Interviews | John Love

Interview with Andrea Johnson Little Red Reviewer

John Love interview with Andrea Johnson, The Little Red Reviewer, February 22 2012

Thanks for joining us, can you tell us a little more about yourself? What do you do when you’re not writing?

I spent most of my working life in the music industry. I was Managing Director of PPL, the world’s largest record industry copyright organisation. When I retired I started doing things in the community aimed at quality-of-life issues: I belong to a number of safer neighbourhood, conservation and community development bodies. I’m also a Governor of a local school for special-needs children.

Apart from my family, London and cats, my favourite things include books and book collecting, cars and driving, football and Tottenham Hotspur, old movies and music.

For a debut novel, Faith is incredibly impressive. Can you tell us a little bit about what went into creating it?

Thank you. Perhaps I could answer in two parts: Process, and Research.

Process first, by which I mean how the idea – the basic premise – of the book came to me. I could list some of the books or films or other influences which I’d carried for years and which combined to make the premise of FAITH (I won’t, because they come up later) but I’m not sure what else they combined with, and where it came from. And (most relevant to your question) how it came.

I do know that the premise for FAITH came fully-formed, and all at once – I could actually tell you the day it came, what I was doing and where I was. It came years before I sat down to write it, because of the demands of my job. But when I did write it, the premise remained completely unaltered.

That seems to be how the process works with me. I’m writing a second novel now whose premise also came to me earlier and has, so far, also stayed the same.

But if FAITH’s premise remained unchanged, its moving parts didn’t. Things like plotting, characters, and back-stories changed as I wrote the book. I found it a bit like assembling an engineering construction: while writing I might have an idea for a back-story or a character-trait which would strengthen the construction like a strut, passing through it three-dimensionally and reinforcing every bit it touched. The process of fitting it into the structure where it could do most good was one I found fascinating.
And Research. I’ve always liked reading authors like Stephen Hawking to get an idea of how physics might develop new views of the universe – the clockwork of Newton, the apparent chaos of Einstein, the apparent illogic of quantum mechanics – and playing with ideas of what might come next. Similarly, I’ve always had what gender-stereotypers would call a typical male interest in things like spaceships and cars and military hardware, and how they might develop in the future.

So I had a headstart for a lot of the research into those areas, but while writing the book I also did some reading on psychological conditions. I didn’t do that before, because it was only as the characters developed and started striking sparks off each other that I realised there was a need for it.

Even the opening scene is quite surprising. Was that always the opening scene?

You’re the first person to ask that. Did you sense something about the opening? If you did, you’re right.

No, it wasn’t always the opening scene. I’m glad it is now, because it seems to work well – particularly the first sentence – but originally there was a short chapter, about 700 words, in front of it. Nightshade’s Jeremy Lassen suggested it should be cut and its content partly redistributed through the book – a suggestion which made sense.

Incidentally, that was Jeremy’s only substantive edit. His others were much more specific; some actually involved additions rather than cuts, and all of them made sense. I’ll always be grateful (and relieved) to have found an editor who left the book almost unchanged.

Many reviewers (myself included) have identified Moby Dick as a possible influence to Faith. Can you confirm? What other books and authors have influenced you?

Imagine if Moby Dick had only just been written, and a modern Melville had to pitch it to an agent. Or if Melville’s agent had to pitch it to a publisher. The easiest job in the world! It works artistically and commercially, and works supremely well, on so many levels. It’s a great literary work, a great page-turner with wonderful action sequences, a deep psychological study, and even a fine piece of social commentary.

Very early on, the ship Faith is described as “the bastard child of Moby Dick and Kafka, invincible and strange.” Moby Dick was a huge influence, but not the only one. FAITH was pitched as a mixture of some of the elements of Moby Dick and Kafka. Kafka’s elements are as important as Melville’s in the book; and there are other things as well.
When I’ve been asked this question in other interviews, I’ve quoted a post I did for Nightshade, in the Night Bazaar website. If I may, I’d like to quote it again:
“If FAITH has any political resonances, they’re at best oblique. But I hope it has some other resonances. About identity and free will: what makes us what we are, and what makes us what we do. About love and friendship: what forces bring us together, or keep us apart, and why we don’t recognise them. And about the absence of simple good and evil: the complexities which make each of them part of each other.”
Those are some of the other things I wanted the book to say.

