Parallax View (26 page)

In contrast to my quick breakthrough, you wrote for years before success came – I don’t think anyone could accuse you of succeeding too quickly. To anyone who doesn’t write, that kind of persistence might appear, er, obsessive... What kept you going?

EB: Well, er, obsession, in a word. And ignorance. I left school at fourteen when I emigrated to Australia with my family. I was a poor pupil, in the D stream of my year, a lazy dunce who couldn’t care less. All I was interested in was football. When I had the opportunity to leave school at fourteen and never go back, I grasped it with both hands. I’d never read a book to that point, and I think it was nostalgia for England that made me read
Cards on the Table
by Agatha Christie when my mother suggested I try it. That book, I can safely say, changed my life. For however many hours I was living in a different world, with a different perspective. It was pure escapism, and I loved it. I’ve been an obsessive reader – escaper – ever since. Within two days of reading the Christie, I was writing my own whodunit. From then on I knew I wanted to be a writer. Then I came across a collection of stories by Robert Silverberg,
Sundance
, and at the same time Wells’
War of the Worlds
– and I was converted. For the next ten years, four in Australia and six on my return to England, I locked myself away and wrote a couple of hundred short stories and more than twenty novels. It was pure, obsessive escapism. I
must
have thought that one day I might get something published, but at the back of my mind was the self-confidence thing, or rather the lack of: I was from a working class background with no education, so how the hell did I hope to become a writer? It got to the point where I’d put so much work in that I couldn’t stop. After ten years of non-stop writing (while doing factory work and other menial jobs) I took a year off and travelled around India, writing there, too, but non-fiction, descriptive pieces, impressions. I came back at the age of twenty-five and the liberating experience of travel around a country as vast and alien as India, combined with the technique I’d built up through writing so much garbage over the past decade, paid off. I began writing the short stories that eventually appeared in
Interzone
,
Other Edens
,
Zenith II
and elsewhere.

KB: That’s exactly the kind of background I always envied: so much material, so much exotic imagery to cut and paste into stories! I came from a comfortably middle class family, living in a very ordinary town and it took me a long time to realise what a rich source of material that background contained: a lot of my near-future SF leans on that background, a lot my horror stories are set in a twisted version of the seaside town where I grew up.

EB: What made you begin writing – how did you get your first break?

KB: Fear of accountancy played a large part. In the mid to late 80s just about any reasonably numerate graduate was pushed towards a career in accountancy and I drifted through the interviews, accepted a job offer... and then the shock struck home. What was I doing? Instead, I took a year out to write full-time. And so on the strength of two small press acceptances I became a full-time writer. As soon as I finished the first draft, I knew that the first story I wrote in that period was a significant step up from what I’d been writing before, and sure enough it sold to
Interzone
.

I started work on
Keepers of the Peace
and pretty soon I was hooked. As the stories started to sell, my ‘year out’ extended itself. The novel did the rounds and received some encouraging rejection letters. I came
so close
to abandoning it: the only publisher left on my list was Corgi, but they didn’t publish that kind of thing and I nearly didn’t bother trying them. But I did and Julia Smith plucked it out of her towering slush pile and showed it to Colin Murray and I started to hear through the grapevine that they were interested. In the meantime I’d written
Expatria
, and I heard at a convention that the slush reader at Gollancz had recommended it. So I appointed an agent – your agent – who worked out a three book deal between the two companies, with Gollancz to do the hardbacks and Corgi to do the paperbacks.

EB: And what are you working on at the moment?

KB: These days I have a very busy life! In addition to a demanding day job I run the infinity plus publishing imprint, putting out work by some fantastic genre writers. We’ve published some of your books, including two new short fiction collections,
The Angels of Life and Death
and
Ghostwriting
– for me, the latter includes some of your best work. We’ve published short fiction by Lisa Tuttle, Kit Reed and others; crime authors Iain Rowan and Kaitlin Queen; and a new short fiction collection,
Phoenix Man
, by Garry Kilworth, followed by print and ebook editions of his autobiography,
On My Way to Samarkand
.

