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John Birmingham

John Birmingham lives in Australia, and is the author of the cult classic He Died With a Falafel in His Hand and the award-winning history Leviathan. Between writing books he contributes to a wide range of newspapers and magazines on topics as diverse as biotechnology and national security.

John Birmingham, author of high-octane thriller, Weapons of Choice, tells us how his novel started out.

Unless they’re catching a flight or meeting a friend you just don’t find antiquarian booksellers in airports. Not doing business anyway. There’s something about the artificial lighting, the travelators, the ceaseless movement and sense of transition that doesn’t lend itself to stillness and contemplation, the prerequisite environment for appreciating big ‘L’ literature. You know, literature as Bircher muesli: dense, worthy, difficult and demanding – but good for your soul in the same way that the grim, joyless chewing of horse oats and rock hard pebbles of dried fruit is good for the bowels.

Your Austens, your Brontes, your Brothers Karamazov and Ullyssses, they just don’t get a look in at the airport. Oh sure, you’ll get last year’s Booker Prize winner, and the latest Nobel or Pulitzer. But they’re the traveller’s equivalent of having a well thumbed copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time lying around the living room. We all know you didn’t read it and you are never going to. Maybe you meant well, but inevitably Mr King, or Mr Clancy or increasingly unusual Ms Cornwell distracted you.

As well they might, because while they’re not exactly troubling those bookies nutting out the odds for this year’s Orange Prize, these fine wordsmiths have all performed the magic trick of writing marvellous books that somehow manage to improve even further with altitude. I have always envied them.

I most envied them about seven or eight years ago when I was being held prisoner in the stacks of the Mitchell Library, researching Leviathan – a very long, worthy history of Sydney, to be published just before that city’s Olympic Games. Six days a week, and a half-day on Sunday, I’d find myself buried in Captain Bligh’s testimony to the Board of Inquiry into the Rum Rebellion of 1808, or scouring Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor , in search of some obscure reference to a convict or migrant soon to be sent out to Botany Bay. Four and a half years it took, and I really needed a break.

So I began reading airport novels. The more outlandish the plot, the more cardboard the characters, the more I enjoyed them. Before long however, just reading them wasn’t enough. I’d begun to play with ideas for the biggest, most whizz-bang airport novel in the history of the genre. I had no intention of publishing it. I was just playing around to wind down for half an hour at the end of each day’s work.

So I built myself a powerful aircraft carrier battlegroup. And then I gave them some lasers and made them from The Future. And then I sent them back in time through a wormhole. And then I thought bugger that, they’re going back to an alternate past! And Prince Harry’s going with them. That’s right, Prince Harry! He’d make a kick arse SAS guy, I reckon. And he did.

Before long, my terribly serious non fiction history had sort of, uh, stalled somewhat, while I’d written about forty thousand words of a book I never intended to show anyone. It had been written entirely for my own amusement. For it amused me no end to think of a powerful military force from our near future sucked back to an alternate 1946 where the Nazis and Imperial Japan had won the war. The kicker was that Prince Harry’s mates could wipe the smile of Hitler’s ugly moosh in about half an hour, but because they were from our equal opportunity future the battle group was full of Latino-American lesbian fighter pilots, and African-American Marine Corps colonels, and the captain of the most powerful stealth destroyer in the world, HMS Trident, was a lapsed Muslim Englishwoman of half Pakistani descent. The question was, would the world of the 1940s want to be rescued by them?

Well, were it not for my friend Garth Nix, we’d never have found out. I eventually finished my history of Sydney, and no longer needing to be distracted I put away my notes for the time travelling alt-hist technothriller without a name. It was only a year or so later, having a drink with Garth, that I mentioned in passing how I’d wasted a good couple of months playing with this idea when I should have been hard at it in the Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Australian Historical Society. Garth, a best selling fantasy author in the US, asked if he could see my notes and I let him on the basis that he tell nobody about it. After all, I’d just invested four and a half years convincing everyone that I was a serious writer, perhaps even a middling big ‘L’ lit kinda guy.

Garth, god bless him, disobeyed me, and next thing I knew there were Americans on the phone demanding ‘to see the goddamn manuscript a hunnert an’ eighty degrees south of yesterday!’

What was I to do, but agree to their demands?

They loved the story so much that they changed it immediately, setting it in a real 1942, instead of some weird Nazis-won-the-war 1946. It was a good call, even though it meant I suddenly had to launch into three years worth of historical research every bit as gruelling as my long haul through the archives for Leviathan .

Most importantly, it was fun. Go on. Try it for yourself. Give Prince Harry a few years to fill out, hand him a lethal arsenal of programmable grenades, superguns and monobonded active matrix body armour and send him after the Fuhrer. See if you don’t have some fun too.

As much as I enjoyed shooting down Messerschmitts with Metalstorm pods and having at the Bismarck with the Trident’s plasma yield sub-fusion cruise missiles, it was still the interaction of two cultures that drove the story for me. Because although Weapons of Choice is a conventional technothriller in some ways – okay, maybe not that conventional – it was also a great vehicle for exploring all sort of vexed identity issues; the sort of things you don’t normally get in your average Chris Ryan or Andy McNab – as brilliant as they always are.

Thus, when poor Captain Halabi isn’t fighting off a wave of Stukas in the Channel, she’s just as likely to dealing with the attentions of some chinless twit from the War Ministry. Add into this mix, the back-story of a War Terror turned Clash of Civilisations which is still blighting the Twenty-First century a decade and a half from now and you get a really interesting mix of prejudices to play with. The up timers think of everyone in 1942 as ignorant bigots, which the contemporaries, or ‘temps, as they become known, are staggered by the unfeeling, machine-like way in which their great grandchildren make war.

It’s the type of thing which gets people talking, arguing, and occasionally even fightin’ mad and if you feel the need to add your opinions into the mix after you’ve read the book you can roll up to my blog, Cheeseburger Gothic (birmo.journalspace.com) and punch it out with hundreds of other readers. We’re always looking for new best friends.