Interviewing Robin Triggs
Helloooo!!!
A few weeks ago, I reviewed New Gods by Robin Triggs a noir-style futuristic thriller set in Antarctica. Robin kindly agreed to an interview and discuss the book, their influences and future projects
How do you like to booktempt New Gods?
It’s a thriller set in near-future Antarctica. Need I say more? Often, I find I know with those words whether I’ve got a reader or not, which is useful as I’m seriously bad at the whole ‘elevator pitch’ thingy!
We have a world where a single monolithic Company has taken over the majority of the world’s governance and has established a city in Antarctica to act both as a source of raw minerals and as a place for some the world’s displaced population – after the rise of global sea-levels – to be relocated. Some come willingly, some less so.
In this world walks the recently-demoted Anders Nordvelt, security officer and magnet for trouble. And trouble there is a-plenty; revolution is in the air and even Anders’ well-set friends are becoming radicalised. The city is a powder-keg, not calmed by the presence of a group of bored soldiers and an auditor with his own agenda.
Then a brutal booby-trap leaves one of Anders’ colleagues dead, another maimed. But does anyone other than Anders care about finding the killer, or are they all too preoccupied with dirty politics?
How do I like to booktempt New Gods? Badly! That much seems clear.
What led to the choice of your future Antarctica as a setting?
Oh gosh, this is a tricky one. I remember I had this idea for a plot and I was turning round lots of potential locations: outer space, the moon, underwater… I wanted somewhere isolated and harsh simply because that seemed to be as much a part of the story as the characters and the conflict. From the very beginning they were enmeshed.
The honest truth, though, is that I only finally settled on Antarctica because I came up with the title Night Shift, which became the first novel of the Anders Nordvelt series. It just seemed so perfect – to have a story set entirely during the long night – that it had to come true.
That first story was about a simple mining base (not that the smallest thing is simple in Antarctica); New Gods takes the evolution of that settlement and builds it into a true city.
What are the challenges in writing an SF thriller where the temptation for technology to solve everything must be everywhere?
It’s like when mobile phones first became widespread in the 90s; suddenly you could hear authors everywhere scratching around for reasons why they couldn’t be used! My issues were with a surveillance state: how can crimes be committed when the Company is watching every move you make? Fortunately, machines are dumb and people ingenious.
Technology usually has its own technological solution. It’s hard to give examples for reasons of spoilers, but it’s worth remembering that even the most sophisticated of systems is programmed, run and operated by fallible humans. It’s not much use collecting all this data if there isn’t a ‘brain’ there to take the raw facts and act upon them. Unless we have a sophisticated AI – beyond my world’s capabilities – we’re reliant on poorly paid data analysers to divert resources. It’s those pesky humans again! New Gods is riddled with the buggers!
And then, at the end of the day, people can always wear masks, sever network-cables, or throw incendiary grenades into the works. That’s often effective.
There is definitely feels a scandi-noir influence in your style is that deliberate in your approach to characters and setting?
I’ve read Scandi-noir and enjoyed it, but I wouldn’t say it was a deliberate decision to write like that. I was more influenced by classic SF writers like Andre Norton, who nobody’s heard of now, and – lord forgive me – Asimov. Dorothy L. Sayers is my major influence in the realm of crime-writing, along with more modern writers like Elly Griffiths and Andrew Martin.
The aesthetic was shaped more by post-war Soviet architecture (or at least my very hazy idea of what that means) than it was by modern sensibilities. I was trying to create something ruthlessly practical, a world in which capitalism has gone so extreme that it starts to resemble Communism; where committees decide everything; and of course a world in which hurricane-strength winds frequently scour the city. That’s why everything is underground, and Company-sponsored artists are employed to make the settlement feel slightly less like a concrete bunker.
As for characters, well, it’s hard to say what influenced them. Partly it’s necessity: what kind of people would end up in a world like this, where STEM specialists share space with forcibly-relocated political dissidents? Then we have characters who simply sprung off the page to become fully-formed individuals without any conscious influence from me; people like Bartelli, Nordvelt’s colleague with his dry wit and feral moustache, and Gisladottir, the UN captain. Those are usually my favourites; I’ve no idea where they come from, but I’m the richer for having known them.
The Anders Nordvelt trilogy owes a debt to something else as well, something that I hesitate to bring up here and certainly didn’t realise at the time of writing, and that’s the black dog. In the books Anders is a trauma survivor, and the trilogy as a whole is a journey through his healing process. It’s also a reflection of my own journey through depression.
That’s why I was so desperate to complete the trilogy, to get New Gods out there. It’s the final part of an arc that I just couldn’t contemplate leaving unfinished. It would have hurt too much.
Sorry, might have gone a little off topic there. Come back! I’m fun, honest!
What else can we look forward to you in the future and where else can we find out more from you?
Right, let’s get the latter out of the way first: I keep a blog on all things writing-related (although sometimes only tangentially) at www.robintriggs.co.uk. I’m also a big Twitter fan and am easily found @RobinTriggs. The benefits of having an unusual name!
As for the future, more writing is the order of the day. I’m currently trying to flog the first in a new series of urban fantasy novels, workingly-titled Oneiromancer. It’s the story of a parallel race invading our universe through the Dreamland and trying to engender hatred and division in our world because theirs is fuelled by fear. Think Monsters Inc as written by Stephen King. It is, now I come to think about it, really quite political.
As I try to sell that (I’m proud to say that I’ve been rejected by most SFF-dealing literary agents in the Western world) I’m also editing book 2 – working title Our Kind of Bastard – and first-drafting book 3.
I say I’m doing this, and I am, but mostly I’m trying to hold down two day-jobs and wrangling a small but effervescent family. Writing time is squeezed into the gaps but somehow – somehow – progress is made.
If you could make everyone in the world read one book (not your own) what would it be and why?
There’s only one author it can be, I’m afraid, and that’s the great Sir Terry Pratchett. He’s had such a colossal influence on the writing world that I’m sure isn’t yet fully realised.
The book I’m choosing is Night Watch, which I regard as his masterpiece. Overtly political (all his books are political, but the anger in this is more palpable), it’s one of his least ‘funny’ books – still with wit and knowing asides and larger-than-life characters, but layered in cynicism about human nature and the dishonest – and unbalanced – nature of rebellion and revolution.
Simply put, he’s the finest observer of humanity I’ve read. It’s not fantasy, it’s allegory. Every word is trenchant; I can feel the power of it even as I write. Everyone should read this – or Thud, or frankly any of his later works – to be reminded of what matters in life, of how to treat people like sentient, feeling beings and not mere objects.
Everyone matters. How we treat other people tells more about us than it does about them. Pratchett sees this so keenly – I wish I had a fraction of his empathy and intelligence.
GNU Terry Pratchett.
