The Newman Files

The prolific Kim Newman's new novel, Life's Lottery, is available in hardback from Simon & Schuster. He also has a novella published by PS Publishing, Andy Warhol's Dracula, which may later form part of the next novel in his loose alternative history/Dracula series. Consequently we thought it timely to post this, a 1996 interview covering Life's Lottery and Kim's fiction in general. Many of his novels are featured below, along with his career to date, involving fiction of many forms, and his film reviewing. You can read an extract from Life's Lottery here too, as well as reviews of some of Kim's books.

I thought we'd take it from The Quorum and the stories from around that time, as that's the period that isn't covered. So having said that, my first question is why write in the first place?
I can't do anything else. It's not a conscious choice. It's something I've always done, literally. Back in primary school I was one of those kids who wrote stories. When told to write an essay, or a poem, I would write a story. It's probably what lots of kids do. I'd recycle films I'd seen, or television I'd watched, bits of James Bond or Doctor Who or whatever. And later, the Universal horror films and that kind of stuff. It grew from there.

I had a kind of blip in the early eighties where I'd graduated and I was unemployed and trying to get a job, stuff like that. I never did get a job. But eventually I fell into being a writer, because I was still writing. I did some work for the theatre and all this kind of stuff. Eventually I started selling the stuff I wrote and after a period of suffering, and trial, and agony, I began to earn a living from it. But it's never been a conscious decision, I never thought, 'Oh, I'll leave University and become A Writer'. I do not remember ever thinking that, it was something I always did, and the big hurdle for me was getting the notion that I could do this professionally. I'd always assumed I would have to do something else, but thanks to Margaret Thatcher there was nothing else. If I'd graduated at a happier time for the economy I'd probably be a clerk somewhere, or very unhappy in middle management.

Graduate opportunities were very poor then, particularly if, like me, you had an English degree. I moved to London because there was absolutely no chance of me doing anything where my parents lived, in Somerset.

The Backwater of The Quorum?
Yes. The Quorum is not an autobiographical novel, but all the places and the furniture of the times is drawn from my life.

I didn't think that it was autobiographical, but that the characters were based on real people. I thought Jonathan Ross was loosely adapted, Nick Logan very loosely adapted.
I've no idea who Nick Logan is, so -

Oh, he's the guy who started The Face.
Oh, I know, yes. No, who was I thinking of for that? There was someone, ermm . . . The Face was in there, in the character's cultural life - it was Mark, wasn't it?

Yes.
I was thinking slightly of Tony Parsons, who I don't know. Jonathan Ross I do know. For that character [Michael Dixon] I was thinking . . . In terms of his career, he's a bit like Jonathan Ross, but he's also a bit like Stephen Fry. The character's nowhere near the two.

It was a difficult book to do because it's intended to seem like a book about real people, because it's about people who are famous, people in the media. So you have to take bits and pieces from them . . . The comic book character [Mickey Yeo] isn't Neil Gaiman, but I used bits of his career, because I know Neil quite well. Of course some people thought it was meant to be Neil. There are elements of what Alan Moore does in there as well, but certainly the character is nothing like Neil.

Yeo's so abrasive I thought you'd made him up as the nastiest person you could possibly dream up.
Not really. He is certainly the nastiest person in the book, in which everybody's sort of nasty. But there's nothing in there that I haven't seen anybody do.

One of the things that's really difficult about the book . . . I was trying to convey that these people were in fact talented, that their works were worthwhile. I wouldn't say I entirely love these peoples' work. If I was doing it now I'd probably make him more like Irvine Welsh. I wanted that idea of someone who was basically middle class and often try to pretend that he is a complete drop-out, and still wear very expensive leather jackets.

Derek Leech, I suppose, is roughly analogous to Richard Branson, Rupert Murdoch and so on.
Sure, and Robert Maxwell as well. There's a little of Sylvio Berlosconi too. He doesn't actually look or act like any of those people, but in my fictional world he fills the hole left by those people. And of course he's the devil. It actually makes him a bit more interesting, I think, than Rupert Murdoch, who I find . . . there's a kind of horrible banality about him and what he does.

