This cliff of
books is what I see when I look at the back wall of my study. We’ve got books and bookcases all over the
house but I spend a lot of time near this one.
A lot of the serious stuff is here – law books (I’m a criminal barrister
when I’m not writing), philosophy, history, biography and poetry (not always so
serious). There’s plenty of YA fiction
in the house but my children hoard it in their rooms. I borrow it from them. I have to admit that they don’t borrow so
many books from me.
Writing The Bad Tuesdays involved a lot of
research – all that weird science had to come from somewhere and it wasn’t just
my imagination. And then there was
mythology, martial arts and the arcane business of computer hacking. A lot of
the books I turned to have found their way onto these shelves.
The outer
limits of modern science provide extraordinary possibilities. They allowed me to write about a world where
the mechanisms for multiple universes, wormholes, cybertronics and bio-engines
could be based on real science. This gives the books I write a reality which is
crucial.
There are
some amazing books here. Michio Kaku
takes mind-bending ideas and explains them in a way that a normally-sized brain
can comprehend. David Deusch is a little
more complicated but will leave you in no doubt that there are more universes
than the one we experience right now. Don’t
take my word for it (or his) – just read the evidence!
I like it
when ideas come together in surprising ways.
I think I must organize my books with that in mind. I certainly write them like that. I wanted to write about a world where
different realities exist alongside one another, not just parallel universes
but spirit dimensions too. All those
gods, heroes, angels and demons didn’t just pack up and leave town at the end
of the Middle Ages. They’re as busy as ever – we’re just not in the habit of
watching out for them. So mythology
and Herodotus’s ‘Histories’ find
their place alongside all that quantum physics.
Sometimes, the future lies deep in the past.
‘Hacking’ is
about computers, not axes. I thought I
knew a lot about computers and breaking the law, but the Tuesdays have taught
me a lot more. The other kind of hacking
finds its way into the books too - the Scythian in ‘The Spiral Horizon’, the final book in the series, comes straight
out of Herodotus and he has an axe that hacks copiously. It’s
amazing where you end up when you set off with a pen in your hand (or an axe).
And then there’s the martial arts section of
the library. Getting the facts straight
and using the technical terms matters when describing an open-palm knife strike
or a reverse roundhouse kick. True to
form, those books have found their own way onto the shelves on a different wall
of the study, where they lurk amongst books about gardening (the gardening
books aren’t mine).
I love books
– my whole family does. We have so many
that we don’t know what to do with them.
Even if we moved to a bigger house, we’d start filling the extra space
with too many books and then we’d run out of space again. There must be a name for a person who does
that. Come to think of it, there must be
a book about it. Now, if only I could
get hold of a copy . . .
THE BAD TUESDAYS 6: THE SPIRAL HORIZON is available now and published by Orion Children’s Books in paperback at £6.99, eBook £4.49
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