As technology becomes increasingly entwined with our selves, via the intimacies of the smartphone, then it’s natural for us to ask: how is technology changing me? More specifically, is technology changing the way I feel about other people. It’s that intimate. In stories, an AI can stand-in for our technologically…

Thank you Charlie Jane and Ria for inviting me onto I09. And for a thoughtful set of questions from engaged readers, thanks everyone.

I have a half-formed or quarter-formed thought about the apocalypse too. Many parts of the world have experienced and are experiencing something that looks like a vision of the end times. To paraphrase William Gibson, the end of the world is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

You’re right Charlie! The meeting between Conan Doyle, JM Barrie, Thomas Hardy, HG Wells and other great authors of the time, brought together by Charles Masterman to write the propaganda that would entice America into the war on the Allied side, was also an origin point. It was fascinating to track the initial…

They submit to the Process out of fear of wider austerity. Rather than risk losing everything, they accept some losses, and also have an ideology that suggests this way of life might be better. Albeit at a cost. Some of the characters believe in the Process as an almost mystical force out of which an apprehension of…

I chose Suvla Bay because it was where John Hargrave landed. Hargrave’s account of the landing and his subsequent life as the leader of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift was my way into the novel. I had material on the Western Front but it felt too familiar. Such well-trodden ground in the UK. Also Suvla Bay was a…

IF THEN is inspired by the financial crisis. Specifically a joke that was doing the rounds in the City of London during the onset of the crisis in Greece: that Greece could sell their islands to pay off the debt. This gave me the idea of selling off towns and villages in the UK to corporate entities. Those corporate…

I write science fiction to expose ordinary people to brutish indifferent power, in the form of imaginary tech. So I need relationships and characters with enough particularity for the reader to respond to that. The marriage of James and Ruth gave me two points of view with which to explore the world: James was always…

I didn’t set out to write a dystopian novel or respond to contemporary dystopian novels. To me, what happens in the novel follows the underlying nature of now. I thought it would be more interesting to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the world.

I could see people sidling up to the algorithm to get on with their careers.