Whereas I think that Leech, although he's not particularly flamboyant, though he has done some flamboyant things in some of the stories, represents a kind of charismatic Antichrist type figure. It's not a conscious influence, but I might have been thinking of the way Sam Neill played Damien in the last of the Omen films, which I saw again this week because they've just come out on video. Watching it I realised I may well have taken some of that. He's a much flatter character than Leech but there are bits of it that have that element. It's a very unimportant movie and doesn't really work but there are moments in it that might have started me thinking. Although there are other elements of Derek Leech that obviously come from other things, Marlowe and Goethe, there's even quite a bit of Thomas Mann in there. I tried to mix up all the different Faust stories. I have to say, when I was doing The Quorum I reread the Marlowe. I didn't reread the Goethe or the Mann but they're on the shelves, I have absorbed it.

I haven't read the Goethe since junior school, to be honest.
Me too. Bits of it are fantastic, but it is, you know, long! Whereas Marlowe is still really zippy, there are lots of things happening and I think Marlowe's ending is better as well.

Yeah, he's damned.
That's it. I think if you let them off then you start thinking, well, yeah, that's cheating. Really I think that if you submit to a deal then you stick with it no matter how bad it is for you. And letting Faust off, it strikes me it shows lack of honour. It's supposed to signify his redemption, but I don't think getting out of a contract is a redemption.

I don't think you can be redeemed that way, you have to go through it.
Maybe that's sophistry but I did want to bring all that into it.

Leech is British, of course. You know, born out of the mud of the Thames, by Docklands.
Oh quite right, yes. I'm British so I wanted a British devil. But otherwise there's unconscious influences, some imported from the first chapter of The Man Who Fell To Earth. The film rather than the book may have been at the back of my mind.

The Quorum is about British culture in the end. It's full of things that are influenced by American stuff but I wanted him to epitomise, to grow out of that kind of British trash culture, The Sun and Sky Television and that kind of Murdoch empire. That's why I rooted him in this kind of Isle of Dogs, greyhound racing, rag trade culture.

You chose The Isle of Dogs because that area began to decay around the time Leech was born?
Yes. It struck me as - out of the Thames, you know.

It was a very British decay as well, the East End being the sort of dump of London, just outside the city wall.
Yeah. I wasn't quite born there, I was born in Brixton. But certainly that section of the book is coloured a little by my childhood memories of bombsites and that kind of stuff.

I've been involved in doing some film projects, I've had a few meetings with people. Americans can't tell the difference between Broadwater Farm and the East End. Their idea of British poverty is still back to back houses and Cathy Come Home kind of stuff. Housing estates in the middle of nowhere, that's where the real locus of misery is. That's the landscape of 'The Original Dr Shade'.

Leech changes a little. In some of the stories he's completely vicious - he does something pretty nasty in 'SQPR' -
Oh?

He sets up Roy - his name's not Roy Race, though that's -
Roy Roberts, no, Roy Robartes.

And in 'The Original Dr Shade', of course.
Yes, that's right. When I re-use characters, quite often I start all over again. That's true of all the connections. Every time I've re-used a character - I suppose The Bloody Red Baron is direct from Anno Dracula, though that's about the only time. And even 'The Organ Donors', which is a kind of curtain raiser for The Quorum, and even then there's a crucial omission between the two to make them both work on their own terms, being that the lead character both, Sally, knows stuff, at the end of 'Organ Donors' she seems to forget by the beginning of The Quorum.

She's got sort of half a memory of it in The Quorum.
Yes. It's simply because they are separate works.

Leech doesn't actually do anything to anybody in The Quorum. He just relies on people to be rotten. And he's absolutely not a fascist, he's a capitalist.
Quite right.

Whereas in 'The Original Dr Shade' he's absolutely a fascist who happens to be a capitalist.
That's partly because it was written in the era of Thatcherism, and I think we've moved on a bit from that to an even grimmer kind of dull notion of evil. I think what Leech does in The Quorum is just show people what they can do. He doesn't actually make anybody do anything.

