Tag: fantasy

A bookish chat with David Atkinson, author of Future Proof

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I’m delighted to welcome author David Atkinson to What Cathy Read Next today. David’s novel Future Proof was published in 2023 and is pitched as ‘a bumpy, fun-filled ride of what ifs and second chances’. The book has received positive reviews with readers variously describing it as ‘a joyous, life-affirming rollercoaster of a tale’, ‘different, and funny, and clever’ and ‘a fantastic story with many twists and turns’.

Future Proof is available to purchase now in all formats, including audiobook. And it has an accompanying original musical soundtrack, of which more later.

Read on as I chat to David about how the 800-year-old head of William Wallace sparked the idea for the book (yes, really) and why an Excel spreadsheet is his vital writing tool.

About the Book

What would you do if you could go back in time and change your life? Which regrets and mistakes would you fix? What would your life look like now?

In Future Proof an experimental medical treatment goes wrong which allows Sam Harris to do exactly that. He starts by standing up to the kids who bullied him at school and then sets about trying to fix the mess he made of the rest of his life.

However, as he discovers, changing his past doesn’t always guarantee a brighter future.

Find Future Proof on Goodreads

Q&A with David Atkinson, author of Future Proof

Q. How did you come up with the concept for Future Proof?

It came about during research for another book I was working on, delving into the murky world of genetics, specifically the DNA obtained from the 800-year-old head of William Wallace. It was here I discovered the concept of epigenetics, which is essentially the manipulation of the human genome to try to cure trauma. The idea is the geneticist can identify genes that were ‘damaged’ earlier in life and effectively ‘switch them off’ to cure mental health issues. It was this that gave me the idea of the treatment; instead of going in and fixing the earlier damaged gene, the patient would go back and experience the part of his life where the trauma occurred. There was quite a lot of science in early drafts but the feedback I got said it was dull so I pared it right back.

Q. Give us a brief pen picture of the book’s main character, Sam Harris.

Sam is one of life’s victims. Due to things that have happened to him, he’s essentially dysfunctional and unable to care for himself properly. This is where we first meet him; broke, overweight, mentally fragile and vulnerable. His early life was marked by being bullied, and I drew on things that happened to me personally to depict this.

Sam is swept along on the tide of the trips back in time with, initially, very little control over what happens. The one constant is his unshakeable love for Luci, whom he first meets as a kid in school. Luci is the rock he anchors himself to. I do put poor Sam through the mill, but he wins in the end.

Q. Apart from Sam, who was your favourite character to write? 

It has to be Luci. She took on a life of her own, and I had to rein her in, as she kept wanting to go off and do things that had nothing to do with the story. In a way, Luci should get equal billing with Sam, even though it is told from Sam’s point of view. I don’t mind admitting I fell in love with Luci as the story went along. When these guys live inside your head from day to day, you find yourself being pulled back into their world, even though you know it’s not real. Luci’s world is a pretty good place to be.

Q. Author George R.R. Martin is quoted as saying, ‘There are two kinds of writers. There are architects and gardeners. The architects do blueprints before they drive the first nail. The gardeners just dig a hole and plant the seed and see what comes up.’ Which are you? 

I sketch out a rough guideline in an Excel spreadsheet of who everyone is, what they do in the story and whether they’re a leading character. I give them numbers: (1) Major characters (2) Secondary characters (3) Minor characters. I then add a timeline (not so easy in time-travel fiction) and a short note of the main events. I always know my ending before I start.

Q. What’s your favourite and least favourite part of the writing process?

My favourite is the first draft when you’re not worrying about spelling, grammar, or structure, but just getting the story down on the page. My least favourite part is, not as most people would expect, editing and fixing structural and continuity issues, but rewriting. By the time I’m at my fifth rewrite, I’m fed up with the characters and the story as I know it so well. Future Proof was the exception. I found I could add layers of stuff as I went along, most of which readers may well never notice or appreciate, but which added depth to the backstory and characters. I will do this with every story from now on.

Q. There’s an album to accompany Future Proof. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

At the time, I was working on some songs for another project (I write and produce music as a hobby) but it didn’t go anywhere. I thought I’d repurpose some of the songs and make an album to accompany the book. One of the big issues I had was finding a female vocalist – many of the pieces were written for one. After scouring the internet and auditioning singers, I came across Luci Riva from Argentina, who was perfect. The fact she had the same name as my heroine is one of life’s weird coincidences! The songs are on the leading streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music.

