Paul Mcauley

The award-winning SF author was clearly a precocious child…

What is your daily writing routine like?

If I’m trying to start something, making a lot of notes as I try to find my way inside it. If working on a first draft, reading whatever I wrote yesterday before trying to add a little more. If revising, working until I lose focus.

Describe the room in which you typically write.

Long and narrow and dimly lit. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves at one end; more bookshelves at the other, an L-shaped desk on which a computer is positioned so I’m angled away from the nearest window. That’s where I most often work, but I can write anywhere – a café, a train, a hotel room, a park… What is written is always more important than where or how.

Which of your books was the most difficult to write?

The one I was trying to write when undergoing some very thorough chemotherapy.

Have you ever come up with a good plot idea in a dream?

If I ever had some kind of revelation in a dream, in the way that August Kehule discovered the ring structure of benzene, it dissolved on waking. And besides, my dreams follow their own logic, which is not the logic of the waking world. I find getting out of the house and going for a walk is the best way to work out narrative options and untie seemingly intractable knots.

Were you a keen reader as a child? Which books were your favourites?

Very much so. I read myself out of the children’s section of my local library and was granted a ticket for the adult section at a stupidly precocious age. After devouring most of the science fiction books, I began a random journey through all the other fiction shelves – but by then I was a teenager. Childhood favourites? Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings books, Richmal Crompton’s Just

William stories, Jules Verne and HG Wells, Mary Renault (I had a thing for Greek myths), and random finds in jumble sales, including an Ace edition of Keith Roberts’s Pavane which I still have. Also the backs and sides of cereal packets, if nothing else was to hand.

What would be your desert island book?

TH White’s The Once And Future King.

If you could recommend one book that you love, but that’s not very well known, what would it be?

Richard Hughes’s The Fox In The Attic, first volume of the Human Predicament trilogy. A rich, strange novel with an unforgettable opening in which two men carry the body of a drowned child across a salt marsh towards a mansion as hauntingly decrepit as Castle Gormenghast, and intertwined narratives of unrequited love and Germany’s plunge into Nazism. Hughes published the trilogy’s second novel The Wooden Shepherdess 12 years later, but died before completing the third. Both titles are out of print in the UK.

Where’s the oddest place you’ve seen one of your books?

Bermuda.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve either received or read?

Don’t look back.

Beyond The Burn Line is out on 22 September, published by Gollancz.

I can write anywhere – a café, a train, a hotel room…