On the writing side, I’ve been busy too, with two books out in 2012. First out was a book I edited for academic publishers Palgrave MacMillan,
Strange Divisions and Alien Territories: the sub-genres of science fiction
. This was a lovely book to do, something that came out of an undergraduate course I taught at my local university called ‘Understanding and Writing Science Fiction’. For this one I simply ( I say ‘simply’: editing a book is never as simple as it would appear) invited a dozen top SF authors to write a chapter each on a sub-genre close to their heart, covering that sub-genre’s history, key works and the challenges facing a writer working in that area today. The idea was to produce a book that was serious enough to be used academically, but written accessibly enough to reach a more general audience, with enough writerly perspective to be of interest to aspiring and developing writers.

Later in 2012, my novel
alt.human
(published under the title
Harmony
in the USA and Canada) was published by Solaris. After 25 years as an SF writer, I figured it was about time I looked at one of the big sub-genres I’d always shied away from: aliens. My challenge was that when I’ve tried writing aliens before I’ve found it difficult to sustain my own suspension of disbelief: how do you write something truly alien that is both convincing and yet still accessible to human readers?
alt.human
was my attempt, and it’s a book I’m very proud of.

You’ve been quite productive lately, too, haven’t you?

EB: I’ve published around seven or eight books in the past couple of years. The best of the bunch is one that I wrote, on and off, for a decade –
The Kings of Eternity
. I thinks it’s the finest thing I’ve ever done – it’s certainly the book I’m most fond of. It tells the tale of an isolated, embittered writer on an island in contemporary Greece, and recounts the adventures of three friends in 1930s England. It’s part scientific romance, love story, mystery...

Other books include
The Guardians of the Phoenix
, a post-apocalyptic adventure – quite violent, for me, but which is redemptive – and
Helix Wars
, a follow up to my ‘best-selling’ action-adventure
Helix
. The next one is
The Serene Invasion
, a return to Quiet SF – about what happens when aliens come to Earth and change humankind for the better. I also published the first of a shared-world series I created for Abaddon Books, Weird Space; the novel is
The Devil’s Nebula
and it’s an unashamed action space opera of the kind I still love to read. And next year PS Publishing bring out the collected starship novellas in one volume, entitled
Starship Seasons
– a book I’m delighted with.

KB: I know we have broadly similar tastes in SF, but who were your early influences, and who are you reading these days in the genre?

EB: Silverberg was a big influence when I was younger. I began reading him when I was fifteen, devoured all his early stuff and loved it –
The Master of Life and Death, The Seed of Earth, Collision Course
, all great adventures. Then I came across his masterpieces,
Dying Inside, Thorns, Son of Man
... novels surely among the finest SF ever written. I like Michael Coney’s books, especially
Hello Summer, Goodbye
and
The Girl with a Symphony in her Fingers
. These days I’m reading Jack Vance, Richard Paul Russo, Robert Charles Wilson. His
The Harvest
is tremendous. What about you? I know you write regular book reviews... Do you get to read much for pleasure?

KB: Not nearly as much as I’d like, unfortunately. My favourite science-fiction writers include Kim Stanley Robinson, Ian McDonald and Robert Charles Wilson. And, like you, I’d rate Silverberg’s
Dying Inside
as one of the finest novels of all time. When I find the time, my pleasure reading tends to fall outside SF, just for a change from the genre fiction I review; I’m a great fan of Ian McEwan, Graham Greene and William Boyd.

In fact, one of my biggest problems at the moment is simply not having enough time to fit everything in. I’m editing several books, writing reviews, and juggling all kinds of story drafts and ideas around. As I say, I have a demanding day job; I have four pretty much grown-up kids; I just got married this year to the gorgeous Debbie. I have a very full, and busy, life, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And on that note: enough. Thanks for talking.

(This double interview first appeared in
Interzone
145, July 1999, and has been extensively updated for inclusion in this book. Our thanks to editor David Pringle for permission to use it here.)