John Meaney on his new Donal Riordan novel ‘Dark Blood’ : UK SF Book News

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Apr

14

John Meaney on his new Donal Riordan novel ‘Dark Blood’

Posted in: UKSFBN Talks To on 14th April 2008 by Sandy Auden

'Dark Blood' by John Meaney Our introduction to Police Officer Donal Riordan, in last year's Bone Song, was imaginative, dark and brooding. Taking a side-step across genres, from SF to Dark Fantasy, writer John Meaney created a strange world of purple skies and gargoyle-haunted streets, populated by even stranger denizens, then he set them on the trail of a murder mystery that spanned planets.

Now Riordan is back for more adventures in Tristopolis, a city fuelled by the bones of the dead that are burned in huge reactors beneath the city's surface. Riordan is adjusting slowly to being dead. He can sense the presence and the thoughts of his fellow zombies. He can see better, hear more accurately and he's tireless. But none of this will necessarily save him as he begins to investigate who is behind a plot to ensorcel the entire population of Tristopolis.

We tracked Meaney down and quizzed him about his extraordinary new series…

UKSFBN: It's a very imaginative world you've created in Bone Song; what do you think influenced you most when building it?

John Meaney: "Everything spun out from the image of human bones stacked inside reactor piles, and the waves of necroflux resonating back and forth inside the cavities. The stone surroundings seemed naturally to reach out into a vast exaggerated city beneath an indigo sky.

"The towers and gargoyles are dark distortions of the bigger, older cities I've lived in or visited: London, Moscow and above all New York. And the gloomy gothic Manhattan of Steve Ditko's first Dr Strange artwork, which I experienced when I was ill and confined to bed, aged six.

"Within Tristopolis the purple cabs and the men with fedoras come from the mindscape of '40s Bogart movies, and The Untouchables, mixed with more images of mausoleums (and the thing that haunted me before the setting sprang full-blown into being: the eerie, disturbing mass graves from the Siege of Leningrad which I visited when the Soviet Union still existed).

"And I'm widely-read in American crime fiction, which has a sardonic humour and a taut physical immediacy that other genres often lack."

UKSFBN: How important is it for you to balance the crime plot with the personal touches of character?

John Meaney: "While most Bone Song critics praised the world-building (and since it's just out in the US, I'm getting new feedback here), others found Donal and Laura and their relationship to be what interested them most.

"It's the people who make the story breathe, who come to life (or paralife, or unlife) in my imagined world, because without them there'd be only a strange and empty landscape. I experience the story through their eyes and feelings, and so does the reader (and reading is such a compelling act of creative imagination)."

UKSFBN: What's Riordan's biggest challenge in this book, now that he's dead?

John Meaney: "To understand himself, for he is no longer human... or so he thinks. He's certainly different, with different awarenesses (and abilities) and the supercool physical attributes of the resurrected are balanced by his dependency on the power supply, and the shifting inner landscape of his mental reality. And it doesn't stop him focusing on revenge..."

UKSFBN: How easy has the transition been from SF to Dark Fantasy?

'Bone Song' by John Meaney John Meaney: "Completely natural! Storytelling is storytelling, and if you're in a mindscape that's at all familiar then it's the same process. When I wrote Bone Song, it was the easiest thing to write that I'd ever experienced. With Dark Blood, the story flowed even more naturally (as easily as black blood through the veins and arteries of an undead cop...)

"The books have been a deep, dark joy, and every single second I spend in imaginary Tristopolis is stupendous."

UKSFBN: Would you write a straight sword & sorcery fantasy novel?

John Meaney: "If I did, there'd be something different about it. There are SF novels that are careless with science (alien lifeforms with DNA) or even contrary to it. The alternate Earth of Dark Blood and Bone Song has wraiths and necroflux and thaumaturgy... and it's rigorously consistent.

"There are historical periods I find fascinating, and they've had resonances in past books and will be more explicit in a future project. Did you realize that in Victorian times, 'civilization' was pronounced in England like the modern Spanish "civilización"? Go back a thousand years, to a location you know now, and the language and other perceptual filters would be so different, you would be in a totally altered psychological as well as physical world. I don't need the conventions of Sword & Sorcery storytelling – currently – to manifest that world.

"But new things always spring to mind. That's the joy of it."

UKSFBN: How did this second story evolve?

John Meaney: "I've deeply trained in NLP and hypnosis (alongside medical doctors and clinical psychologists, while coming myself from a hard science background) and I know about altered states of mind.

"The ability of different parts of the mind to control / negotiate with / fight against other parts of the same mind... that's fascinating. Experiencing this hands-on, when using trancework to enable a deeply conflicted or addicted person to find happiness in life (in minutes), is a fantastic joy, far beyond textbook analyses.

"'Parts of the mind' is a metaphor for collaborating clusters and networks of what neuroscientists now term 'neural cliques'. So when I had lunch with my editor Simon Spanton, before commencing Dark Blood, he mentioned that it would be interesting to see how Donal changed. And I knew immediately that would involve the kind of journey through the architecture of his own mind that few people have experienced.

"Remember, he's a hardbitten cop who fought his way through an orphanage upbringing, so he's happier blasting guns in a firefight than picking through the labyrinth of his inner self."

UKSFBN: Your martial arts and NLP background is a clear influence in your plots, what other parts of your background have played a part in your stories?

John Meaney: "I guess the physics is obvious, too. Not only does necroflux have units of measurement (necrons per square foot), but wraiths exist in an eleven-dimensional space, rotating themselves into our reality only as much as they want or are forced to.

"On a more personal front: my parents were Irish and left school aged fourteen. After my Dad served in the RAF during WWII, he settled in London (as did my Mum) at a time when boarding-houses bore signs reading: 'No coloureds or Irish allowed'. Donal Riordan's background isn't mine, but I understand his resentments and determination.

"During my IT consultancy and corporate training career, I spent a lot of time travelling alone to different cities, sometimes in countries where I didn't speak the language... and I adore the feeling of strangeness and knowing I could cope and thrive. The hundreds of different hotels and thousands of different streets I've seen allow new, complex imaginary architectures to pop up in my mind... leavened with that eerie, alien, outsider feeling.

"There are language and logic games twisted through many of my stories. The thirty-six haiku in my first novel linked together to form a hypercube. While I find it easy to invent new character names that sound real, many place names derive from real languages, almost multi-lingual puns.

"But Bone Song and Dark Blood are sheer story, and that's what you want most of all."

For more information about the author, visit John Meaney's website. Dark Blood was published last month, in hardback, by Gollancz Books.

Source: John Meaney

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