Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!
And welcome to the latest edition of the Arthur C. Clarke Award science fiction book of the year newsletter.
We’re marking the leap year with a HAL’s Book Club special and are delighted to welcome 2021 Clarke Award nominee Patience Agbabi who took a few precious moments-in-time out from her current book tour to tell us more about the story behind her nominated book, The Infinite, and its ensuing Leap Cycle tetralogy, which completes this year with The Past Master.
HAL: Hello Patience, and congratulations to you on finishing your tetralogy. I’m curious, did you always know this would be a four-book cycle or did the project grow more organically?
PATIENCE: Thank you, HAL! Once I had that eureka moment with the Leapling concept – that a tiny percentage of those born on the 29th of February would have The Gift of time travel – one book turned into four. I decided to base the entire series around the actual leap cycle years 2020 to 2024, blurring reality with fiction i.e. each book would begin and be published in the present. I shared this idea with my publishers, Canongate, when I submitted The Infinite. They told me I’d have to write a book a year as young readers expect that from a series. It was daunting as I’d only written one novel in my life and wasn’t sure I had three more in me but it made total sense to follow the concept through. The alternative, bringing out one book every four years, wouldn’t have worked.
In reality, a series made sense for lots of other reasons since I had too many ideas to fit into a single book: I wanted to explore the past as well as the future; to take different angles on ecological issues, becoming more covert as the series progressed; and also, I wanted to develop my hero, Elle, from a 3-leap girl to a 4-leap young woman. Elle is black, of Nigerian origin and autistic. It was a positive challenge to show the reader how she overcomes numerous obstacles to reach maturity. I originally submitted the manuscript as young YA but Canongate wanted to market it as middle-grade since my hero was 12 and children like to read up. But since my hero gets one year older with each instalment, I knew I’d be segueing into YA territory anyway, which demands a greater level of introspection.
From the beginning, I knew the macro plot trajectory – exactly how Book 4 would finish – but I had no idea how I’d get there. In that way, the project grew organically, with stand-alone plots for each book but an overarching narrative across the tetralogy.
HAL: I apologise if this is a follow up question of sorts, but I’m fascinated to know how did you first pivot from poetry to science fiction (or indeed is it a pivot at all or just a continuation of that same work)?
PATIENCE: My fourth book of poetry was Telling Tales, a 21st century remix of all of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Mirroring the original, it was in effect a short story collection in various poetic forms incorporating lots of strong voices and characterisation. After that, I found it difficult to write poetry maybe because I’d developed a taste for character and story. I’d wanted to write a novel for years but never have the confidence or stamina or a strong enough idea to sustain one. Telling Tales was my storytelling apprenticeship. Writing that opened creative portals in my head. One of these was prose but the other was speculative fiction.
Some of Chaucer’s tales are horror, magical realism and fantasy (the 14th century was a bit early for science fiction). My favourite is ‘The Franklyn’s Tale’ where the main protagonist makes the black rocks of Brittany disappear. In my version, he makes Edinburgh Castle vanish. I got such an intense thrill writing it, conjuring with the What If, it reminded me of my childhood when I reading fantasy and writing stories containing magic was the norm. I’d spent years writing edgy political poetry, urban realism, but occasionally made imaginative flights that were not just enormous fun but also intellectually liberating. One of my earlier signature pieces, UFO Woman, reimagines my life as an alien landing on earth in the mid-70s. The sci-fi trope enabled me to examine racism through a new lens: spacism. I could combine social criticism with humour. Rewriting ‘The Franklyn’s Tale’ helped reignite that part of my brain.
Every few years I do a writing exercise called Be A Replicant that I found in a how-to-write manual. “The novelist, children’s writer and film-maker, Philip Ridley, once made a list of 100 texts – comics, films, novels, songs, poems – explaining, ‘If you were to make a replicant of me (à la Blade Runner) these should be the first things filed in my memory.’” Maybe it was the sci-fi basis of the exercise but my list has always been highly speculative fiction, containing fairy tales, horror and sci fi films as well as poems and novels. The exercise asks you to examine your list and see if it mirrors what you’re actually reading and writing. I thought it was about time I tried to write some sci-fi which corresponded with a period I was researching autism in girls, a topic close to my heart.
So the segue from poetry to science fiction took a few years but once Elle came into my consciousness, and the leap cycle concept fired me, I was able to combine both genres. The entire leap cycle to some degree mirrors a poetic corona, a form resembling a snake eating its own tail. Each book has 24 chapters to mirror the 24-hour clock. One of my characters, MC2, speaks in rhyme. I try to write prose that sings.
HAL: Thank you again, Patience. I also thought it was important to note that you are one of only a handful of authors shortlisted for fiction for younger readers in the Clarke Award’s lists. I've often found it interesting that, as an SF prize, the award is seen as one of the more 'serious & grown up' of the SF awards, and yet so many humans have their first close encounter with science fiction when they are younger. Was this the case for you, or if not what were your literary inspirations when growing up?
PATIENCE: It's interesting how people often equate children’s literature with lack of seriousness yet the best books for younger readers are for everyone and cover all the big issues, life, death, war, love but not sex. Sex is the only taboo for children’s books.
I didn’t read any science fiction until I was an adult. I read quite a bit of fantasy when I was in primary school like C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series, Alan Garner’s first two books of the Brisingamen trilogy. But once I hit secondary school my tastes changed. In those days they gave you an adult library card at 11. So suddenly I had access to books containing sex, drugs and rock an’ roll. Between primary and secondary school, I binged on Mills and Boons interspersed with the entire Agatha Christie collection. I knew this was what people call literature with a small l but it was lots of fun, having access to the adult world without any of the responsibility. I read those books in summer holidays spent with my dad in London, racing through Leyton and Walthamstow library shelves.
But up in North Wales with my foster parents in term time, and in my early teens, I read a lot of non-fiction from Colwyn Bay library: about athletes like Mary Peters and Brendan Foster; about the mod scene in the 1960s and the astonishing assortment of amphetamines they took. I guess that sowed the scenes for wanting to time travel, to engage with the past on a deeper level. My actual literary inspirations came from school and centred on poetry by dead white men: Dylan Thomas, Thom Gunn, William Shakespeare. I loved Shakespeare at the age of 15. Then at 17 I got introduced to Geoffrey Chaucer and another door opened in my head. Poetry could be about sex as well as death. I lived a very sheltered teenage life in reality, but in books my mind was well and truly opened.
I got into sci-fi in my late 30s, through films when my first son was a baby and we didn’t go out for a year. My husband introduced me to Brazil, Minority Report, Bladerunner etc before we moved onto film noir. But the science fiction made a deep impression on me and later, I sought out the books or short stories that had inspired the films. The reading I did immediately before writing The Infinite gave me enough foundation inspiration for the entire tetralogy.
HAL: I’m sorry, Patience, but that’s all the questions I’m allowed for now. Thank you again for taking this time for us, and good luck with the book tour!
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