John Birmingham kindly agreed to talk to us, as his novel Without Warning is about to be released in the UK by Titan Books.
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Hello, John. Thanks for agreeing to this.
We’re talking as the UK edition of Without Warning is about to be released. It has a bold premise – that suddenly much of the North American continent’s population disappears. Such an event has pretty impressive consequences. Was that your original starting point for the novel?
A bit over 20 years ago now, I had an argument with an idiot. We were at a demonstration protesting the massacre in Tiananmen Square. This guy, who was like a real life parody of a political nutter from (the Monty Python film) Life of Brian (“The Popular People’s Front of Judea? **** them!”) insisted that the massacre was the fault of George Bush senior. Worked himself up into a head spinning rage about it. Of course, I had no choice but to keep poking him with a stick. In the end he screamed at me, actually screamed, “We’d all be a lot better off if we woke up one day and they were gone, just gone!”
At the time I thought, ‘Sweet Jesus, you are an idiot’, but the idea stuck with me. A bit like a fish hook in the brain, as Stephen King would say. When I was looking for something new to write after wrapping up the Axis of Time trilogy, I felt a tugging deep in my memory, and there it was, my next book idea.
Why was the book set at the point of the outbreak of the Iraqi War in 2003?
I do like to write alternate histories, even if they are only alternate recent histories. Setting it in that week before the war allowed me to quarantine a couple of hundred thousand Americans as potential characters, but also to safeguard all of that military equipment. It set up an interesting narrative tension within the book. Because so much of the US military survived ‘the Wave’, the remnant US remained a superpower. But a superpower for which time was running out. In a way it was a method of compressing the future history of America, say the next three or four decades, into one week.
What do you like about writing alternate histories? The Axis of Time series also looked at differences in history, didn’t it?
The thing I most like about alternate histories, is reading them. I came to the genre late. I have a vague memory of reading (Philip K Dick’s) The Man in the High Tower in my late teens or early 20s, and being happy enough with it as a story, but not being blown away. Years later I picked up Harry Turtledove’s World War series and was blown away by the balls out ridiculous premise. I loved it. After that it was a short journey to reading Steve Stirling, Eric Flint and even the more literary alternate history writers like David Kowalski. So, long story short, I think I just liked messing around in this fabulous playground I’d stumbled across. It is enormous fun to write dialogue for the likes of Winston Churchill, Heinrich Himmler and Bill Gates.
I do like the international aspects of Without Warning. The book covers a broad global sweep as we look at the consequences of ‘the event’. You write of things in Kuwait, in Paris and in Cuba, for example, and there’s a pretty good sprinkling of places, weaponry and strategic meetings throughout that give the novel that feeling of ‘this is how it could be’. Is this something you’ve travelled for to get information on, or is it all down to good old planning and research?
Sometimes I travel. I’ve spent a bit of time in Seattle and New York, for instance, which makes writing about them much easier. So too with Rome in my most recent book, Stalin’s Hammer. (An e-book sequel to the Axis of Time series). But one of the things which has changed everything for authors in the last decade or so is the Internet, and specifically Google. Google Earth, Streetview, Wikipedia, travel blogging, the photo sites, they’ve all made it possible to research locations and history in fine granular detail. It’s not as much fun as going there, of course. But it’s a hell of a lot cheaper and more efficient. And it can really put the zap on your head when you research a place before going there. With immersive tools like Streetview, for instance, you can get to know a city at eye level without ever having set foot there. Freaks me out.
There’s also a broad range of characters. Which characters in Without Warning came first? Do you have favourites?
Caitlin and Jules came first. I had always wanted to write a ‘sleeping assassin’ story and Without Warning gave me that opportunity. I also really like kick arse female characters and those two would quickly run out of arse to kick if left to their own devices. Caitlin is also important because her role puts her at the center of the political collapse which follows the Disappearance. My favorite scene in the entire series is when they meet for the first time in After America.
Caitlin has become hugely popular with my female readers. To the point when some of them threatened me with quite terrible consequences if I killed her off. She remains my favorite too, but in many ways Jules is more interesting. Unlike Caitlin she’s not a superhero. She’s something of a villain, and a very dirty fighter who is well aware of her limitations. But she is also one of those interesting characters who ends up doing the right thing in spite of herself, often when she’s trying to do the wrong thing. She’s a bit like Jed Culver in that way, another favorite.
Without Warning finishes on a bit of a cliff-hanger. Since Without Warning was first published, you’ve written two more books in the series: After America and Angels of Vengence. Were you always planning to write a trilogy of books? Are there more to follow?
Yeah, I had the three books roughly plotted out before I wrote the first. Although having said that, the characters do take over and tend to run away with the story. At least they should if you’re writing them properly. So some people who were meant to live, died, and some for whom I had magnificent death scenes minutely plotted out, ended up surviving.