Much of the book is an epic space battle, yet those scenes feel like they take place in claustrophobically close quarters, more like a boxing match or a submarine chase. With an entire solar system to play in, what led to the choice to give the space battles such an intimate feel?

It was deliberate. I wanted that contrast. Two individual opponents, fighting with the intimacy of single combat, but looming behind them is what each of them represents. One of the book’s recurrent themes is Orders of Magnitude.

The claustrophobic feel, and the shift from macro- to micro- , is something I wanted so I could focus more closely on the individual characters – the psychological effect on individuals of the looming and unknowable menace they were facing. Without that, the space battle wouldn’t have had its particular texture. With it, the space battle doesn’t only have texture, it has ambiguity: at times it doesn’t seem like a battle at all, but something else, possibly larger.

That, at least, is what I wanted and tried to do.

The end offers what is undeniably the most unique reveal in years. Without spoiling the ending for people who haven’t read the book, can you tell us how you got going in that direction? Did you know the ending before you starting writing Faith?

I can’t answer this as fully as I’d like without the possibility of giving something away. The idea which underlies the ending is something I’ve had since I was a child. Since I first started looking up at the night sky.

There are so many ideas in Faith that are touched upon, and we’re given just glimpses of the larger political picture. Do you have plans to write more in this universe?

When I finished FAITH, I had an unexpected reaction: I closed the file on it and didn’t want to look at it any more. It certainly wasn’t because I’d turned against it – I enjoyed writing it, I put a lot into it, and I was proud of it. I asked my agent, Jason Yarn of Paradigm, if my reaction was unusual, and he said it wasn’t. He suggested it was because I felt I’d said everything I wanted to say about those people and that universe.

So the short answer is No, I don’t, for that reason. I’ve never been enthusiastic about sequels or prequels. But you’re not the first interviewer to ask that, and it’s flattering to know that FAITH’s universe worked well.

The book I’m writing at the moment is also SF, but very different, and deliberately so. It will be a kind of political thriller, but with strange edges. I set it in the future (about fifty years from now) so I could explore ideas about how politics, economics, technology, culture and religion might develop by then. And that’s why I love the SF genre. Whenever I get an idea for a book, I turn almost automatically to SF as the genre in which to express it. SF gives the freedom to explore and develop ideas. It’s not impossible in other genres, but it’s more possible in SF.
Thank you, Andrea, for your review, and for seeing so much of what I wanted my book to say.

Interview with Justin Landon Staffer's Musings

John Love interview with Justin Landon, Staffer’s Musings, January 14 2012

#1) Obviously, Moby Dick was a huge influence on Faith. Predominantly reflected in the relationship between Captain Foord and Faith. What is it about those themes, and symbols, that appealed to you in a classic SF setting?

In my bio notes for Nightshade I said that science fiction books are among the first I can remember reading, and they’ll probably be among the last. I love the genre, in all its forms. Whenever I have an idea for a book, SF is the automatic default option for expressing it. The genre gives more freedom to make philosophical or political points – and it makes for a good read. I’m currently writing a second novel, and again I turned automatically to SF as the best medium for saying what I want. It will be a kind of political thriller, but with strange edges. I set it in the future (about fifty years from now) so I can play with ideas about how politics, economics, technology, culture and religion could develop by then.

Moby Dick is a great novel on so many levels: a literary work, a page-turner, an examination of character, even a social commentary. It was a huge influence, but not the only one. FAITH was pitched as a mixture of some of the elements of Moby Dick and Kafka. Kafka’s elements are as important as Melville’s in the book; and there are other things as well.

Can I quote from a post I did for Nightshade, in the Night Bazaar website?
“If FAITH has any political resonances, they’re at best oblique. But I hope it has some other resonances. About identity and free will: what makes us what we are, and what makes us what we do. About love and friendship: what forces bring us together, or keep us apart, and why we don’t recognise them. And about the absence of simple good and evil: the complexities which make each of them part of each other.”
Those are some of the other things I wanted to put in the book.

#2) In my review, I point out a kind of commentary on the Gene Roddenberry concept of SF. I felt like you clearly referenced it in the way you structured the Charles Manson, the deep characters on the bridge, and the faceless crew outside it. Is that something you were consciously doing?

