John Dickinson

I was sharing a corner of the RHCB Christmas Party with the writer John Dougherty, sheltering from exploding glasses and from the crowds of other writers whose books I ought to have read but hadn’t. We’d got as far as agreeing that today’s young readers preferred stories that were much more pacey and quickfire than the ones we had enjoyed in our childhoods. Therefore, I said, I ought not to worry if the stuff that I’m writing seemed to me rather hurried. It was what today’s child wanted, wasn’t it?

John wouldn’t go so far. It might be what they wanted, but that didn’t mean we should always be writing it. He recalled studies on the effects of shortening attention spans on children’s intellectual development. There was a trend here to be resisted. It was good for children to read stories that demanded concentration.

Well, yes, I said. But won’t they need to hop quickly from subject to subject? Many working environments are fast, multi-tasking places. Think of your average office. I swear that the hours I had spent shooting down space invaders were just as much help to me when I was an office worker as any amount of time I had put into carefully-researched essays on medieval history.

Ah, said John. But… And he talked about further studies which showed that the butterfly mind does less well in a multi-tasking environment than the mind that is a focused beam. John is a former teacher who thinks deeply about the relationship between teaching and writing. And there’s a time when even I give up arguing with people who know more than I do. Especially when I’m in a room with a hundred other people and am having to shout to make myself heard.

Writers are entertainers, not teachers. Even more than teachers, they part from their audience at their peril. But the best stories should be about more than entertainment. They affect the way we think. They give us models to follow and ways of understanding the world. A story-teller who is not, at some level, saying to the audience I want you to think about this is an empty vessel. If the story teller is good, maybe they will listen. But is the thought a good one? The usual test is ‘do enough of us (adults) agree with it?’ Yet no one can really be sure. Whole generations can be wrong. Or at least, they can fail to see how the world is changing.

So. WE has been nominated for the Carnegie medal. Hurrah for all librarians everywhere. Let us, however, keep a tight hold on our expectations, because between them the members of CILIP have nominated nearly sixty books this year. The panel will have quite a lot of reading to do, it seems.

Let’s not get above ourselves either. Yes, it’s an honour even to be nominated and I am grateful. But I can’t duck the comparison here. My father has won the Carnegie twice.

He used to tell us stories in the car, to keep us quiet during long journeys. I remember one in particular, which later became his novel Giant Cold. It begins with a child dreaming that her father has risen from his bed during a stormy night and walked naked out of the house, and in the lightning flashes he seems twice the height of a man. And when she wakes she finds his bed is empty, and so is the house, and outside the door a line of footprints lead away over the fields.

She goes out and follows the prints. They are larger than a man’s. The marks of all five toes are clear, and in the bottom water has collected and turned to ice. And as she follows them they get larger, and further apart, as if the man who made them was growing even as he walked. Soon they are huge. The child is running for a hundred yards between each one and the next, and all the grass and forest around them is blasted with frost. And he is gone far out of sight, leaving only the marks of his passage and the child hurrying in his wake.

It is a tremendous opening, nightmarish and powerful, sprung from the darkness of subconscious where our insecurities dwell. Maybe he dreamed it himself. Maybe he just picked it up somewhere on the endless, mental beachcombing for ideas that all writers know. I should pray for more flashes of inspiration like that myself. Oh yes, and the craft to turn them into a story too. The footprints point. That way. And the child follows - on very, very little legs.

It’s happened again!

Someone’s put my book in the wrong age category. This could take forever to sort out. You’d think a single phone call would do it, but no. You call someone and they talk to someone and they tell someone else, and by the time the buttons are pressed up at Book Control Central the answer you get can be worse than the one you started with. And out in the shops the book is on the wrong shelves. If it’s made it to the shelves at all.

Categorising by age is fraught with problems. The categories are simple things: 9-12, teenage, adult etc. But the mind is not simple. It can reach in all directions. My daughter loves Jane Eyre and has read Camus and Primo Levi. But in the same month she was reading Camus she was also reading Tamora Pierce’s teenage fantasy-heroine fiction, and she was loving that too. And adults loved Harry Potter, didn’t they?

Books aren’t simple either. A rollicking child adventure story can work at profoundly different levels. So how do you categorise it? There may be no more misleading term in literature than the words ‘Children’s Fiction’.

