Concept Sci-fi

Interview conducted by Gary Reynolds (November 2008)... 

You've been involved in writing/journalism for some time. What prompted you to move into writing speculative fiction?

To be honest, I’ve been telling stories and thinking up crazy stuff since I was five years old – it’s just taken me a very long time to build up the confidence to actually finish something. You could construct a medium-sized house out of all the books/scripts/stories I started and then gave up on, and it’s only in the last few years – partly as a result of all my journalistic adventures – that I’ve understood that no matter how good or awful it might be, you never really learn anything from a story until you finish it. I also had to come to terms with the fact that it’s okay to not write short stories – it’s a discipline I’m just not suited to – and that sprawling, over-the-top stories seem to be what I have the most fun working on. Journalism was something I fell into by accident, and it’s taught me a lot, but writing sci-fi/fantasy is what I was put on this planet to do – it’s just taken me a certain amount of time to work that out.

'The Hypernova Gambit' is your first novel. What's it about?

An intergalactic version of Harrods is hi-jacked by a gang of reality revolutionaries out to change the universe, and only an unwitting megastar, a world-weary employee, a polite AI and a gestalt-entity prostitute can stop them…

Can you describe your process for writing 'The Hypernova Gambit' from initial idea through to revision and submission? Are you a planner, or do you just dive in and start writing?

It’s a bit of a saga – the book actually began back in 1999 as a Doctor Who spin-off novel that I pitched to BBC Books. At that point, I was getting very vexed with the direction Doctor Who spin-off fiction was going in – it was all very post X-Files, dealing with shadowy conspiracies and plot devices that you had to have read fifty previous books in order to be able to keep up with. In my grumpy fanboy arrogance, I basically decided to come up with something completely different – instead of sinister and mysterious, I was going to go brash and colourful (heavily influenced by Marvel’s Doctor Who comic strip at the point where it had people like Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons working on it) and instead of inscrutable villains who lurked in the background, I’d have a gang of kinetic, interesting and energetic bad guys with a very clearly defined goal. They’d be very physical and comic-book in their construction (I was also being strongly influenced by the last few issues of Grant Morrison’s run on JLA at the time), and the whole world of the book would be packed with enough stuff to make it stand on its own two feet. It was crammed to bursting with ideas and coolness, I was really excited about it… and it got turned down.

I knew it was still a good idea – but I couldn’t for the life of me see a way of converting it into a non-Who novel. The Doctor’s such a useful character and an instant catalyst – he just has to turn up and stuff starts happening, and there were other aspects of the story which were fairly heavily wired into Who mythology. So, it sat there in my head for a few years under the heading of “Wouldn’t it have been nice if…” and it wasn’t until 2005 that things seriously started to happen. That’s when, instead of simply thinking about the bits of the story I liked, I started wondering about different ways of approaching it… and I had a breakthrough. I suddenly realized how I could replace the Doctor. It meant that gigantic chunks of the story were now a complete unknown, but at least I had a way of actually telling it.

I also realized that there was no need to be embarrassed about the relative daftness of my central concept – “Intergalactic version of Harrods gets hi-jacked” is, to be honest, the sort of thing that would fit into Doctor Who quite smoothly, but I was nervous about making it a standalone until I realized that it was okay to be silly, and that I should embrace the silliness and make it part and parcel of the whole book. So, that’s how I got to the writing proper, which took about 9 months for the shambolic first draft, and then just over a year of rewriting, and rewriting, and then more rewriting, and I kept going until the point where I genuinely didn’t think I could do anything more to it without my head exploding.

In answer to the main bit of your question, I tend to have certain sequences storyboarded in my head – especially much of the gigantic chase sequence that makes up a big section of the climax, which was something I waited years to do – but much of the book starts off as blind improvisation, just sitting down at the keyboard and seeing where I end up. There’s one fairly major plot thread in the second half of the book that grew out of a completely improvised sequence I wrote early on. The basic plot remained the same, but the details went through all kinds of changes as I went through the process of throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what kind of pretty patterns they made.

I can only really describe it as trying to build a skyscraper at the same time as trying to teach yourself how to build a skyscraper – scary, unsettling, and often involving the uncomfortable realization that you’ve put the foundations in the wrong place. It’s really been a process of finding out what works; going from writing 350 word reviews or 2,000 word articles to writing a 165,000 word novel is a bit of a leap, and it’s taken me some time to get used to the change. It was really just a matter of keeping my enthusiasm going, and remembering one important thing I have learned – it’s incredibly rare to get a second shot with a project, so you’ve got to make your first shot count by getting it as good as it can possibly be.

