brought to book
Get spooked… The Brit author tells us about mixing up spy fiction and space opera
Chatting to SF author James Lovegrove.
There’s a reason James Lovegrove has never written space opera before. He was, in his own words, “slightly scared” of the genre. And its fans. “It’s a field that those who love it absolutely love it, but also it’s developed its own language over the years, its own laws,” Lovegrove tells SFX, “and you have to be careful about not ripping off anyone else and adding to the genre rather than rehashing what anyone else has done.”
So what changed? Partly, Lovegrove says, he thought it was about time he gave space opera a shot. Then there was the fact his publishers, Solaris, asked him if he could create a series of books set on different planets. “I thought about it for a while, and I came up with this idea of a cold war in outer space between human settlements as they’re spreading out and an artificial intelligence race,” he says. “Our territory has just butted up against theirs and so there’s this conflict going on.”
It’s central to the premise of the books that this is a cold war, with all the opportunities this affords for tales of espionage in the shadows. The character who links the books is a secret agent, Dev Harmer of Interstellar Security Solutions. He and his colleagues are “sent out as beams of pure data and then they’re inserted into new bodies that are tailored to suit the new planet”.
In the case of the first novel, World Of Fire, this involves waking up on a fiery world that’s much like Mercury. To avoid being incinerated, its inhabitants live underground. But don’t be expecting a suave secret agent figure in the vein of James Bond – or at least the screen version of 007 rather than the more flawed Bond of the novels.
“I wanted someone who was easier to relate to, he’s more of a blue- collar agent than a white- collar agent,” says Lovegrove, “and he doesn’t shag everything in sight, although that doesn’t stop him trying. He’s not infallible, he’s competent. He’s the kind of person you want on your side who, even though he doesn’t immediately have a solution to a problem, can usually jury rig something to make it work.”
As for Harmer’s foes, they’re called the Polis+, “religious extremists” who are “driven by belief ” and devoted to “a religious entity that they call the singularity”. Seeing as they can “transfer their consciousnesses between organic and inorganic forms”, and disguise themselves as people, they’re dangerous foes. “I suppose they’re more like the Mysterons than anything,” laughs Lovegrove.
If this all sounds self- consciously pulpy, that’s no coincidence. Lovegrove has lately been re- reading stories from the 1930s and 1940s featuring the likes of the Shadow and Doc Savage, “getting a grip on what makes these books work, and what makes these characters work”. He’s particularly interested in the “continuous pace” that characterises the best of such fiction.
Considering Lovegrove is also writing Sherlock Holmes stories for Titan – the next will feature the detective taking on “a steampunk computer” called the Thinking Engine as a tribute to Charles Babbage’s Victorian- era difference engine – and has a Holmes/ HP Lovecraft crossover in the offing, this interest in popular fiction in all its glory is genuine.
Which in itself is quite intriguing because Lovegrove’s early books, well reviewed and largely written for Gollancz, were very different in tone, satirical and full of wordplay. By and large, the books were well reviewed. “I rather hoped to carve out this niche of SF that was entirely my own, and to be fair I did that for about 10 or 12 years,” he says. This approach brought plenty of critical acclaim, but didn’t pay the bills, a pressing issue for a man with a young family.
Financial salvation arrived when, long after his relationship with Gollancz “came to a natural end”, Solaris approached Lovegrove to write a series of alternate history novels. Thus was born the military SF Pantheon series, featuring deities from different civilisations. Initially, the first, Egyptian- themed book in the sequence, The Age Of Ra ( 2009), rather sneaked out because Solaris was in the midst of a takeover, by Rebellion. However, on a word- of- mouth basis, Ra began to sell. The third book in the sequence, The Age Of Odin, was so successful it made it onto the New York Times bestseller list.
“That literally did turn things around [ for me],” he says. “About six or seven years ago, I actually started selling books as well as having critical acclaim. The critical acclaim has always been very nice, but that doesn’t butter any parsnips, as the saying goes.”
Or possibly your granny says… Anyway, Lovegrove in part attributes this success to focusing on what he was reading himself. He realised that, as a harried, time- poor father, he favoured “solid action storytelling ” over literary fiction. “[ Writing The Age Of Ra, I thought] ‘ Why not try to write that yourself instead of going for these rather high- flown, highconcept ideas, just get down there and figure out what makes a plot work, and what makes people turn the pages,” he says. “This sounds incredibly cynical, it’s not. I was interested to see if I could do it and how well I could do it. Throw in gods as well and it just seemed to click. I haven’t thought about going back and doing the high- flown literary stuff again, I’m much happier doing the fun stuff as it were.”
“I came up with this idea of a cold war in outer space”