Not really consciously. The only time I can remember thinking of possible Star Trek parallels, while I was writing FAITH, was when it occurred to me that some of the main characters on the Bridge of the Charles Manson had functions similar to those on the Bridge of the Enterprise: Pilot, Engineering, Weapons, Communications. And also that there was a Bridge. I considered trying to alter these things, but decided it would be too artificial. A warship like the Charles Manson would naturally have them. Also, the Charles Manson’s function, and the characters of those on the Bridge, were very different. The Charles Manson’s smaller size, cramped interior and almost totally absent crew were further differences. On the Enterprise there are frequent scenes of the main characters walking through wide corridors with other crew members, socialising in the canteen and holodeck, chatting in the elevator and so on. The Charles Manson doesn’t do any of that.

I can’t absolutely discount your suggestion of a possible dark satire of the Enterprise, but it wasn’t a conscious intention.

#3) I got a bit of chuckle out Patrick Stewart of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame playing Ahab in a Moby Dick film. Is it possible that film is what incubated the idea for you?

I’d like to say yes because it’s such a nice sideways leap, but I’ve never seen that film. I’ve always thought that the 1956 movie, with Gregory Peck as Ahab, is the definitive version. I’ve never really wanted to see any others.

Patrick Stewart’s a great actor, though. He was wonderful as Jean-Luc Picard, and I’ve seen him on stage in London in Shakespearean roles and in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. But his Moby Dick movie wasn’t on my radar.

#4) I’ve already heard some rumblings from the hard SF fans that your physics are fuzzy. When you set out to write a SF novel, how much time did you spend trying to get that stuff right?

#5) Is it a little intimidating writing this kind of novel given that science isn’t in your background (at least I don’t think it is)?

(I’ll try to answer 4 and 5 together, if that’s OK.) Science isn’t entirely out of my background. I went to Keele University in the English Midlands. At the time I was there (it’s changed now) the degree course lasted four years, not three, and Keele required every degree to cover a mix of subjects from the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Sciences. My main subjects were English Literature and Politics, and my subsidiary subjects included Chemistry and Geology. So science wasn’t my major area, but it wasn’t absent either.

In a way I hope my physics are fuzzy. There are three good reasons for my not wanting to go into exhaustive detail on the physics:
1. I’m not a physicist: I couldn’t do it properly
2. It would be obsolete in a few years
3. It would clog up the narrative
4. The way I’d do it, it would be boring.
Four good reasons. I’m not a mathematician, either.

But again, here’s the wonder of the SF genre. If you have thoughts about how subjects will develop (not just science or technology, but politics or religion or virtually anything you’re interested in enough to have contemplated where it might be going) then an SF setting gives you the freedom to explore and play with those thoughts. It’s not impossible in other genres, but it’s more possible in SF.

So I don’t have a specialist scientific background, but I know enough about it to have contemplated where it might be going. I did science subjects as subsidiary parts of my degree, and over the years I’ve read some of the standard texts: Einstein, Hawking, Planck, Heisenberg, Newton (honestly! I made myself read all 500-plus pages of the Principia Mathematica). I’m an interested lay person or non-science person – interested enough to want to use my thoughts on it to illuminate a work of fiction, but cautious enough not to want to make it the reason for that work of fiction. It’s there for the book, but the book isn’t there for it.

#6) You set out to write some pretty despicable people. More and more, we’re starting to see the kinds of characters in both SF and fantasy. Why do you think this might be?

I didn’t set out, right from the start, to write some despicable characters. They sort of grew out of the demands of the story as I was writing.

I set out to describe a battle between two apparently invincible opponents. Two ships, one of human origin and one unknown, locked together in a battle so immense that it almost tears space-time around it: Irresistible Force meets Irresistible Force. For the “human” ship, the people inside it had to be seriously unusual to make them a serious match for the unknown ship which had defeated every other opponent. When I started thinking about how they might become so unusual, it took me down this path: back stories of social or political or sexual deviance, unusually gifted people who are also Outsiders, in the Albert Camus sense. That led me on to some other things which helped thicken the consistency of the book’s universe: how these people were identified and recruited, how their ships were built and named, how the regular military regarded them, how the rest of humanity regarded them, and so on.

I can only speak for my book, of course. Those characters are there because the story demanded them.

#7) They certainly felt authentic to me. Did you much research into psychological disorders to prepare to write these kinds of characters? Was it difficult to accurately represent them?

I did some reading (I wouldn’t call it research) on psychological conditions while I was writing the book, not before – because, as I said just now, their characters kind of grew out of the demands of the story. I enjoyed creating them, because they seemed to strike sparks off each other. I’d expected it to be difficult to represent them, but the natural chemistry between them made it less difficult. At times I felt they were writing their own dialogue!