Q. What are you working on next?

I’m working on three projects. Quiet Kisses is a romantic comedy utilising William Wallace’s head (as mentioned above) which should be out next summer. Secondly I’m about 60k words in to a follow-up to Future Proof called Future Perfect. I’m hoping to get that out next year too. Finally there’s a book with the working title Under The Ice which will be something of an epic and utterly different to anything I’ve done before. Who knows when that will be finished!

About the Author

David Atkinson is an Edinburgh based writer. His first romantic comedy Love Byte was published by Buried River Press (Joffe Books) and was shortlisted for a Romantic Novelists’s Association award. The follow up Squeezed was well received as was The Second Live of Nathan Jones published in 2019 by One More Chapter, an imprint of Harper Collins.

Connect with David
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Book Review – Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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About the Book

Book cover of Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

There is one other person in the house — a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

Format: Paperback (245 pages) Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publication date: 15th September 2020 Genre: Fantasy, Mystery

Find Piranesi on Goodreads

Purchase Piranesi from Bookshop.org [Disclosure: If you buy books linked to our site, we may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops]

My Review

Piranesi was the book chosen for the October edition of BBC Radio 4’s Bookclub, hosted by broadcaster and author Jim Naughtie. I attended the recording of the programme on 25th September and joined an audience of readers to hear its author Susanna Clarke answer questions about the book. The programme will be transmitted on Sunday 6th October 2024 and is available after that on BBC Sounds (as are all previous episodes of the programme). My review is a combination of my own thoughts about the book and my recollections of the conversation that took place during the recording.

I’ll confess that for the first 80 or so pages of the book I felt completely lost, as if I was in some sort of labyrinth myself. I found myself wondering was Piranesi in an actual building? If so, how did he get there, and why? Perhaps it was all in his head and the House was some sort of analogy for mental illness? I think I was actually trying too hard to make sense of things and when I let myself go with the flow, as it were, I found myself drawn into this strange world the author has created. She admitted her favourite books as a child were C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series and one can see how this would have inspired her conception of the House. Susanna is also an admirer of the works of Jorge Luis Borges. If you’re looking for other intertextual links – as I often find myself doing – than the legend of the Minotaur is certainly one and I also found myself thinking of The Palace of Green Porcelain the Time Traveller discovers in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

Piranesi, which he knows instinctively is not his real name but is the one given to him by the mysterious Other, has a childlike innocence. (The choice of the name Piranesi is no accident. Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an 18th century Italian architect who, amongst other things, produced a series of prints depicting fantastical subterranean prisons.) Where others might find the House forbidding, “our” Piranesi finds it a nurturing entity. It provides him with shelter and food – fish and shellfish – and seaweed which he dries and uses to create all manner of things. He spends his days exploring the various floors and vast halls that make up the House – some of which are derelict – and meticulously recording his findings in journals, his only means of recording the passing of time. Amongst the artefacts in the house are hundreds of statues depicting human figures and animals.

He believes himself to be alone in the House and one of only two living people in the world, the second being the man he knows as the Other. The Other arrives promptly every Tuesday and Thursday in the main vestibule of the House but never ventures any further in. Piranesi looks upon him as a kindly presence because of the useful things he sometimes brings him, such as a pair of shoes or a new supply of multivitamins. I don’t think I’ll be alone in regarding the Other’s intentions as distinctly sinister and manipulative.

Having initially struggled a bit with the fantasy element of the book, surprisingly I found myself regretting when it became more of a mystery as we gradually discover how and why Piranesi came to be in the House. Having said that, in Piranesi the author has created a character you won’t forget, and in the House, the sort of place you might encounter in your dreams.

In three words: Imaginative, fantastical, mysterious
Try something similar: The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

About the Author

Author Susanna Clarke

Susanna Clarke’s debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was first published in more than 34 countries and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. It won British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year, the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award in 2005. 

The Ladies of Grace Adieu, a collection of short stories, some set in the world of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, was published by Bloomsbury in 2006. Piranesi was a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year Award and the RSL Encore Award and won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021. Susanna Clarke lives in Derbyshire. (Photo: Amazon author page)