And of course a trilogy takes a while to write. By the time I finished the last instalment, Angels of Vengeance, publishing was being remade by the rise of the e-book. It’s scaring the hell out of a lot of people, but I see it is a great thing. E-books won’t replace paper, the same way that television didn’t replace radio. But the world of stories will look very different ten years from now. For me it means I can go back and revisit a series which would have otherwise run its course. Hence, we go back to check up on Prince Harry ten years after the Axis of Time books wrap up. And because e-books can be shorter and simpler, I can write them more often than full-length novels. So there will be more in both series.
I understand that although you were born in Liverpool, in England, you have lived most of your life in Australia. In your opinion, has this antipodean aspect of your life affected the way you write?
Interesting question. One of the great things about living in the Anglosphere is the richness and diversity to be found within that single language and deceptively similar cultures. My favorite TV shows as a kid were Dr. Who and Thunderbirds. Some of my favorite writers do two or three long features a year for American magazines like Vanity Fair and Esquire. I couldn’t say which elements of Australian culture have diverged from and influenced me more than, say, English culture. But they undoubtedly have.
I wasn’t aware until recently that in 2002 you won Australia’s National Prize for Non Fiction for Leviathan, a history book about Sydney. Congratulations! That is seriously impressive. Is that book always something you wanted to write or did it ‘just happen’ out of interest, through more of that research?
Leviathan was an attempt to escape the gravity well of my first book, He Died with a Felafel in His Hand. That was a comedy, nonfiction, about all of the people I lived with in my 20s. It was a bestseller, a monstrous, inescapable bestseller that would’ve trapped me in the cage of writing increasingly desperate and unfunny indie comedies for the rest of my life. I’d been a magazine feature writer for 10 years before it was published. Successful enough, but anonymous. That form of writing, narrative non-fiction, was my first love, and Leviathan was my attempt to get back to it. A very successful attempt, as it turned out. But then I went and wrote Weapons of Choice for fun… And here we are.
I’ve also been told that you are the author of the longest running stage play in Australian history. Is that true?
Sort of. The play was the theatrical adaptation of Felafel. I had some input into it, but it was really the work of a bunch of unemployed actors. And yes, it ran for about five years, often simultaneously in a couple of different cities. I think it even toured Edinburgh at one point. The only reason it stopped was because the producers of the Felafel film had a clause inserted into the contract killing it off before their movie hit the screens. To avoid confusion or some such bollocks.
Do you read for fun? And if so, what?
A writer who doesn’t read is like a chef who doesn’t eat. It’s a crime against the order of nature. But there’s reading and there’s reading. For fun, right now, I’m finishing off Peter F Hamilton’s Great North Road, and loving it, even though I’m having to punch through with the effort of getting to the last page before we discuss it this week at the book club on my blog, cheeseburgergothic.com. Because I have so much driving around to do with my kids, I’ve also been getting into audiobooks the last year or so. I’ve found I prefer them for nonfiction, for some reason. I think because the character voices in fiction just don’t work with a single narrator. At least not for me. The last audiobook I finished was Anthony Beevor’s The Second World War. It was awesome, the sort of book publicists invented the word ‘magisterial’ for.
What else do you do to give you a break from the writing?
I returned to the dojo to take up jujitsu after a long break a couple of years back. Mostly because I wanted to train my daughter, so that when she leaves home she will do so as an unstoppable killing machine of death. But it keeps me fit and limber, too. (Caveat, right now I’m limping from a pulled hammy as a result of an over ambitious kicking drill). And it helps when I’m writing fight scenes. It’s getting harder as I get older, though. Increasingly I’m reminded of something Steve Stirling said to me about why he gave up the martial arts. He said he was becoming the most dangerous cripple in America.
I’m also a big fan of video games. I had all three consoles, but I’ve given away my PS3 and Nintendo Wii because I just wasn’t using them as much. Right now, at this very moment, I am sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for Grand Theft Auto V to drop. At that point all productivity will cease.
What are you writing at the moment?
I have three major projects on the go at the moment, my next e-book in the Axis of Time series, a new novel in a new story world, and a screenplay which I’m writing for somebody else. Keeps me off the streets.
Future plans?
The next series of novels is keeping me up late at night. It won’t be a trilogy, and it won’t feature an ensemble cast of characters. I’m trying to build a whole world around one character who can sustain a narrative over an unknown number of books. It’s forcing me to break out of a lot of my habits of mind.
And as I’ve mentioned a couple of times, I’m excited by the possibilities inherent in the arrival of e-books as a mass medium. Revisiting old stories, hiving off characters into their own independent story arcs, even gathering and editing some of the better fan-fiction which is been written in my story worlds. It’s kind of exciting.
Tangential to that I’m going to “relaunch” my blog very soon, with a new design and a lot more content than the usual meanderings about what I had for lunch and my problems with the film version of Where Eagles Dare. I mean 1950s US helicopters in 1940s Bavaria? Come on, that’s my schtick!
Many thanks again, John.
