Authors Electric

Times change far more quickly than they did in the past. Honest. It’s not just my age, although it does seem as though only yesterday that we had mobile phones the size of bricks. If you’re writing children’s fiction, the vocabulary mutates with an alarming rapidity, and the technology does too. Unless you’ve opted for the safe haven of fantasy or historical fiction, yesterday’s electronic device is as extinct as a plesiosaurus. This applies to adult fiction as well, of course. What self-respecting criminal wouldn’t use a drone, or a burner phone? What detective would ignore social media or digital photography? What police force wouldn’t employ the cast of Silent Witness ? Oh, hang on, that’s fiction. Real forensic science is ahead of that, and it’s as well to keep some of it secret. Terrorists are well aware that you need double pairs of gloves these days, and murderers know you need to keep your DNA about your person rather than scattered around the crime scene.     ...

I suspect that most, probably all, of the other Authors Electric either don’t watch TV at all or concentrate on programmes devoted to culture, the arts and serious discussions of crucial social issues. I imagine them sitting back on a Charles Eames chair, sipping a glass of Château Pétrus and enjoying a serialisation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason on the latest Bang and Olufsen. My own diet, on the other hand, is predominantly of football, rugby, cricket and golf viewed from a Scrabble-named IKEA chair as I scoff a tub of peanut butter ice cream. A Charles Eames Chair Fine, it’s a very popular, quite addictive medium with highly professional writers, actors, presenters, producers and the rest who cater for almost all tastes. Even the despised commercials show levels of creative and professional excellence way beyond those of some blockbuster movies. But I really don’t like what it’s done with the notion of ‘reality’. I know it’s a cliché, but one of the reasons is t...

Ever since the financial crash of 2008, money has become a far more popular topic in fiction, and the TV series Follow the Money had us on the edge of our seats as it dealt with financial malpractice. However, the fact that they were talking in kroner made it timeless for us Brits! How you deal with money in fiction is an interesting topic on its own, though. Times change, and if we could predict how some of us would be a lot richer than we are. If you’re writing a book that you expect to be of zero interest in three years’ time then the issue isn’t a critical one. But if you’re hoping that people will carry on reading it and regard it as contemporary, rather than historical, the scenario is somewhat different. The examples I’m giving here aren’t all e-books, as we’re dealing with past publications, but that’s why they’re relevant. Missing Link   was finally published in 2009, fifteen years after it was originally written. It was set in what then seemed the far distant future ...