He's quite nice to some people.
That's right. And particularly because you have to live with him for a while, I think that in the end in The Quorum there are always stirrings of humanity. I think he quite likes people to stand up to him. I think that every time he wins, he's a little disappointed that his low opinion of people is confirmed. The fact that Sally, and in the end Neil, won't go along with it means that for him it's still worth playing the game.

And he wants to be human as well.
Yeah, he does have a moment of rage at the end. When he loses there's a sense of anger about him.

I was going to say, the only emotion of Leech's I'd noticed, is the moment where he experiences taste for the first time, and he's ecstatic. That and the compassion he shows towards Sally.
I don't know whether it's a compassion thing, I think it's a respect thing. I think because it's a relief to find one person, no matter how pathetic and ordinary, and in Sally trying not to write 'a heroine', I was trying to write someone who just had a certain bedrock of moral values and wouldn't do it, and just wouldn't go along with it.

The Quorum's very easy to read as a cynical book because it is about people doing terrible things. I thought quite a lot of evil is just through weakness, and so I thought it was important to have at least the one character who just stood for it and said 'No, I won't do this.' Historically there are plenty of occasions of this, like the people who sheltered Anne Frank, and that kind of stuff. So I didn't really want her to be a heroine, I just felt that she didn't have a choice. I think also it's a very British thing, it's to do with notions of duty and all that kind of stuff, that are a bit old-fashioned now.

There's a sense that one just can't go along with it, whereas the sense of Dixon and Amphlett just going along with it is that they were just tempted, you know, out of weakness.
And also they were only kids.

You mention HG Wells somewhere. Famous Monsters I think.
Wells is certainly an influence. It's hard not to be influenced by Wells.

Who are your favourite writers?
Good question . . . There are people like Wells, or Raymond Chandler, or Lovecraft, who are sort of genre touchstones. There are people I have enthusiasms for who are less well known. I like Richard Condon very much, Stanley Ellian, Cornell Woolrich. People who haven't quite hit the Top of the Pops of genre writing.

Why The Rockford Files?
Oh, I really like it. I think it's the best TV show of the seventies. I'm a great admirer of that. Again, it's not a trade choice.

I'd put it on a par with Starsky & Hutch.
No, no, Starsky and Hutch don't have any relationships.

Neither does Rockford in the end.
The great thing about The Rockford Files is it's an inversion of Philip Marlowe. Philip Marlowe is 'a man alone'. The whole thing about Rockford is he likes to be alone. He's got these really complicated relationships with his Dad, and his lawyer, and his best friend on the police. And the strain on his face as he drives into yet more problems. He's the bloke who would really like to go fishing, but has to make a living. A great many episodes I rate very highly.

Sally reminds me of Hannah Wolfe for some reason.
Hmmm. There isn't a particular connection. When she very first appeared I think she was a bit too much like most of the female private eyes of literature, but she kind of became more individualistic the more I wrote about her, and you do find out more about her in each story. I think it's only really with 'Organ Donors' that you gain any sense of her background.

And The Quorum.
Yeah. And I've left her alone since then.

Have you got any more plans for Sally?
I'm not sure. Probably. At the moment not, but . . .

You wouldn't rule it out?
That's right, yeah.

Is the movie going to be made?
I've just finished the script, so keep your eye on Screen International. It'd be nice. The producer's very keen, and the development money's been very nice. I've gone through umpteen different drafts and changed it all around. There are things I can't remember whether they're in the book or not, that are in the script. I can't remember whether I made them up or whether they were in the book first. I think that as it stands the ending of the script is slightly better than the ending of the book, but there are enormous numbers of things I had to leave out that I really like, because I can't get them all in. And there are lots of complicated flashbacks, lots of things . . . So there are several things that can't quite fit into the structure of it. But I am quite pleased with it. At the moment it reads quite well. It's playing a little long at the moment but that'll be changed.

Other influences . . . You grew up with Hammer films, Doctor Who, Universal . . .
Oh, yeah. True.

I notice that every story or book of yours I look at has some sort of comic reference, usually a made up one.
That's interesting. Like a lot of people in the business I went through a period of really being interested in comics, but it was between eight and eleven. I still vividly remember that moment when I decided that Marvel Comics were more interesting than DC Comics because they had better characterisation. Now I think we'd slip that round the other way.

