Hello!!

Last month I was hugely impressed by Inscape by Louise Carey out now from Gollancz. A future SF thriller that explores how Augmented Reality (AR) could evolve in our lives and its downsides. Exciting, inventive and with a compelling double act it already stands out as a favourite this year. Louise has already co-written novels such as The City of Silk and Steel plus the House of War and Witness. They’ve also wrote Confessions of a Blabbermouth for DC Comics. As such I was very lucky to be able to chat to Louise about the new book and what more we can expect in this new series.

Thank you for Inscape and in particular giving us such a unique world to discover!

How do you like to book tempt Inscape?

Haha, I find doing this challenging! It seems like whenever I try to summarise the book, I immediately forget everything about it. When I first told my dad about the idea for Inscape, though, he said it was a novel about ‘the extension of corporate control into the human psyche’, and I think that puts it best. Think of the worst workplace culture ever—tyrannical managers who demand your unwavering loyalty, an HR department that spies on your social media usage, on the lookout for any hint that you’re not a model employee. Now imagine a corporation that could enforce those policies 24/7 through a smart device installed in your own head. Throw in a mysterious cache of missing files, a cold-war-style standoff between two big tech companies, and a twisted tale of corporate espionage, and that’s Inscape!

What drew you to the use of AR and its possibilities? Was this fun or disturbing to research?

Around the time I started planning Inscape, I was also writing blog posts for a digital recruitment agency. They had me writing on a whole range of technology news topics, but the growth of AR and VR was one of the ones I found the most interesting. The posts I wrote for their blog were the start of the research into AR that I did for the novel. I think what compelled me about AR initially is that it’s just so much fun. I associate it with games like Pokémon Go—apps that allow you to overlay mundane reality with something more colourful and exciting. It’s a playful technology, and that made weaving it into the dystopian world of Inscape all the more enjoyable—I got to put it to much darker and more nefarious purposes!

Tanta and Cole drive the novel what led to their creation as quite a unique double act?

Right from the start of planning Inscape, I was interested in exploring a platonic friendship between a man and a woman, and making that the emotional core of the novel. I haven’t seen much focus on relationships like that in the fiction I read, so I wanted to write one myself. Sometimes, I feel like the default assumption in a lot of fiction is that if you throw a male lead and a female lead together, sexual chemistry will be the inevitable result. When I encounter that attitude in a story, I find it wearing, because there are so many other rich, complex and interesting ways for men and women to interact! That was my starting point for Cole and Tanta’s relationship. They’re very different, both in terms of their outlooks and their skillsets, but they’re united by a shared moral decency that makes them unlikely friends.

As well as the hi tech you also involve lots of spying stagecraft was it important that this was not all cyber-crime?

For me, writing the set pieces and espionage scenes in Inscape was about giving both Cole and Tanta a chance to show off their skills. Tanta’s combat training makes her well-suited to high-octane action sequences, while Cole’s background in coding means that I often show him helping Tanta from behind the scenes, hacking secure networks or deciphering viral code. They complement each other well, and some of the chapters I enjoyed writing the most were the ones where they’re working together to solve a problem, but coming at it from very different angles. The scenes I wrote from Cole’s viewpoint are often quite abstract and contemplative, while Tanta’s scenes are more fast-paced and cinematic, and I liked this contrast. What I liked even more was occasionally forcing the two to swap roles: making Cole infiltrate a building or Tanta interact with a piece of unfamiliar tech. These changes in pace made the novel more fun to write – hopefully they make it more fun to read, too!

What else lies in store for the Inscape universe?

Well, I finished the second book of the trilogy during the lockdowns last year, and book three is currently underway! I don’t want to give anything away, but I’m really excited about both of them. Book two will resolve many of the narrative threads that weren’t tied up by the end of Inscape, while also introducing some new viewpoint characters. It spends more time exploring the lives of the unaffiliated, and the landscape outside of the city.

Once the trilogy is finished, I think I’d like to try something completely different. I’ve enjoyed the world of Inscape immensely, though, so maybe I’ll return to it one day!

Where can we find more news from you?

The best place is my Twitter, @Louisecarey25 . I have a website too (www.louise-carey.com), but Twitter is where I’m most active.

If you had one book (not your own) that you could get everyone to read what would it be?

Ooh, that’s a hard question! The books that changed my life aren’t necessarily going to do the same thing for other people… I’ll pick something short, so I don’t incur anyone’s ire by forcing them to read a doorstopper like Little Dorrit (which is really good, by the way!) Shaun Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia blew the roof off the top of my head, and you can devour the whole thing in an afternoon. The illustrations are beyond gorgeous, and the stories themselves are full of wit and wisdom and rich, strange beauty.