We have to have age categories. Most authors are simply not well-enough known for their work to reach their intended audiences without some guidance. So this author does not fall down and start tearing up the carpet with his teeth just because someone might put an age-label on his book. What he objects to is getting an age-label that’s wrong.

My fantasy novels are aimed both at teenagers who like to think as they read, and at adults who loved The Lord of the Rings and who have never lost that. I don’t mind these books being categorised as teenage novels (although I would prefer to see them on the mainstream fantasy shelves, because teenagers do look there for their reading, whereas it’s a rare adult who goes browsing on the teenage shelves). But I did protest when I found them in the 9-12 category. It took months and months to get that changed.

WE is definitely mainstream science fiction. Never mind that the editor is known as a publisher of children’s fiction: that’s what it is. The hero is adult, the theme is dystopian, there is little zap-kapow and the young love quotient is nil. Sure teenagers will read it and like it for what it is, but I don’t want them misled about what they’re getting. And I want the book to be where adults will find it. When I heard that it was being put on the children’s shelves, I objected. So did my editor. Calls were made. The coding was changed, I was assured, within days of my protest. Hurrah! Maybe we’ve learned something.

Except that I was in a local Waterstones on Friday. I was waving WE’s Times, Guardian and other reviews under the nose of the counter staff. Yes, said the counter staff on duty (a polite and intelligent young man called George,) they did have the book in stock. Great. And, er, what category was it under?

George checked his screen. Nine to twelve, he said.

Sounds of teeth in carpet.

Here’s another question I hear a lot. ‘What kinds of books do you write?’

Fair enough. The guy says he’s an author. So what kind of author is he? I say – ‘Well, three of them are fantasy novels…’ And my questioner nods. They know now what kind of author I am.

Except that I then say ’… and one’s a historical novel…’. And while they’re thinking about that , I add ‘…and I’ve just published one that’s science fiction.’ And maybe I will also explain that while the fantasy novels were marketed for teenagers, the historical one is definitely for adults and WE, the SF novel is, er… for both, maybe.

At this point I’m usually getting a reaction along the lines of ‘How come you do so many different things?’ And my answer is that I don’t think they are different.

Well - not that different.

There is a problem with labels like ‘Fantasy’, ‘History’, ‘Children’s book’ etc. We have to have them. If we didn’t, we couldn’t begin to distinguish between books at all. But they quickly become misleading. Fantasy and Science Fiction blur easily into one another (Are Anne McAffrey’s dragons fantasy or SF?). So do Fantasy and History. My interest in medieval history, which I ended up studying at university, began with The Lord of the Rings. And the word ‘Children’s’ is the most misleading of all. Compare the intellectual content of The Dark Materials with that of your standard formulaic thriller that flies off supermarket shelves in thousands, for example.

If you look at my books, the covers will tell you that they are all completely different. They will say ‘Fantasy’, ‘History’ and ‘Science Fiction’. That’s marketing, and it works. But if you read them…

Ah. If you read them…

In each one, the central character makes some kind of moral or spiritual journey. It involves suffering, duty, maybe sacrifice, and in the end leads to a greater understanding. That, I think, is common to all of them.

On that journey there is usually an encounter with the devil, in some form. It is not an actual encounter. It is metaphorical or symbolic. It’s about thinking thoughts or hearing words that will lead you into darkness.

And what are the paths of escape? Well, love may be one. Sacrifice is certainly one. Perhaps just a greater understanding of yourself and your own weakness. On this journey the way to the devil is easy. It’s finding the path back that matters.

I write in different settings and with different voices. That’s important for freshness. It’s a rare author who can do the same thing for book after book without losing quality (never mind that that’s what the public and the marketing department want him to do). But it seems to me that I’m writing about the same thing, like an artist walking around an object and sketching it from different angles. One view can’t capture the whole. Maybe no number of separate views will.

But if I ever did feel I had captured it?

Sure. I’d go and write something different.

Snow has hit Britain in the very week in which my novel about an extremely cold place is officially published. Can I be sure it is not my doing?

Well, yes probably I can. But sometimes novels do seem eerily prescient of events in the real world. My father’s bookThe Poison Oracle (1974) involves the hijack of a Japanese airliner. I remember how awed we were when, a few months after publication, a real Japanese airliner was indeed hijacked. I’m sure many other authors have similar stories. And when disasters happen that they’ve already imagined in their books, they feel uncomfortably like Bruce Almighty and probably want to go and hide under their beds. But it’s only to be expected. It’s an author’s job to think of things that might happen. It would be extraordinary if some of them didn’t.

