Authors Electric

It all started with the triffids. Whether it’s science fiction, dystopia or fantasy, plants have a lot to offer from horror to humour. I found John Wyndham’s creation absolutely terrifying. Mankind is rendered blind by a meteor shower, and the genetically-engineered triffids become the dominant species. They are equipped with a powerful sting that can kill, and they can uproot themselves and walk. It also becomes clear that they can communicate with one another. The book was written in 1951, long before we knew anything about the relationship between fungus and trees, and the underground web that passes information back and forth just as efficiently as the internet. The more we know, the more we realise we don’t know, and the more we ought to realise that interfering with nature can have unexpected and usually unpleasant results. The saying In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king has been around for a long time, and certainly in Wyndham’s novel the people who were already b...

In the olden days, when typewriters and carbon copies and sending everything off by post was the way things were done, getting an agent was comparatively easy. It wasn’t something you could do by simply pressing a computer key; it took time, effort, nice plastic folders and a lot of typewriter ribbons. Not as many people bothered. I sent three short stories off to an agent, and was taken on straight away. She wanted me to write a book and so, full of confidence and the conviction that I could do something really different I went for speculative fiction, and my main character was an intelligent vegetable that could move and was used as a form of transport. I probably had some sort of plot, but I can’t remember it now. Astonishingly, she didn’t like it. I didn’t learn my lesson because, many years later, although I’d had a lot of short stories published and several radio plays broadcast I was still trying to do something radical. That time I set it 5 million years in the future; evolutio...