TRICIA SULLIVAN

SF’s comeback kid tells us how she revived her career

The author of Dreaming In Smoke returns to the SF fray with her latest novel, about a woman who can hack your mind while you snooze. Are Sweet Dreams really made of this?

There are times when writing careers don’t quite go as planned. Between 2010 and 2014, Tricia Sullivan, despite having won the 1999 Arthur C Clarke Award for Dreaming In Smoke, was out of contract. It would be 2016 before Gollancz would publish her book, Occupy Me. So what happened? “Most of this delay is down to the fact that I was spending most of my time studying for a physics degree,” Sullivan says, “but I’d started the physics degree in part because after 10 novels I still had no commercial traction.” Just in case there’s any room for misinterpretation here, Sullivan adds: “This failure to move units made me a risky prospect for any publisher.”

This seems to be changing. One of the things about a writer spending time away from the publishing fray is that, with luck, everyone remembers just how good you are. That certainly seemed to happen with Sullivan’s Occupy Me, an eerie high-concept future thriller that garnered her a third appearance on the Clarke shortlist.

study break

A little over 18 months later and, after novelistic famine, feast as Sullivan’s new novel Sweet Dreams hits stores. As Sullivan tells it, it was a book that began life as a distraction when studying for her degree was especially tough.

“I would do two-three hours of problems in the morning and another couple of hours every afternoon, and then some more reading in the evening,” she says. “It was really hard and there were long stretches where I couldn’t work on Occupy Me because I didn’t have the brainpower. But every day I’d go to pick up my eldest at high school. I’d get there early, sometimes to fit in a run, but sometimes I’d be sitting waiting for him. I got in the habit of messing around in longhand just to amuse myself. It was an escape.”

The result is Sweet Dreams, which tells the story of Charlie, a “young, down-at-heel psychology graduate who contracts an experimental nanotech infection for cash” and finds she can “enter others’ dreams” because of a side effect. Charlie tries to use her gift to help people, but not everyone is so scrupulous, which, deadpans Sullivan, “is why we can’t have nice things”.

While writing, Sullivan was trying to channel the spirit of Elizabeth Peters’s Vicky Bliss detective series, but things didn’t quite go to plan. “They are light mystery novels about an art historian, her on-again, off-again con artist boyfriend, and her ridiculous German professor boss who challenges strangers to duels when drunk,” she says. “Pure escapism. Writing Sweet Dreams was for me a way of scratching that same itch, only I can’t help being a sci-fi writer. I look at everything from a funny angle. So as a ‘science fiction mystery’ Sweet Dreams isn’t simply a crime novel set in the future. I hope it is genuinely twisted, on a conceptual level.”

seize the day

All of this sounds positive, which is great considering that, to come back to that hiatus, Sullivan posted on her blog about how she had “already been written off in some circles”. Ask her about this and she says, “It was really just a feeling, not something I can pin down causally. You know, like a fart in a room.”

Ask her whether this happens more often to women writers and the reply is pointed. “I can’t see how this is a real question,” she says. “It’s like saying, ‘Is the gender pay gap real?’ when the gender pay gap is established fact. To keep asking these fake questions as if they are real makes it impossible to move on to actually shifting the deeply seated sexism in our culture.”

Admonishment noted. Nevertheless, during this time, was it difficult to keep the faith? “I don’t actually have any faith,” Sullivan replies. “I just keep working. It’s what I do. And, you know, here’s some free advice for anybody who may be skimming over this piece looking for crumbs of wisdom or whatever regarding the writing life: guys, the only thing you can control is the work. And most of the time you can’t even control that.

“When you start publishing it’s easy to get addicted to the response and praise and bank balances that go with. That’s all fine as long as you’re on an upward trajectory in your career. But when things go wrong, you risk a creative death spiral if you allow your mind to be held hostage to the demands of the marketplace. This is mostly because the marketplace is deranged.”

Because of this, she says, trying to appease the market only results in writers losing their own voice and vision. Better to learn resilience. “If your career crashes, then after you’ve mourned you have to reclaim ownership of your work, even if no one but you gives a fig about what you are doing,” she says. “That’s how you recover.”

So we can expect loads more books, right? Maybe not right away. Sullivan still has studying up ahead. “In October I’m starting a four-year PhD in data science working at the Astrophysics Research Institute in Liverpool,” she says. “This means little fiction for a while.” Let’s not forget how good a writer she is if it’s a while before the next book.

Sweet Dreams will be published on 21 September.