Absolutely.
Back then I - and this must be about 1969 - I remember going from reading Superman and Batman, which at that period were in a really bad phase. Just nothing was happening with them, the characters were just going through repetition. And then discovering Fantastic Four, and The X-Men and Doctor Strange and all that and being really quite taken by what now actually seems rather thin. And like a lot of grown-ups in this field I've looked back at some of that stuff. The thing that strikes me now, particularly if you look at, say, Fantastic Four or Spider-Man, where what was innovative at the time was the idea that these heroes had regular lives and they couldn't pay their bills or they kept being evicted because they blew up houses and that kind of stuff, is that, OK, that was innovation, but I think they rubbed it in too much because in the commentary they'd always say things like, 'You'd never see another comic book hero do this.' I think there was a smugness about the innovation that I don't like now.

Stan Lee was a psychopath [jokingly].
Well, yeah. We don't want to go too far into that! Certainly, and I would suspect it was mostly down to Stan Lee, that . . . Not to take away from the fact that he did have some brilliant ideas. Interesting that I think both Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, who are the great under-heralded creators of Marvel Comics left over arguments.

Both reckon they wrote a lot of the stories.
Yeah, that's right, because they have the thing where you do the artwork and then they put in the words later. Although the dialogue was actually quite good for comics at the time. You just compared it to how bad the rest of it was!

I think if Lee adjusted a few characters . . . minor characters, and sub-plots, it was still a huge innovation.
Yeah. But both those creators left over arguments where in retrospect they sound right. Although I can understand because they wanted to take it further, they wanted to do innovations. Jack Kirby's big argument was he wanted Doctor Doom to take his mask off and you find out that he had a slight scratch. And that that was the thing, his vanity was so monstrous, that he couldn't take it that he had a tiny disfigurement. And Ditko left because he wanted the Green Goblin to be nobody, as opposed to someone you'd met before in the strip. That would be the whole point, this character would be a complete non-entity who was just on a random collision with Spider-Man.

I lost interest in comics for a long time after that, and it's only recently that I've started looking at it again, partly because as you know friends of mine have written them so I tend to read their stuff. I've gone back and bought very expensive reprints of the book I used to have for sixpence.

Do you want to absorb your old influences?
I might be unusual in writing about comics but not writing comics. And also I think that there is a vein throughout it's like dealing with the shortcomings of the medium and there are certainly things I that you still can't do. Writing novels is much better, there's still much more you can do with it.

How many novels is it now?
I don't know. I can tell you offhand . . . what is it . . .

Seven or eight Jack Yeovils . . .
Depending on whether Genevieve Undead is a novel or not, which I think it is, and it's six Kim Newmans. So it's fourteen novels. The reason it's confusing me is that there are two non-fiction books and three books I did on top of that.

Two non-fiction books?
Nightmare Movies and Wild West Movies.

Oh, of course, I forgot Wild West Movies. And of course there's Ghastly Beyond Belief and, er, thingy, that other one . . . 
And Horror: Best 100 Best Books and In Dreams. That's the lot, I think.

Why do Jack Yeovil stuff, exactly? Is it really - I don't mean it in a derogatory way - hack work?
Not particularly. It was originally floated to me as a way to make money, of course. But then again, writing novels is a way of making money. I don't do anything else. And once you get past that, I couldn't have done it if I hadn't been interested in it.

The thing is, I probably wouldn't have written those books on my own because they take spin-offs from other peoples' ideas and so forth. But no, I'm quite pleased with most of them. One or two of them, I think, are sloppy in ways that I wouldn't have done if I'd been working entirely, 100% as me, or had more time to write them. But I think that in their own way some of the Jack Yeovil's are as good as or better than some of the early books I wrote.

Your 'Pitbull Brittan' story is a Jack Yeovil isn't it?
That was kind of a fluke, because I'd created Jack Yeovil as a name. There are several other things that appeared as Jack Yeovil and have been reprinted as me. For instance, until you mentioned it I'd forgotten that was originally credited to Jack Yeovil. Of course it was. If I was doing it all over again I'd put my name on it.