#8) Faith, I think, reflects a deep seeded interest in philosophy and metaphysics. While I recognize the presence of it in the novel, it’s not a strong suit of mine. Is there a particular philosopher that you reference in the novel that might provide your readers with some more context?

Like science subjects, philosophy formed a subsidiary part of my University degree (it was a subset of one of my two main subjects, Politics). Also, like science subjects, it was something I continued reading after University.

I wanted FAITH to have a philosophical dimension as well as action sequences. The philosophical dimension was something I wanted as a looming sense of menace. I didn’t have any particular philosopher in mind, but with hindsight maybe I was thinking of Marx’s economic forces or Darwin’s Natural Selection: an overarching, faceless force, but morally enigmatic. I tried to avoid a simple clash of good and evil.

Like the characters on the Bridge, I wanted the philosophy and action sequences to be increasingly strange – to strike sparks off each other, and illuminate each other in the process.

#9) Do you have a book deal in place in the UK yet?

Not yet, but I’m hoping the book will do well enough Over There to attract some interest Over Here. I’d love to see someone reading it on a train, or browsing it in a bookshop’s SF department. We British tend not to speak to each other unless we’re introduced, but I’d find it impossible not to start a conversation!

#10) Thanks for joining me John. And sorry about the lack of softballs.

Thank you too, Justin – for your review, for your interest in the book, and for seeing so much of what I wanted it to say.

—
Justin Landon
Staffer’s Musings
@jdiddyesquire

Interview My Bookish Ways

John Love interview with My Bookish Ways, February 24 2015

I’ve heard great things about Evensong. What inspired you to write it?
It was quite an unusual process, and it’s nice to find someone who I haven’t already regaled (or bored) with it.
My wife and I went to an Evensong service in Rochester Cathedral in Kent. It was a beautiful summer evening and afterwards everybody went out into the Cathedral precincts where some tables had been set out for coffee. Halfway through my coffee I had this idea of a similar setting, where an unidentified woman comes to the Evensong service but doesn’t stop for coffee afterwards. She hurries away. She’s been to several previous Evensongs and has always hurried away afterwards, avoiding eye contact or indeed any other contact. Who she is, and why she comes there, is her back story which begins nearly a year earlier.
What is so unusual is that I’d got the whole of her back story, and the whole construction of the book, in less time than it took to swallow a mouthful of coffee. There was no blinding flash or feeling of revelation, but the whole book had sprung out fully formed – main plot, sub-plots, main characters, minor characters, settings, everything. I could see it in three dimensions, could (metaphorically) walk round it and study it from every angle, and it worked. It all hung together.
When I came to write it there was nothing major, and almost nothing minor, which was changed.
Will you tell us a bit about your future world in Evensong?

I love the SF genre. Whenever I have an idea for a book, SF is the automatic default option for expressing it. The genre gives more freedom to make philosophical or political points – to project features of the present on to the future – and it makes for a good read. It’s not impossible to do this in other genres, but it’s more possible in SF.

Some of the reviews and reader responses have described Evensong’s universe as being dark and twisted, which I wouldn’t deny. But it’s not entirely dark and twisted. Some interesting technologies have started to answer (not completely, but partially) the questions of long-term clean energy supply. And fundamentalism, both religious and political, has been marginalised – again, not completely, but partially. The book’s universe is ambiguous and menacing, but there are also the elements of a kind of Enlightenment springing up here and there. I was tempted to go down that road a bit more, but I decided it would be outside the scope of the book.
What do you think makes Anwar Abbas a compelling character?

What made him interesting to me when I was writing him were his apparently contradictory qualities: he’s deadly but also vulnerable and obsessive. He has limited social skills and few friends, and perhaps to compensate he’s developed an interior life full of private routines and private jokes, and the (ultimately delusional) belief in his self-sufficiency.

Or, as a couple of the other characters put it, he’s got his head up his ass.
Did you do any particular research for the book?

I did some research into possible future sustainable energy sources and their attendant technologies. Room-temperature semiconductors. Linear induction coils,water rights, Congo, Congolese music. Evensong services. UN summit procedures and communique wordings.

There were some other subjects with which I was already familiar, because I like Boys’ Toys: possible electric propulsion systems for high-performance cars, VSTOL aircraft, MagLev trains, future architecture and building techniques.