The invention of something like the World Ear wouldn’t be extraordinary at all. It’s not hard to look at the current state of technology and draw a few lines into the future. Some corporation somewhere may already be working on it. Indeed there was a moment this autumn when there was a spate of news stories about experiments in getting a computer to read thoughts, and I started to fear that my ideas about how the World Ear would work were going to be obsolete even before the book was published. But we’ve a way to go before that kind of machine-assisted telepathy becomes real.

Meanwhile the weather outside is very definitely real. Snow falls like fireworks from branches in the sun. Ice and slush compete to cover the roads. The schools are shut and Pippa hasn’t been getting into work either. Four of us have shared the house all week. And although the boiler, thank God, has been mended after its breakdown, we’ve had something almost as catastrophic happen instead. The study computer has developed a power problem.

The captain has gathered all hands on the bridge. “The situation is grave,” he says. “There are four of us, and only one working computer.” A deathly silence follows his words. We all know what this means. Ready access to a computer is essential for the happiness of each and every one of us - except for Pippa, who just needs it because she’s working from home. We’re talking rationing here. We’re talking about children hovering hopefully at our elbows as we type, just in case we’re about to get up from our place and make a cup of tea (in which case Vrooom! Child in seat, and not to be dislodged even by the pouring of hot tea down the back of their neck.) These days everything worth having comes to us through a screen, it seems.

I don’t think the World Ear is far away at all.

‘They made the wrong choice,’ said one of my early readers of WE. She is a highly intelligent and strong-willed person, and I know why she said it. I’m sure that if she had been in the same position as my characters at the end of the novel, she would have gone in a different direction.

A certain amount happens in this story. There is dispute, physical danger and shocking discovery. But it’s primarily a psychological novel, and the climax is a moment of choice. If you are confronted with an overwhelmingly collective society – the WE – and it threatens to absorb you, what do you do?

The character called Lewis wants to preserve freedom at whatever cost. He wants to establish his own society, based on liberal principles, no matter how poor or difficult life is going to be outside the society he is trying to escape. He wants this to be a Mayflower story. Mayflower-type stories are powerful. They crop up again and again in story-telling. In science fiction they may get blended with the Adam and Eve myth, as the small band of colonists arrive on a pristine new world.

To the character called Erin the WE is even more horrifying than it is to Lewis. It means the death of her free will, and without free will no relationship with God is possible. Her response to the dilemma is prayer. But it’s not a response that the others can share, and therefore it is not decisive. Even an idea as powerful as God is powerless if held by only one person.

Paul, who chooses with them, is a child of the WE. And May has a child of her own coming, and must choose for two.

In the end the story is about whether there is any point being on your own. It’s about what you do when everyone else has gone off in a direction you don’t agree with. How you decide what ‘we’ means, and when, and why. And – this is the thing about reading – when the characters make the choice, the readers may make it too. They are free to choose their own way.

The book starts with a massive idea about something that has happened on Earth to billions of people. But it’s set at the edge of the solar system and the cast numbers just four. This is a story about someone who travels from one extreme to another: about what he finds and what he learns.

What he finds is isolation. He is no longer part of the great “We” of Earth. He becomes an “I” instead, and it is not a social “I”. He becomes suspicious, paranoid, to the point where his fellow crew members have less meaning to him than a computer image of an ape-man and the thought of a dead colleague. It is a story about loneliness, and return from loneliness. That’s why it is set in the most remote and terrible place I could imagine.

The isolation of the setting is important. So is the cold which surrounds it – because cold is an image for death. And the cold gave me a lot more trouble than the isolation. It is easy to say to the reader “imagine you are so far away from Earth that the Sun looks like a star.” The mind can picture that and shudder. It is less easy to describe a cold far more intense than I or anyone else has ever experienced from themselves. I talk of frozen nitrogen and methane crystals, but to the reader that’s just another type of ice and another type of snow - no big deal. I wrote purple passages about how the astronauts were living on a tiny pinnacle of warmth while the temperatures plunged away into the abyss all around them – and I took it all out again, because it was all more laboured than it was worth. I can’t tell the reader what it would feel like to be exposed to a temperature of -240° Celsius, because anyone who was would simply freeze on the spot. (I did have a rather ghoulish conversation with an astronomer about what would happen to a human body that froze like that and was then dropped, however gently, onto a hard surface. Eeee. ) But, ay, I did my best. And the cold is there, I hope.