I got the idea you'd done it as a sort of sub-stream of your main work.
It was because everybody else was doing it, everybody else who was doing those books for Games Workshop was using a pseudonym, so I just assumed that was what you did. If I'd thought it through I probably wouldn't have done it.

You were quoted somewhere years ago, I believe, as saying that your fiction was about society rather than the individual.
Maybe . . . It's not a hard and fast thing, I do stories about lots of stuff.

Most horror tends to be about the individual.
I feel that a lot of - particularly American horror - tends to be sort of 'Me first' stuff, you know, 'What am I suffering'. Child abuse seems to be the kind of big cliché of that. It's like, 'I was abused so I'm a monster', or whatever.

It's a big issue and there's a lot to be said about it, but I think there's a rather cynical co-opting of it into what I would regard as meretricious rubbish, but there's a lot of meretricious rubbish around in all genres.

Shaun Hutson for example.
Yeah, I'm not a great fan of his stuff! I'm not a great fan of Jim Herbert's stuff either. There is something there, in both of those people. I wouldn't choose to read it. I have read quite a lot of it because I've reviewed quite widely in the field and I do try to keep up with what's going on. Which is why I'm not entirely sure if I'm comfortably slotted as a horror writer but I'm not one of those people who goes around saying, 'Oh, I don't write that nasty stuff. My werewolf-cheerleader novel is about relationships.'

I can't see how you got pigeon-holed as one in the first place, rather than SF or fantasy.
Well, I wrote a book about vampires, and I wrote a book about horror films as well. And of course the early books: Bad Dreams is a horror novel, and Jago's a horror novel.

But your first novel, The Night Mayor, definitely isn't. The Quorum definitely, surely isn't.
I'm not sure about that. If you look at it, The Quorum is one of the oldest horror stories. It's a Faust story and it's a deliberate attempt - I mean, what it is, it is a horror novel but it's not like most of the others. I deliberately tried to write a horror novel in which nobody dies.

But there's no horror in it. Nothing horrific happens to anyone.
Nobody's physically hurt, but that doesn't mean there's no horror in it. It doesn't mean nothing's horrific in it. I think what happens to all those people is pretty horrific.

Yeah, but it's not charged, or blood and guts in the manner of Skipp & Spector or Shaun Hutson.
Oh no. Horror's that, but horror's MR James and whatever as well. There are other aspects of horror. I suppose it's spiritual horror, and I don't have a problem with that [being described as horror].

Why do Leech's fangs keep growing?
It's a good image. I've no idea where it came from. They don't grow if he grinds his teeth... There are a lot of things where you pick up some tiny detail and think, I know exactly what I was thinking of there, what the touchstone that made me put that in was. In that case I don't know. He does chew all the way through the book though, an ultra-bland bloke who keeps chewing.

Why Baron von Richthofen?
He's an interesting man. I wanted to do a book about the First World War, and he was the figure who stood out, that seemed to work best as a leading... well, not leading character, but as an emblematic character for my vampire version of World War One. He was the Bloody Red Baron, you know.

What do vampires mean for you?
This question keeps coming up, because obviously I've written about them so much. I have to say that they don't mean anything for me. The whole point of these two books is that vampires mean a lot of different things. It's a mythology or an image which is multivalent. There are all sorts of interpretations of vampirism. What I've tried to do is use almost all of them, and so we keep coming back to it in the books, you see different types.

To me the problem of vampire novels is the act of vampirism, one person drinking someone else's blood. It's very repetitive, so I've tried to take different variants. I think there's a lot less of it in The Bloody Red Baron than there was in Anno Dracula because I felt I'd done that. So I keep trying to find different things to do with it, or to do with vampires. I think it shows the elasticity of the concept that there are so many ways of playing it.

What's your idea of the significance of the vampire today, why is everyone fascinated with it? Because it's useful?
I think so. I think it's not a single thing, and if you ask most authors they tell you the thing that's the ultimate significance of the vampire and how it refers to what's in their last book. I can't play that, I don't know what the rigid attraction of it is. I only know it's there, and I'm quite pleased with that because it means people bought and read the book.

