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You can read an interview with new US author Ian Tregillis in the latest issue of SFX , on sale now with an incredible look back at Star Trek: The Next Generation . Ian had a lot to say about the first in his alternative-history trilogy, Bitter Seeds (part one of the Milkweed Triptych), so today we'd like to share the rest of that interview online.
We asked him a few questions about the alternative world he's created and how he researched and planned it:
SFX: Imagine you have to write the blurb on the back cover of the book. What would you say?
Ian Tregillis: On the eve of World War II, the Third Reich unveils a cadre of unstoppable superhuman soldiers. In desperation, British Intelligence resorts to black magic. What follows is a tale of tragedy and triumph featuring superheroes, spies, invisible assassins, warlocks, snipers, and demons - both human and supernatural.
SFX: This is your first novel published in the UK. How long have you been working towards being a published author?
Tregillis: I suppose most writers say this, but the honest truth is that I've dreamed about being a published author since childhood. But actually working toward it? A little less than that. I started writing seriously in 2003, after I finished graduate school. With hindsight, that was a mistake. I shouldn't have waited so long to get started. But it wasn't until then that I realized writing is something for which you have to make the time, rather than waiting for the time to present itself.
SFX: What first inspired you with the idea for Bitter Seeds ?
Tregillis: It came about from a collision of two unrelated ideas. The first was an utterly bizarre piece of World War II trivia, and the second was the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report .
Years before I started writing Bitter Seeds I stumbled across a magazine article about Project Habakkuk , which was a short-lived scheme by the wartime Admiralty to build aircraft carriers from a special form of ice. It wasn't quite as crazy as it sounds - they even got as far as building a working scale model on a Canadian lake. Still, in the end it wasn't feasible, so it was scrapped. But I couldn't shake that image from my head, of vast bergships plying the North Atlantic. I wondered what might have happened if Habakkuk had been successful enough to turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic! The answer hit me like a thunderbolt (I still remember exactly where I was at that moment): obviously, Ian, the Third Reich would have sent a pyrokinetic spy to sabotage the icy shipyards. From there it was a short jump to wondering about the programme that created him.
As for Tom Cruise... There's a scene in that movie (minor spoilers here) where the hero is on the run, but he happens to have a clairvoyant at his side. It leads to a fun but short sequence in the movie where she tells him exactly what to do to elude capture - because, of course, she's anticipating everything before it happens. Fun stuff!
But the more I thought about it later, the more it bothered me. Because a truly talented precog wouldn't be working 30 seconds ahead of everybody else. She'd be 30 years ahead of everybody else...
And then, just for fun, I decided to make her a sociopath, too.
SFX: How do you go about building an alternative history of World War II? Did you consciously avoid other people's visions like the Hellboy backstory or Captain America or Philip K Dick's The Man In The High Castle ?
Tregillis: Oh, very much! I had read The Man In The High Castle on a trip to South Korea years ago, but I made a point of not revisiting it while writing this trilogy. (Which is ironic, given that the film adaptation of PKD's story The Minority Report was an important influence.) I still haven't read the Hellboy comics - though I'm sure to devour them, they went on the back burner while I was writing this trilogy. So too did the Laundry novels by Charles Stross, Tim Powers's Declare , some Dennis Wheatley books, and still others.
I like to let ideas rattle around in my head until random collisions cause unrelated things to stick together in intriguing ways. So I started with the bones of the world and the characters in it, and then I started looking for ways to connect them to history. Though I'm quite interested in World War II history, and have been since before I started this project, I would never hold myself up as an expert or amateur historian. So I filled a bookshelf with reference books and got to work.
But once I knew the shape of the story, I knew that the turning point for the war in Bitter Seeds had to be a historical event that was iconic, early in the war, as close to Britain as possible, and surrounded by strange or controversial events. It was easy to find.
SFX: How did you go about researching the minutiae of life in wartime Europe? And was that especially difficult since you're based in the US?
Tregillis: It was by far the most difficult part of the research. Names, dates, and battles are easy - that's what history books are for. But how did people talk to one another, and curse, and kiss, and what did they eat for breakfast? That's trickier. If the past is a different country, then I was trying to write about people who were doubly foreign to me, by virtue of time and geography. In the end, I'd never claim I got it right, but I did my best.
For flavour, I tried to read books written during the war by people who lived through it (Waugh, for instance). One invaluable reference work was How We Lived Then by Norman Longmate. I also made heavy use of the BBC People's War archive. The books are there, it's just that digging out a specific detail isn't as straightforward as looking up a date. Along the way I also became a fan of Foyle's War - I used that show as a source of pointers for focusing my research.
SFX: How do you plan to follow up Bitter Seeds ?
Tregillis: The second and third books in this trilogy ( The Coldest War and Necessary Evil , respectively) are finished. As suggested by the title, the sequel to Bitter Seeds takes place during the Cold War.
And I recently sold a new novel to Tor in the US. Something More Than Night is a Raymond Chandler-inspired murder mystery set in Heaven. Sort of a noir detective story but populated by angels, archangels, cherubim, seraphim, and the rest of the heavenly choir.
Now I'm having a blast brainstorming ideas for the next project.
SFX: Thanks Ian!
Bitter Seeds was released in the US some time ago but hits the UK on Thursday 12 July . The sequels, The Coldest War and Necessary Evil , will arrive in America this summer and in the UK later on. Check out Ian Tregillis's personal webpage here and the Orbit page here . SFX 223 is on sale from Wednesday 30 May to Wednesday 27 June and you can order it here : it features additional author Q&A.