And some other subjects which feature in the book purely as a personal indulgence because I like them, and because they added a certain quirkiness: Doctor Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, Brighton and its Royal Pavilion.
You have a background in the music industry, but have you always wanted to write? Will you tell us a little about that progression?

The actual writing of Faith (my first novel) took about fifteen months, but I’d had the idea in my head for a few years before that. My job in the music industry (I was Managing Director of PPL, the world’s largest record industry copyright organisation) meant I never properly sat down to write it until after I retired. Before then, it existed as disconnected scraps of dog-eared paper. I’ve kept some of them, for sentimental reasons.

I’ve always liked writing, the putting together of words, marshalling and organising them to make a point or deliver a message or argument. My work involved a lot of writing, usually legal documents in furtherance of large precedental legal cases where millions in royalties were at stake, or business documents in support of large commercial negotiations. I always knew I could put words together for those purposes, but I wanted to find out whether I could do the other things needed to write a novel: characterisation, pacing, description, and so on.

In retrospect I often wonder if I let my work intrude for too long. Maybe I should have tried writing novels before I actually did. I don’t know whether I’d have got them published, though. They’d probably have been quite different.
What do you like to see in a good book? Is there anything that will make you put a book down, unfinished?

Almost nothing would make me put a book down unfinished. Even if I hate it, I have to finish it so I can know exactly why. What I hate most is if I get the impression that the author isn’t trying to communicate with, or engage, the reader: that he/she is performing some intellectual exercise to which the reader is only admitted, condescendingly, as a guest.

I like any book that manages to be both literature and a page-turner. Crime and Punishment, for example, works equally well as serious literature about Life, The Universe And Everything, and as a whodunnit. Except that the person who dunnit is known at the outset and has a cat-and-mouse game with the equally clever examining magistrate, wanting both escape and capture.

More modern examples would be David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, William Boyd’s Brazzaville Beach, Thomas Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.
What authors have inspired you the most?

Apologies in advance: this will be quite a long answer. It’s a question I often get asked, so I’ve got a long list to which I’m constantly adding.

Hitchhiker’s Guide is one of my SF favourites, in all its early forms: the original BBC Radio 4 programme, the equally original BBC TV adaptation, and Douglas Adams’ marvellous “Trilogy of Five Novels.”

Some other SF favourites are:
Alfred Bester: his novels and stories from the fifties.
Ursula LeGuin: almost anything of hers.
Jack Vance: the Demon Princes novels especially (most of his others too, but sometimes he goes on autopilot).
Iain M Banks: almost anything of his.
Brian Aldiss: Hothouse and the Helliconia trilogy especially, but most of his other stuff.
William Gibson: especially Neuromancer, also The Difference Engine and the Bridge trilogy.
Fritz Leiber: most of his stuff.
Frederik Pohl: The Heechee trilogy, and (with Cyril Kornbluth) The Space Merchants.
R A Lafferty: especially Past Master.
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: almost anything of theirs.
Stanislav Lem: known mainly for Solaris, but his output covered a huge range, and I like almost all of it.

Non-SF favourites include:
Giant nineteenth-century novels, especially from England, Russia and France. Great literary works, and great page-turners.
Jane Austen: How did she do it? No sex or violence, mostly just people having tea, but totally unputdownable.
Metaphysical poets: neutron-star language: ultimate concentration of meaning.
World War 1 poets, especially Wilfred Owen.
James Joyce, especially Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses.
Doctor Johnson: he was a great bear of a man, a pompous High Tory and High Church figure with opinions on everything – always original and sometimes unexpected, like his opposition to slavery. And he liked cats.
Herman Melville: Moby Dick of course, but also Billy Budd and Bartleby The Scrivener.
Jack London.
Richmal Crompton’s William books: children’s books mostly set in the nineteen-thirties and forties. Great children’s books, because Richmal Crompton used unashamedly literary words whose meaning you could figure out by their context. A good way to learn and remember words. Her style was dry and ironic, with absolutely no talking down.
Shakespeare, for all the obvious reasons, and also some of his contemporaries: Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe.
Chaucer, for his characterisation.
Cormac McCarthy: everything of his that I’ve read so far.
Elizabeth Bowen: her stories exist on the tipping-point between the everyday and the mysterious. Her famous story The Demon Lover is only six pages long, but hints at immensities.
If you could experience one book again for the first time, which one would it be?

Probably King Lear. Or Crime and Punishment.