The book opens with a very dramatic and tense scene. What do you think makes a good opening hook?

It’s something I picked up from journalism, and from having to do lots of freelance reading of manuscripts for publishers – when you’ve only got a limited number of words, you can’t afford to mess about, and you’ve got to grab people’s attention. If you think about when a book actually ends up in a shop, it has to have an opening that’s going to make you want to know what happens next – it can be funny, sad, weird, energetic, violent or crazy, as long as it asks enough questions so that you simply can’t get to the next page fast enough. If it doesn’t hold the attention in those first few pages, it’ll be very easy to put it down and go look at something else.

I accidentally lucked into a good opening scene – give or take a few changes, the opening of my book is one of the few elements that’s stayed largely intact throughout all the endless rewriting – but I’ve always loved openings that throw you into a new world and make you work things out for yourself. My favourite opening hook would have to be in the book ‘Only Forward’ by Michael Marshall Smith – it’s a short, utterly unsettling scene that instantly makes you think “What the hell is going on?!?”, and it doesn’t even get remotely explained until the last forty pages of the book.  I read the prologue not knowing anything else about the book (the blurb was wonderfully enigmatic), and simply had to buy it after reading those pages.

What did you learn from writing your first novel and how will it impact upon your approach to future works?

Just keep writing. Don’t give up. You really don’t know what you’ve got until it’s down on paper. Rewriting isn’t anything to be afraid of. It’s alright to be funny.

To be honest, one of the main things I learned is simply that I was capable of finishing a book. Going from what was essentially a standing start to a 165,000 word novel isn’t something I’d recommend to anyone else – you really do have to be psychotically driven to do it this way – but it’s worked for me so far. Right now, the main thing I want to do is simply get on and get the next project done – and given that it’s another big one, it’s a process that’ll take a while, and require a lot of dedication. For various reasons, life has been getting in the way for a while (it has an annoying habit of doing that), but I know this is what I’m meant to do, and no matter how many difficulties I may have in motivating myself to get behind that keyboard, I know I’ve simply got to do it.

What's the current situation with 'The Hypernova Gambit'?

It’s still in that frustrating grey area where it’s being shopped around by my agent, and it has been getting some very nice feedback, but not to the point where someone has actually said “Yes, we’ll publish it!” as yet. Publishing is a world that moves very, very slowly – however slow you think it’ll go, it’ll always end up happening that little bit slower. Nevertheless, I’m doing my best to remain hopeful – all the way through the writing, I was convinced that something would happen as a result of writing a book so deliberately crazed and energetic and off-the-wall. It’ll probably come along when I least expect it, but I am convinced that it will eventually happen.

What's your favourite book of all time and why?

Difficult one. I have different favourites that I go to for different things, but I guess in terms of influence and impact, I’d have to go for The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams. It took me a long time to realize exactly how much impact and influence Adams’ writing had on me – I first experienced it as the TV series when I was 8 years old, and didn’t really get any of the jokes, but it was the tremendously bizarre ideas and world-view that hooked me. It’s such a shame that his output was so small, and yet there’s so much good stuff in there – Dirk Gently’s Hollistic Detective Agency would be a close runner up for my favourite, and without Adams I doubt I’d have sought out P.G. Wodehouse, another writer who’s had a different but very significant effect on me.

What are you working on now and what can we expect to see from you in the future?

Right now, I’m working on the follow-up to The Hypernova Gambit, which is also the second in a prospective series of five books – each of them roughly standalone, but all leading up to a gigantic finale in book five. I’m also trying to make sure that each book has a separate and distinct flavour – the one I’m currently working on is my own particular take on a ground-based war epic, as well as exploring some of the consequences of what happens in The Hypernova Gambit – plus I’ve got some fairly bizarre and outlandish ideas for the later books that I can’t wait to be able to implement.

For the moment, that’ll be my life – inching forward with the current novel, and waiting to hear what happens with The Hypernova Gambit. I’ve also got an idea for another series set in the same universe that I’m currently sketching out. There’s a character in The Hypernova Gambit who ended up so fascinating and strange that I really want to do a spin-off novel centred on her, and there’s a whole urban fantasy epic that’s been lurking in my head for over ten years… so whatever happens, it should hopefully be a long time before I run out of ideas!

For further information, why not check out Saxon's author profile and his website.