Authors Electric

They say it’s odd how fiction mirrors life. But how about life mirroring fiction? I was mooching around on Amazon the other day – as you do – and   inadvertently  signed up (again) for Amazon Prime. This is the 4 th  time I’ve made that   mistake ; I use italics because I am convinced that periodically Amazon changes the code behind its buttons and signs up whoever it chooses in the hope that either you won’t notice, or if you do, you will love it so much that you’ll stay … So I cancelled (again) and thought I may as well enjoy my month’s free deliveries. Actually – come to think about it – maybe  that’s  why Amazon does it? They know you will order more if you have unexpected free delivery? And Andy is enjoying watching  The Grand Tour  on Prime, so everybody is happy. But while I’m mooching, I find that Matthew Reilly has a new book out and I wonder how on earth I missed it. If I haven’t already said (and I probably have), I adore Ma...

(Spoiler Alert!) Kazuo Ishiguro is the latest Nobel laureate in Literature, and when he won, I decided to read Never Let Me Go . Like most readers, I buy more books than I have time to read, and Ishiguro’s latest triumph just nudged me a little harder towards this book. I have long admired his understated, gorgeous prose. Never Let Me Go starts very, very slowly and as I read, I was struck by the thought that if this were a book written by a woman, it would be dismissed as derivative YA fiction in the mould of Enid Blyton’s tales of British boarding schools. The love triangle seemed clichéd and all too predictable, and I almost stopped reading. But I had faith in the Ishiguro magic, the slow unfurling of earlier scenes which take on color as the story gently unspools. And this book does not disappoint. When I finished the book, I had a vague sense of unease. And then, I couldn’t stop thinking about it for the next three days. The most astonishing books are like tha...

The very first book launch I had to organise was for The Merlion and The Hibiscus ; it was an anthology published by Penguin, and designed to market the best of Southeast Asian writing worldwide. I was the lead editor with Kirpal Singh and M.A Quayum but a total newbie. I honestly thought that all my subsequent book launches would be like this, with the legendary Raffles hotel in Singapore sponsoring hors d'oeuvres, a leading statesman and writer the Guest of Honour, and a ballroom packed with people sipping wine, eager to buy the books that the publisher had imported in large quantities. That was in 2002. I had no idea that publisher-backed anthologies are a very different beast from single-authored books and debut novels can be a hard sell.  In 2011, at the launch of my debut novel  Thunder Demons at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi, it rained incessantly. It made the bad Delhi traffic virtually unnavigable (it rained at ALL the launches of Thunder Demons, until ...

If you like setting fiction in the near future you try very hard to imagine what it will be like - but you have no idea how accurate your dystopia may be. No one predicts a utopia any more.            I’ve recently returned from China. Don’t get me wrong – I liked the place a lot, and I have developed a considerable respect for the Chinese. There’s so much they’ve got right – and so much they’ve got wrong, too.             I was surprised to learn that the population of China was already 400,000,000 in 1904. It’s nearly 1,400,000,000 today. If you’re familiar with the work of Malthus you’ll know that an unchecked population increases  exponentially , whilst food production increases arithmetically . It ought to be quite clear to everyone that something has to be done before we breed our way into oblivion, but the Chinese seem to be the only people who have tried to address this issue, and they...