It's something that, like all characters or stories or legends that crop up again and again and again, it's because there are enormous numbers of ways of playing it. I think you can say the same about Hamlet or Sherlock Holmes or The Three Musketeers or whatever. Those are stories that mean so much to different times, to different generations, different people, and they will keep going. Once you get past a certain classicity then there's all this stuff there that you can go and play with and reinterpret and, I suppose, it gives a certain solid ground. Everybody knows what they're getting, but then they get some surprises from it.

Like DH Lawrence. What's he in the book for?
Well, he was actually married to the Baron's cousin, for a start! But, in the same way, there are Hemingway references in it, it's all about the dawn of modernism and all that sort of stuff.

You've done screenplays for what, exactly?
I've done screenplays for The Quorum and Dr Shade, which are in whatever limbo these things are in.

Dr Shade is still set in England, I take it?
Oh yes. That's one thing they've not wanted to change.

Chris Fowler was saying that Spanky is now set in Pittsburgh . . .
To me that's silly, because Chris writes so well about London, so why set it in Pittsburgh. It just becomes a story then, and the story's the least important part of the book. There's never really been any serious attempt to do The Quorum or Dr Shade as American stories. I don't think they would work. But also, I am willing to compromise. Well, not compromise - I can see avenues of making these films work for an international audience. At one point I offered to got through The Quorum and explain all the things Americans wouldn't get, for the American edition. I would cut out the more arcane stuff, maybe replace it with references I thought would work for them. But in the end they didn't do that, probably through laziness as anything else. But for instance, in the script of The Quorum there are so many things that are absolutely fixed and have to be related to the specific class and geography and location . . . but there are things that aren't. I wouldn't mind if Sally was played by an American.

She inevitably will be!
Mmmm . . . not necessarily. But all I'd have to do if she were is rewrite her mother. That would be fine. She'd be a bit of an outsider but that works for the story context. None of the other people could be American. Also I suspect Leech could be played by an American. I don't think that would matter. They are stories that are set in London, though, and they're stuck with that.

Future novels. You've completed another novel already, haven't you?
No. I've started one. It's kind of a little like The Quorum. It's called Life's Lottery. And it's - it's very nebulous because I haven't done that much work on it, but it's about somebody who has a lot of choices and it explores the choices that he makes. He's given a chance to see how things might work out otherwise. The unusual thing about it is that it's written in the second person and the narrator is Derek Leech. So it's Derek Leech talking to someone.

I'm not sure if that will even be explicit, but that's how I'm writing it. The voice is Derek Leech telling you - although you as a character - what might happen. But I haven't got very far with it. All this may change.

Leech doesn't sleep, does he, from what I remember.
That's right.

I got the impression that what he does instead of sleep is turn himself off when there're no people in the room.
That's possible. Because it's a slightly alienating device I may well dump it. But certainly, Leech will be a part of it. And the lead character is somebody who would have been at school with the Quorum. It's the same school, but not a character you've met before. But you meet some of the people again. The trouble is that at the moment I've only really only written the bits that deal with his primary and secondary school. I'm up to his rag day 1976 or something. I'm up to the school disco sequence. But there's another 25 years worth of stuff.

The Quorum rang horribly true for me. I don't want that ringing true as well.
A lot of people say that, a lot of people who broadly fall within my age range, because nobody else was writing about it. It's like...

Playing Monopoly with a Dalek as a token?
Yeah, all that stuff. All those things, that's why all that furniture is in there. And almost nobody has written like that...Trainspotting, for instance, in theory ought to be about people like that. Irvine Welsh is somebody like that.

The problem with Trainspotting is that it's about trainspotters but there are no trainspotters in it.
Yes. And, in some way I wanted to redeem [the characters] from the incurable naffness of it . . . Horrible as some of these characters are, I did try. I reconciled myself with some aspects of my past in writing it. And there were things that people told me they found quite moving, the first day at school sequence, and all that kind of stuff. It brought back stuff that they had suppressed completely. I have to say, I ran it past Eugene Byrne, who I collaborate with quite often.

