Hello, Dave! Welcome to SFFWorld. Many thanks for doing this.
We’re speaking as Europe at Midnight is being published in paperback in the UK. Can you tell us a little about it?
Europe at Midnight is a companion to my earlier novel Europe in Autumn. It’s not a formal sequel to the first book, but it does bear a relation to it – which it would be slightly spoilery to reveal. It involves two intelligence officers, Jim and Rupert, who come from different worlds and are both caught up in…it’s not exactly a conspiracy, but they’re caught up in the movement of vast events.
As you’ve said, Europe at Midnight is the second in a series, after Europe in Autumn, which was published in 2014. It received glowing reviews and both a BSFA Award nomination and an Arthur C Clarke Award nomination. Congratulations! However, as a result, it could be said that there’s a certain weight of expectation for Europe at Midnight. Is this a motivator or a hindrance in your writing?
Thank you! Yes, I never expected Autumn to have the reception it did, and yes, there is a weight of expectation; Midnight has to step into a large pair of shoes. It wasn’t a hindrance to the writing, but I was conscious the whole time that it needed to be at least as good as the previous book, and preferably better. So many people enjoyed Autumn and I didn’t want to let them down by turning out a substandard follow-up. That made writing it very tough, and consequently I am utterly terrified about how it’s going to be received.
Can you tell us a little about the world building for each novel? You’ve a clear premise from the outset here? What made you decide on that as a scenario in the first place?
Really all the important worldbuilding was done in Autumn. The Xian Flu, the fragmentation of the European Union, the rise of polities and little nation-states, the Community. And a surprising amount of that simply arose from the kind of book I wanted to write. I wanted to do a near-future thriller about cross-border smugglers in Europe, so I needed the EU to disappear, and that was where the Xian Flu came from. Once the basic framework was in place, everything else flowed from questions I asked about what that Europe was like – and of course more questions came up as those questions were answered, and so on. Eventually you find yourself filling in the spaces and the world takes form.
What came first – the world or the characters?
I can’t actually remember, is the rather embarrassing answer. Rudi and the world arrived more or less simultaneously, if memory serves, but filling Rudi out as a character took a long time. In the case of Midnight, the world – worlds, I should say – came first and the characters followed on from there.
How have things moved on from Europe in Autumn to Europe at Midnight? What do you hope readers will get from the new book?
I don’t want to get too spoilery about Midnight, because the structure, the relation is has with Autumn, is part of the surprise; I’d like readers who read the first book to get to a certain point and think, “Oh, that’s what he’s doing.” It expands a lot on the background of what a friend of mine called ‘autumnal Europe,’ ties up some loose ends from the first book, introduces many new ones. I just hope people will enjoy it as much as they seem to have enjoyed Autumn.
To me throughout the books there’s a strong Cold War type vibe, espionage novels set within an alternative dystopia. Where does your interest in the spy novels come from?
I’ve been a fan of spy novels since I was at junior school and read Len Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin. It’s always seemed to me that there are as many similarities between espionage fiction and science fiction as there are differences – both introduce us to worlds which are utterly unfamiliar to us in our day-to-day lives; both involve a certain esoteric technical expertise, and both involve a nitpicking amount of worldbuilding.
And are there plans for more?
Yes. I’ve just finished a third book in the series, Europe in Winter, and I’m currently pondering a fourth, Europe at Dawn – although that may be some way down the line.
Onto wider issues now. How long have you been writing for?
I always date the beginning of my writing ‘career’ as my sixteenth birthday, when my mother bought me a typewriter, so almost forty years now – although there was a period of about ten years, around the time I was at university and started work as a journalist, when I barely produced any fiction at all.
How useful has your occupation as a journalist been for your writing? I can see a certain degree of reportage in your fiction, perhaps.
It certainly taught me discipline in my writing, although I don’t think it’s influenced my style all that much. More importantly, it taught me the importance of good editing and not to be precious about my writing. If stuff needs to be cut – unless I have a very good reason for it to be there – it gets cut, or rewritten, or whatever. I can’t speak for other writers, but I find it very difficult to judge how good or bad my own stuff is; I’m perfectly happy to be guided by an editor.
Going back to the beginning, what interests in the genre did you have before writing your own? How much have they influenced your writing?
I spent a very long time when I was young reading nothing but American science fiction writers – Heinlein, Asimov, Niven, EE ‘Doc’ Smith – and my very early stuff – stuff which thank God nobody will ever read now – was heavily influenced by them. Then I read Keith Roberts’s Pavane and had a sort of lightbulb moment; his engagement with English landscape was a revelation to me, and when I went on to his short stories and found him writing about garage owners and small-town cinema projectionists – ordinary people, in other worlds – it turned my writing upside down. Roald Dahl was a big influence early on, the ‘twist endings’ of his Tales of the Unexpected stories. Stylistically, Len Deighton and Raymond Chandler had a big impact on me.
Previous to these two novels your fiction writing was mainly short stories. In the past, it was rather expected that authors started with short stories and then progressed to novels. How have you found the transition to novels? Do you think you need a grounding in short stories before tackling novels?
A friend of mine once said that I was a short story writer by nature rather than a novelist, and there could be something in that. I’ve sort of cheated in the Europe books by assembling them from chapters which are almost self-contained stories, but I find a novel a real slog – I find writing of any kind very hard work. My first novel, The Villages, grew from a short story I workshopped. Afterward, a couple of people came up to me and suggested I might try to turn it into a novel, and when I protested that I’d never really done a novel before one of them said, “Just treat it as a novella and keep going.” Which was easy for him to say. I don’t think it’s necessary to start out on short stories before moving to novels – the two forms are surprisingly different, in my opinion – and every writer approaches their work differently.
What kind of books do you read for pleasure, any favourite authors? Can you read for pleasure? (I know a lot of authors who can’t!)
Yes, I can absolutely read for pleasure, and I hope that never goes away. I’ve enjoyed Charlie Stross’s work for many years, Chris Priest, Alan Furst, Gareth L Powell. Nick Harkaway’s novels are a total joy to sit and read, many many more. I do tend to find myself reading either thrillers or science fiction, and I suppose I ought to do something about that at some point. I used to enjoy reading westerns – Lonesome Dove is one of the finest books I’ve ever read – but it’s been a while since I did that. Too many books, too little time!
Obviously we wish you all the best with the next developments.
Many thanks for your time, Dave.
Thank you!
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Interview by Mark Yon – SFFWorld.com © 2015
