here.

1.6.3 And what about ‘The Ruins of Time’ in Short Trips: Time Signature?

‘The Ruins of Time’ is a story in Short Trips: Time Signature, edited by Simon Guerrier. It features Doctor Who’s original regular cast of characters – William Hartnell’s Doctor, his granddaughter Susan and two of her schoolteachers, Ian and Barbara, whom the Doctor inadvertently kidnaps from 1960s Earth.

Prior to doing my research for this story, I hadn’t been particularly familiar with Doctor Who’s original first season – but I was determined that, if I was going to write a story set in this era, it would attempt to be as faithful as possible to the source material rather than a generic Doctor Who story. This year of the programme was, by later standards, quite atypical – there being no formula to adhere to at this stage, the stories wandered into some very surprising territories. The Doctor in particular is an arrogant old bastard, and his unwilling companions seem genuinely traumatised by the distressing things which happen to them.

‘The Ruins of Time’ is the story of a once-great civilisation laid low by random happenstance, and of the struggles of some very human aliens to survive in extreme circumstances. It’s about what happens when time becomes a currency, and about people from the sixties encountering a very different understanding of sexuality from the one they’re used to.



2. CRITICISM

2.1 Thesis

2.1.1 What’s your thesis about?

It’s called The Relationship Between Creator and Creature in Science Fiction, and it’s about certain recurring theological themes in sf. The idea is that sf authors frequently use sentient ‘creatures’ (in the older sense of the word, ‘created being’), such as robots, artificial intelligences, engineered human beings and the like, in an allegory of humanity’s relationship with its own (supposed) divine creator. In the allegory the created beings usually stand for humanity, which means of course that their human creators represent God. Different authors use this complex and reflexive relationship in different ways, depending on their own religious opinions. Science fiction derives this whole idea-set from Romantic poetry via the first science fiction novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

2.1.2 So how does that apply to [insert favourite sf author / film / TV series], then?

Ah, well. To find that out, you’d either have to read my thesis or talk to me. Unfortunately, while there’s any chance of having my thesis published by an academic publisher, I won’t be web-publishing it. If you like you can check the Contents page to see if your question is covered – obviously, to treat the authors I examined in any depth, I had to be fairly discriminating. And virtually no film or TV gets a mention, I’m afraid.

If you want to ask me, try email. But I’m pretty busy, and haven’t yet managed to read all the books in the world, so the reply you get may not be very helpful.

2.1.3 Sci-fi’s all rubbish, though, isn’t it?

[Firmly] No. Some highly respected writers, such as Iain Banks and Brian Aldiss, write both science fiction and ‘mainstream’ fiction. Others, such as Samuel Delany, write science fiction and fantasy whilst simultaneously being intimidatingly erudite Professors of Comparative Literature. Some are damn good writers, who see in science fiction a modern literature which can treat the kinds of cosmic themes which creation myth, religious vision and epic poetry have dealt with in the past. Many are just writers who like playing with scientific ideas.

Of course there’s some science fiction written and published which is, indeed, utter rubbish. But look me in the eye and tell me that’s not true of your literary genre of choice as well. (See Sturgeon’s Law.)


2.2 Other

2.2.1 I enjoyed your article about Philip K. Dick in The Guardian.

This one, you mean? Why, thank you.

2.2.2 Where can I find a copy of your Greenbelt talks?

My talks on ‘The Spirituality of Doctor Who’, ‘Science Fiction as the Bible’ and ‘The Bible as Science Fiction’, plus reading list are available at this very site.



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