Hellooo!!!

I recently reviewed Outcast by Louise Carey the sequel to Inscape by Louise Carey — Runalong The Shelves a nearish future dystopian series exploring Augmented Reality, mind control and corporations that have no morals. Happily it also has one of the best partnerships teaming up and helping to potentially do some good. I was very happy that Louise again agreed to answer some questions on the book and what else to look forward to later this year!

Hi, Womble! Thanks for having me back on the blog!

How would you booktempt Outcast?

If you enjoyed the cyberpunk, Cold War-esque spy thriller that was Inscape, then Outcast pushes the envelope even further. The second book in the Inscape trilogy takes us beyond the divided city where Tanta grew up and explores the Unaffiliated Zone that surrounds it—a blighted wasteland, dotted with corporate strongholds and bandit encampments. There’s another mystery brewing out here, far from the watchful eyes of the big tech corporations that have ruled Tanta’s life—one that will make her question where her loyalties truly lie.

Outcast is full of all the hi-tech thrills, twists, and action that readers and reviewers said they loved about the first book, but it brings in a wider cast of characters and a much richer world. There’s an eerie company town ruled by a middle manager with a god complex, a crew of bandits who scratch out a precarious living by stealing from the corporations, and a mysterious network of freelance agents with their own secretive agenda.

Did the sequel go the way you originally planned?

It depends on what you mean by ‘originally’! When I first had the idea for Inscape, way back in 2015, I conceived of it as a standalone novel. Over the years of worldbuilding, thinking and planning that followed, I realised there was a broader and more ambitious story I could tell about this corporate dystopia—one that wouldn’t fit in a single book—but I still only had a vague idea of what that story would look like.

The plot of Outcast took form gradually, and went through a lot of changes. Characters went from heroes to villains and vice versa, and I ended up throwing most of my initial ideas out the window. One of the only things that stayed largely the same throughout the whole process was the text of chapter one. About six months before I started writing Outcast properly, when I was still finishing off the first book, I had an idea for a scene where a group of bandits try to shoot down a corporate supply drone with nothing but a scavenged handgun. It was one of those rare, perfect moments of inspiration where the chapter came into my mind almost fully formed, and all I had to do was write it down. I still really love that scene, and I’m glad it made it into the finished novel.

In this story you give Tanta and Cole slightly different colleagues to work with. Was it fun showing both how they have developed and also why they need to work with each other?

Tanta and Cole’s partnership continues to be central for me. Their friendship, and Tanta’s relationship with Reet, are the two emotional cores of the trilogy, and I think both of those relationships develop in interesting ways in Outcast. Having said that, I loved introducing a wider cast of friends, allies and enemies for Tanta and Cole to work with and against in this book. It was great to bring back Yasmin Das, as she’s a favourite of mine, and I also really enjoyed writing the new characters—particularly Fliss and her bandit crew.

I said in my last interview for Runalong the Shelves that one of my favourite things about writing Inscape was the scenes where Tanta and Cole have to work together, using their very different skill sets—Cole’s coding know-how and Tanta’s combat training—to solve a problem. I’ve had even more fun with the new characters in Outcast, who have skills of their own that complement and challenge Tanta and Cole’s abilities in different ways. Fliss, for example, doesn’t have Tanta’s martial arts prowess, but she is an adept at navigating the dangerous terrain of the forests, wastelands and fallen settlements that fill the Unaffiliated Zone. Without giving too much away, that’s a skill that comes in handy for her in a key scene.

The world and the corporations that run it have a greater prominence in this story. Was that always the plan for this book?

As I mentioned, the plan for this book went through a lot of changes, but it was always my intention to broaden the world of Outcast, so that it wasn’t focusing on just the city anymore. Doing this allowed me to bring in more characters from outside the corporations, and to give a sense of the often devastating impact the corps have had on the world around them. Tanta is in something of a bubble in book one—the city and the two corps that run it is all she knows. She’s used to thinking of her corp, InTech, as the good guys. In Outcast, I wanted to burst that bubble, and to show Tanta encountering people who have radically different perspectives and priorities to her—people who have only ever experienced the corporations as a threat and a scourge. That’s a theme that I’ve continued to explore in book 3.

What three words best describe the final book?

Haha, that’s a hard question! Well, my editor has called it ‘thrilling’ and my agent said it was ‘cracking’. As for me, I think I’d call it ‘satisfying’.

What else can we look forward from you in the future and where can we find out more?

I finished the first draft of the final book of the trilogy late last year, and I’m editing it at the moment. It will be out in January 2023—I can’t wait for people to see how it all wraps up!

This year I have a few pieces of shorter fiction coming out or currently in progress—a novella and a short story. I can’t say too much about either of them yet, but one is about an Alexa-style smart assistant who knows more than she lets on, and the other’s about an oil rig in space. I’m hugely excited about both. Beyond that, I’ve got some ideas for the next novel after the Inscape trilogy, but we’ll just have to see! I always post updates on Twitter, where you can find me at @Louisecarey25.

Any recent reading highlights you’d like to share?

Early Riser by Jasper Fforde was my first read of 2022. It’s an alternate universe novel about a world threatened by global cooling, where the bulk of humanity hibernates through the winter. I devoured it while stuck in isolation with Covid, and it was a great sickbed companion – bitingly funny, very tense, and with fantastic worldbuilding. Last year’s highlights for me were Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, and Frances Hardinge’s Deeplight.