So there are the two extremes: the “We” and the “I”; the warm Earth and the frozen moon. And the question – can we find our place between them?

The book was written and the title chosen before my attention was drawn to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, published in English in 1924. I have only my ignorance to blame, for Zamyatin’s work is an important early dystopian novel, inspiring Orwell’s 1984 and influencing many others.

I did look for another title (Cold Eden seemed a possibility, although this again was not original.) But nothing else captured with such short, stark simplicity the theme I wanted to write about - the place of the individual in the larger group. So We it remains. I, too, owe a debt to the great Russian. And I don’t feel bad about that. Not with Orwell’s footprints before me on the road.

Orwell and Zamyatin wrote in the context of the early and mid-twentieth century, which saw the rise of powerful totalitarian states founded on the argument that “we” – the people as a whole – were far more important than “I” – meaning you, the individual. That “We” fed itself upon show trials, purges, mass murder, and war. Against it, the “I” had no appeal. It was terrifying. “If you want a picture of the future,” Orwell wrote in 1984, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.”

In the twenty-first century, those clouds have parted. The worst dictators are dead. Their armies are defeated or have rusted away. But the “we” is of course always with us. It has to be. We (ahem) would never achieve anything if we were only a collection of random “I”s. So where does the balance between “we” and “I” now lie, in our comfortable, liberal, if slightly bankrupt societies? And what seeds have we sown that could transform it?

Look at the screen on which this is written. Consider what lies behind it. All those connections, all that information.

Think about how you use it.

…And fast forward fifty years…

WE comes out in January. It’s my first science fiction novel, set not very far into the future – say the second half of this century, so that all the technology is still recognisable and plausible and hasn’t transformed into substitute magic. Inter-stellar travel is not possible. The action takes place on a tiny moon on the edge of the solar system, where gravity is one-tenth that of Earth and the average surface temperature is about forty degrees above absolute zero.

Just think about that for a moment.

The sky above the moon is dominated by a giant planet, as big as two fists held together at arm’s length. On Earth, you can cover the moon with the tip of a finger. The forces on that planet are massive – winds of hundreds of thousands of miles an hour, an ocean deep enough to drown the Earth and hot enough, at its lower levels, to poach it. But you can’t reach it and it can’t reach you. it’s just up there, looking down on you. The sun is so distant it appears to be the size of a bright star.

(All this is for real, by the way. The planet is based on Neptune and the moon on Triton, though I don’t use those names in the book.)

It takes years to get here. The costs are enormous. In the low gravity the human body sheds most of its weight-bearing muscle and the bones become brittle. Once here – do you ever think you’re going back? So why come here in the first place?

That’s what the novel is about.

A good blurb is like an elephant.

1) It’s rare.
2) You know it when you see it.
3) You need to be God to get it right.

How do you create, in a few short words, something that will make the reader pick this one novel from a thousand others? My editors and I have been batting the blurb for WE back and forth for weeks now. I’ve lost count of the number of versions we’ve gone through. Even our cover artist has had a go. It was quite a good one, I thought, but it did not find favour. Since then the wise man has retreated to a distance and let us get on with it.

We know what messages we are trying to get in. We have converged on a way of doing it. We agree that the first line should be a quote from the book. We have even agreed on a punchline. We just can’t get the rest of it right. Words that resonate to me seem to do nothing for others. They in turn write stuff that seems good to them, and when I see it I tear my hair and cry ‘How can this be?’ A few nights ago I had a revelation. I woke from a dream with my heart pounding, leapt to my computer and fired off the magic words at four-thirty in the morning. ‘There,’ I thought. ‘That’s how creation happens!’

My words fell into a well of silence. Round we went again. ‘Do you like this one?’ ‘ Well, not really . . .’ The most recent offering from my editor was prefaced ‘Hopefully final!’ I read it and reached for my sideburns.

But this time I am conceding something. This time I am working on someone else’s draft, rather than expecting someone else to work on mine.

This time, we may get somewhere.