What are you currently reading?

I’ve just finished reading a review copy of Cash Crash Jubilee, by Eli K P William. Skyhorse asked me to read it and supply a cover blurb if I liked it. They sent it to me because of my career in the music industry, which was intimately involved with intellectual property, and Cash Crash Jubilee is about just that – about how, in the future, technology could enable a sort of all-pervading consumerism to develop where every daily action, even something like sighing or blinking, can be made into intellectual property which is appropriated by shadowy mega-corporations who licence it commercially. The premise is both ridiculous and horrifying, and I’m not sure if it’s a satire or a thriller, but it works brilliantly as either. It’s his first novel and it’s due out later this year.

Before that I read two books whose themes are very similar though they’re as different as any two books could possibly be: The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, and The Player of Games by Iain M Banks. They start out from a similar premise: a far-distant future where society is obsessed with proficiency at game-playing, and where the game (whose rules are never explained by the author, and are almost irrelevant) becomes a metaphor for society and real life. The Glass Bead Game (which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1942) is slow-moving, cerebral, subtle and oddly compelling, with an absence of sex and violence. The Player of Games is a Culture novel, and has some of those qualities but definitely not the absence of sex and violence. I’d read both novels before but I wanted to re-read them concurrently to compare how two great authors can start from a similar point and arrive at such different destinations.
What’s next for you?

I’m writing a fantasy novel. It doesn’t have any orcs, elves, dragons, sorcerers or dark malign gods, only people. But “fantasy” is probably the most convenient shorthand description because it’s set in a completely imaginary world at the same approximate level of development as ancient Greece or Rome. It even has a map.

Interview Sally Janin Qwillery 1

John Love interview with Sally Janin, The Qwillery, January 25 2012

TQ: What would you say is your most interesting writing quirk?
Rather grandly, I used to tell people that I preferrred writing key passages with pen on paper first: the texture of the paper, the feel of the nib, and so on. Like a real auteur. Pretty soon into writing FAITH, all that got thrown out. Word lets me put key phrases at odd positions, then fill in the gaps, until the whole moves into focus. More impressionist than linear.
And I like some malt whisky, and a cat, within easy reach.

TQ: Who are some of your favorite writers? Who do you feel has influenced your writing?
Hitchhiker’s Guide is one of my SF favourites, in all its early forms: the original BBC Radio 4 programme, the equally original BBC TV adaptation, and Douglas Adams’ unequalled “Trilogy of Five Novels.” But not the Hollywood movie. I didn’t like that at all.
Some other SF favourites are:
Alfred Bester: his novels and stories from the fifties.
Ursula LeGuin: almost anything of hers.
Jack Vance: the Demon Princes novels especially (most of his others too, but sometimes he goes on autopilot).
Iain M Banks: almost anything of his.
China Mieville: Perdido Street Station especially, but most of his other stuff.
Brian Aldiss: Hothouse and the Helliconia trilogy especially, but most of his other stuff.
William Gibson: especially Neuromancer, also The Difference Engine and the Bridge trilogy.
Fritz Leiber: most of his stuff.
Frederik Pohl: The Heechee trilogy, and (with Cyril Kornbluth) The Space Merchants.
R A Lafferty: especially Past Master.
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: almost anything of theirs.
Stanislav Lem: known mainly for Solaris, but his output covered a huge range. For example, Imaginary Magnitude and A Perfect Vacuum (reviews of, and forewords to, nonexistent future books); the Pirx the Pilot and Ijon Tichy stories (surreal but perfectly logical political satires); Cyberiad and Futurological Congress (more satires, almost Swiftian); and The Invincible (page-turning hard SF).