Who you were at school with?
Yes, that's right. He remembered one of the things I'd forgotten. He's a lot more bitter about it than I am. He wrote this amazing rant about the disciplinary system at our old Grammar school, and how prefects were identified by tassles on their caps and that gave them the right to do terrible, terrible things to people. All that's in The Quorum and there'll be a lot more of that this time round. That's not all there is to the book, there's other stuff going on. Universal stuff I hope.

What happens in the end of this novel?
I don't know, I haven't written it yet.

Oh, you work like that then. You don't start from a -
The whole thing about this novel is it gives you the choices, so it kind of has a multiplicity of endings, but only one beginning. So it will fan out. An enormous number of things will happen. I hope it all ties up. But like I say, I'm in the middle of it at the moment, so I can't promise. I can't even promise it'll be called Life's Lottery, that's the working title. The publishers liked it. I quite like it, but we'll see - it just may not get explained. The other title I had for it was Choose Your Own Adventure, but that may end up being a subtitle.

Any more short stories in the works?
Just done one for New Worlds, whenever that comes out. It's a Western story set in the West Country, but I don't want to give away too much because you'll be out before the story. Eugene and I are working on a couple more collaborative things in the series we've been doing for Interzone. There are two more of those currently in the works and we hope to do a collection early next year that'll have a further story that will tie the whole thing up. They're getting longer and more complicated, and more work.

When's your next short story collection?
I don't have enough stuff yet. I think, since Famous Monsters, which is the last one, I've not written that much. Last year I wrote one, very tiny short story. Since then I've written two more 'Where The Bodies Are Buried' stories which are quite substantial, one of which was in Dark Terrors, which is already out. The other is in next year's Dark Terrors. I'm currently collaborating with Paul McAuley on a story as well. The thing about collaborations is that they go on for ever, you post the disks back and forth. Eventually it'll get finished.

Where did this tiny little story appear?
There are two tiny little stories. One was in Interzone, 'The Slow News Day', and the other one was called 'The Germans Won', which is in Nick Royle's anthology of football stories [see our Reviews].

Have you given up on near future predictions now, since you have such rotten luck with them?
Not particularly, no. The last 'Where The Bodies Are Buried' story, which is 'Where The Bodies Are Buried 2020', that is a near-future story. It kind of sticks onto the beginning of the world seen in The Night Mayor and some of my earlier stories. It's the beginnings of that form of entertainment. But also it's about Europe, it's what the EC might be like in twenty years time.

It's another of your cyberpunk type things?
Not really because it's set, I would imagine, twenty or thirty years before that, so the language isn't quite the same, although there are the beginnings of it. As usual it's not quite a perfect join, but it does bring it full circle. I wrote those stories before cyberpunk existed as a discrete sub-genre, and I'd finished doing them by the time it did. I felt that I'd finished that particular strand. I'm not saying I won't go back to it, probably, 'Where The Bodies Are Buried 2020' does revisit those stories in a seriousish way. It also involves some of the characters and plot threads from the Dark Future books as well. Again it's kind of pulling in together or re-using old material. And of course my werewolf story was another near-future thing, the one in Famous Monsters called 'Out Of The Night When The Full Moon Is Bright'. That's set in Los Angeles in about three years time.

You're right, you can lose out. 'SQPR' was proved hideously wrong in the short term. It was published the week before the general election, and of course we all assumed that the Labour Party was going to win and I thought it was important to start writing about that, and then of course they lost. That said, if you reread it now - in fact even since Famous Monsters it's actually much more accurate now - all the stuff about the Prime Minister in the story is very like Tony Blair. It's a woman, but they are almost exactly the same so in the long term I may have been right.

She's in other stuff as well.
She's in The Quorum briefly, but that's before she became Prime Minister, and she's in 'Where The Bodies Are Buried 2020' as well, which takes place late in her Prime Minister-ship.

You've got her whole career mapped out?
No, that's why all this stuff never adds up, you just go back and see who's available to put in. I don't have any coherent future history that I am sticking with, and all the stories contradict each other. •

Extract from Life's Lottery

Reviews of Kim's books

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