Babel Clash

The universe of my novel Triumff existed in my head for about two decades before I got it into a printed form. It didn’t take that much longer to reach publication than my 40K books because the universe took so much more time to design, but the contrast is useful from the perspective of the jobbing writer. A key advantage of working in someone else’s universe is that it already exists. You climb aboard, you make a creative space for yourself, you benefit from (and, if you’re doing your job right, contribute to) the ongoing momentum. Coming out of nowhere twenty years ago, I’d probably have had great difficulty selling Triumff to anyone, and if I’d managed it, it would have probably have gone out so low key it would have vanished again. Twenty years later, with a track record and past credits, I was a better prospect. Triumff isn’t being sent out over the top on its own.

Oh, and this is a crucial thing: twenty years later, Triumff is a much better book.

Triumff has benefited from the time I’ve spent in other people’s universes, both in the evolution of my actual writing chops and the development of my ‘brand’ as an author writing different things with cross-appeal to overlapping audiences.

And that’s the last time I intend to talk like a marketing manager in this blog. These are the sort of things you probably want to consider less publicly, or maybe chat about with an agent (if you have one).

Let’s talk about Triumff some more, and make sausages again. I’d always loved Elizabethan England as a setting, and I wanted to work out a way to set a (light-hearted? maybe?) novel there. But I also wanted to find a way to be a little, how can I put it, post-modern with it. I wanted to be able to make arch comments. I wanted to be a little knowing. This also might be explained by the simple fact that I was too lazy to do such thorough research there wouldn’t be any anachronisms, but I don’t like to admit that.

The easiest way to do ‘post-modern Elizabethan’ was to create an Elizabethan Age in modern times. Once I was on the path of alternate history, I needed a trigger event: the Thing That Happened that changed history from the one we’re familiar with having lived through it. The trigger turned out to be magic. In the universe of Sir Rupert Triumff, the Renaissance rediscovered magic, not art. The great empire of Elizabeth the First capitalised on this ‘technology’, became the pre-eminent world power (Liz One married Phil of Spain for new World consolidation purposes) and the rest was (alternate) history.

I could, I know, talk about humour in Triumff, because that’s a key theme, but while I’m prepared to make figurative sausages and refer to myself as a ‘brand’ without irony, I cannot bring myself to do so. There really is nothing more painful than someone explaining the mechanism of his jokes. For a start, it involves him selecting the things he believes to be examples of genuine funny. Oh god, it makes me clench just thinking about it.

I will say this: I was chuckling when I wrote Triumff, in the same way that I chuckle when I write my long running Euro hitmen comic strip Sinister Dexter in 2000AD, and people have been kind enough to tell me both have made them laugh a great deal. If the humour (that I’m not talking about) in either one works, I believe it’s because it operates in relation to its world setting, and the world setting works. Twenty-First Century Elizabethan London (in Triumff) and the massive European supercity of Downlode (in Sinister Dexter) are both very real places, in my head, that I work hard to realise for the reader.

Triumff’s success (and it’s yet to go on sale in the US, so American readers have all that excitement to come) has meant that my third book for Angry Robot will be a sequel, named The Double Falsehood. In the meantime, my second book for Angry Robot will be called Embedded, and will play to my strengths as a writer of Combat SF or, to give it its technical literary term, ‘Shooty-death-kill In Space. More on that next post.

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