Non-SF favourites include:
Giant nineteenth-century novels, especially from England, Russia and France. Great literary works, and great page-turners. Crime and Punishment, for example, works equally well as serious literature about Life, The Universe And Everything, and as a whodunnit. Except that the person who dunnit is known at the outset and has a cat-and-mouse game with the equally clever examining magistrate, wanting both escape and capture.
Jane Austen: How did she do it? No sex or violence, mostly just people having tea, but totally unputdownable.
Metaphysical poets: neutron-star language: ultimate concentration of meaning.
World War 1 poets, especially Wilfred Owen.
James Joyce, especially Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses.
Doctor Johnson, or more precisely Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. Johnson was a great bear of a man, a pompous High Tory and High Church figure with opinions on everything – always original and sometimes unexpected, like his opposition to slavery. And he liked cats.
Herman Melville: Moby Dick of course, but also Billy Budd and Bartleby The Scrivener.
Richmal Crompton’s William books: children’s books mostly set in the nineteen-thirties and forties. Great children’s books, because Richmal Crompton used unashamedly literary words whose meaning you could figure out by their context. A good way to learn and remember words. Her style was dry and ironic, with absolutely no talking down.
Shakespeare, for all the obvious reasons, and also some of his contemporaries: Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe.
Chaucer, for his characterisation.
Cormac McCarthy: everything of his that I’ve read so far.
Elizabeth Bowen: her stories exist on the tipping-point between the everyday and the mysterious. Her famous story The Demon Lover is only six pages long, but hints at immensities.
Flann O’Brien: The Third Policeman (like Gormenghast, it defies genres).
Any books which manage to be both literary works and page-turners: too many for an exhaustive list, but titles like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, William Boyd’s Brazzaville Beach, Thomas Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. The book I’m currently reading is that kind of book: The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I’m alternating it with The Windup Girl. I like alternating reads: each one seems to gain by the contrast.

TQ: Are you a plotter or a pantser?
Boring answer, but a bit of both. I only have experience of one-and-a-bit novels so far – FAITH, and the one I’m currently writing – but it’s been the same both times. The overall idea comes almost fully-formed and is not altered, but details of plotting, characters, back-stories and so on, can alter radically as I’m writing.
A bit like building a three-dimensional engineering construction: while writing I might have an idea for a back-story or a character-trait which strengthens the construction like a strut, passing through it three-dimensionally and reinforcing every bit it touches.

TQ: What is the most challenging thing for you about writing?
I’m always asking, Is this page enough to make a reader want to turn to the next page?

TQ: Describe Faith in 140 characters or less.
Motiveless, invincible alien ship. Almost-alien human opponent. Moby Dick meets Kafka meets Duel. Irresistible force meets irresistible force.

TQ: What inspired you to write Faith?
Moby Dick, with the meeting of two titanic opponents. The movie Duel, because one opponent is unknown and unknowable. Kafka, for the sense of looming menace and the idea of struggling against a world where normal laws are inverted, where water flows uphill.
And I wanted to try writing a novel with a mix of “literary” and action content. But with no simple good and evil: where one bleeds into the other.

TQ: What sort of research did you do for Faith?
I’ve always liked reading authors like Stephen Hawking to get an idea of how physics might develop new views of the universe – the clockwork of Newton, the apparent chaos of Einstein, the apparent illogic of quantum mechanics – and playing with ideas of what might come next.
Similarly, I’ve always read up on Boys’ Toys like spaceships and cars, and played with ideas of where they might go next.
So I had a headstart for a lot of the research into those areas, but while writing the book I also did some reading on psychological conditions. I didn’t do that before, because it was only as the characters developed and started striking sparks off each other that I realised there was a need for it. None of the characters are exactly nice or conventional.

TQ: Who was the easiest character to write and why? Hardest and why?
An uncomfortably good question. Foord was the easiest, possibly Thahl the hardest.
Foord because he was central to the book and so I’d had him in mind for longer. Thahl because he is genuinely nonhuman but had to have some features which would enable him to relate to the humans around him. Also there was a need to balance his capacity for violence with his gentle sense of irony, and to balance his (partial) ability to sense human feelings with his inability to understand human sexual dynamics.

TQ: Without giving anything away, what is/are your favorite scene(s) in Faith?
The opening scene, and the courtroom scene, for similar reasons: to balance an info dump with action sequences (opening scene) and to balance another info dump with characters and politics (courtroom scene). Also, the courtroom scene reminded me (in the assembling of arguments, and the cut and thrust of cross-examination) of things I used to do in the music industry – fighting legal cases in an abstruse area (copyright) which still had huge financial and precedental risks.
And the last scenes: the challenge to balance increasing strangeness with the need to keep the reader turning the page.

TQ: What’s next? /this is where you share anything you’d like/
I love this genre. I’m currently writing a second novel, and again I turned automatically to SF as the best medium for saying what I want. It will be a kind of political thriller, but with strange edges. I set it in the future (about fifty years from now) so I can play with ideas about how politics, economics, technology, culture and religion could develop by then.
TQ: Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.
Thank you, Sally. And thank you for your interest in my book.

Interview Sally Janin Qwillery 2