NOTES ON NOBODY’S CHILDREN
WARNING: This page contains substantial SPOILERS for Nobody’s Children.
NOTES ON THE TRIPTYCH
Nobody’s Children is a collection of three novellas by different authors telling different parts of a single story. This is a fairly specialised literary form, and is – as far as I know, and I acknowledge that the publishing industry is pretty damn big and that I’m only familiar with a small proportion of it – unique to Big Finish Productions’ Bernice Summerfield range.
The brief that the range editor, Simon Guerrier, gave to me and my fellow authors Kate Orman and Jon Blum for this collection was as follows:
- that it would took place in the aftermath of an interstellar war between the Draconians and Simon’s creations, the spongelike shapeshifting Mim;
- that it should deal with a putative war crime;
- and that the stories should show events from different angles, with the Draconian Ambassador being accused of the atrocity, and with the truth being revealed in the final act.
Iain Pears’ historical crime novel, An Instance of the Fingerpost – which I’d heartily recommend to any fan of narratives which twist and trip you up and turn against themselves – was mentioned as a possible model.
Everything else about the plot – including which of us wrote each novella – was worked out between Kate, Jon and me in our early planning stages. I liked the idea of resolving the multiple perspectives; Jon was interested in exploring Draconian society and especially the position of Draconian women; and Kate’s background in marine biology made her surprisingly keen to write about sponges. So that all worked out rather well.
The ‘stolen war orphans’ motif, and the biological peculiarities which would make it interesting, also emerged very early on. I think the only alternative we seriously considered concerned the Ambassador having executed hundreds of his own people on suspicion of being secret Mim agents. (This would have prefigured the revelation that there were shapeshifters among the Draconians, but working towards an unexpected agenda. Which ended up being the way I resolved the storyline anyway.)
The way we outlined it, Kate’s ‘All Mimsy Were the Borogoves’ would worldbuild a proper background for the Mim (who’d been rather light on detail in their appearances to date, and who were certainly ripe for further development); Jon would elaborate on Draconian culture in ‘The Loyal Left Hand’; and I’d write ‘Nursery Politics’ as labyrinthine realpolitik – conflicting agendas, hidden alliances and people talking briskly while walking down corridors.
(I’d been watching a lot of The West Wing, I admit. But I’ve always liked science fiction about three-dimensional politics, from Ken MacLeod’s Marxist space operas to modern Battlestar Galactica.)
It was fairly early in the plotting process that I came up with the Institute – the shadowy third party, lobbying behind the scenes for access to the stolen children – and the details of their black-ops enterprise, Project Narcissus. Resolving the problem of who should actually end up with custody of the orphans took much longer.
- Notes on Nobody’s Children.
- Forward to Notes on Benny.
- Buy Nobody’s Children at Peculiar Tomes.
- Buy Nobody’s Children from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com or Big Finish Productions.
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