The Web series
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My entanglement in the Web came about during the first few months of '96. Simon Spanton, a fiction editor at Orion, contacted my agent to see if I would be interested in writing a children's science fiction novel as part of a six book series set in a future World Wide Virtual Reality. Simon had been my editor at Pan for my last two books, Engineman ("This novel is fine, Eric - but do you think you could lengthen it by fifty thousand words?") and my collection Blue Shifting. The Web book would my first book for children and an opportunity to work again with Simon. The idea of the Web was devised and developed by Simon. He gave each writer a five thousand word Web 'bible', detailing everything about the future world: politics, religion, medicine, climate, business and geography, among others. And, of course, much detail about the Web itself. It even had a glossary of Web-speak, the lingo spoken by the Web-users of the future. The Web series of novels would be set in the year 2027, in six different countries around the globe. The premise was that, by the year 2027, communications, education and business transactions (quite apart from leisure pursuits) would be conducted via the technology of the Web. National and local government rely on the facility: the phone and fax are a thing of the past and the Web is a key part of business transactions. Retail is run as much from the Web as from shops, cinema is dying and books are the preserve of a minority. But most importantly, from the point of view of the children of the year 2027, the Web is one vast fantastic playground, an almost infinite series of venues available at the push of a button. The user enters the Web either with a simple headset, glasses and gloves - or via a rubber-textured Websuit which would give the user a more sophisticated and realistic interface with the reality of the virtual Web. The six writers met in London in June '96 for a meal and an afternoon discussing the nitty-gritty of Simon's fictional future. The writers were Stephen Baxter, Stephen Bowkett, Maggie Furey, Peter Hamilton, Graham Joyce and myself. We each had a vague outline of our individual books, and many questions and suggestions to fire at Simon. What began slowly - with doubts certainly on my part that any coherent series of books could be designed by such a committee - soon snowballed in exhilarating fashion as ideas were taken up, expanded upon, fleshed out and stored. We devised a timeline for the six books and were casting about for a thread that might link the novels - other than the common venue of the Web and perhaps characters shared from book to book - when Maggie Furey came up with the idea that the novels should have a series villain. Magically, the idea fitted with a number of our scenarios. A villain (we called her the Sorceress, which would become the title of Maggie's own book) would provide each writer with a dramatic focus for our stories, and the series with an overall sense of threat or behind-the-scenes danger escalating with each book and culminating with the final novel in the series, Maggie's Sorceress.   All that was required now was to go home and write them. The idea for my own novel, Untouchable, was sparked by a line from Simon's 'bible', in the section on India: 'Set against this India's economic success story] the plight of the Untouchables has become even more appalling and there is extensive international pressure for reform...' I had travelled extensively throughout India in the '80s and set numerous short stories and part of a novel in the subcontinent. It occurred to me that the plight of an Untouchable in future India could be dramatised to good effect using the medium of the Web to contrast realtime living conditions and attitudes with those maintaining in virtual reality. I made my protagonist a ten year old Untouchable street kid, Ana, whose right leg had been amputated by an evil gang-lord. The book opens with Ana and her blind brother Ajay begging on the streets, having escaped the gang-lord. They are seen by the Indian Fagin, and in the ensuing chase Ajay is recaptured and handed over to a mysterious western woman. Ana meets a young Brahmin boy and is introduced to the miracle of the Web. While exploring the virtual reality, Ana discovers that the woman has captured other street kids and is keeping them captive inside the Web... for reasons that become clear with the unfolding of the plot. It was the first novel I had written for children (the target age is 10 to 14). I observed a few obvious tenets of the discipline: I kept the sentences in general shorter than those I used in my adult work, the vocabulary a little simpler, and kept character introspection to a minimum. Other strictures, which I thought I might find limiting, in the event did not bother me: no swear words, we were told (W.H. Smiths don't like them) and no gratuitous violence. What struck me most about the experience of writing for children was how similar it is to writing for adults: I brought the same techniques of construction, characterisation, and plotting to bear on the novel as I did with my adult work. What mattered was to get the reader interested in the plight of the central character. There had to be emotional involvement with the aims and wishes of the heroine. The reader had to be taken through the same rollercoaster ride of discovery, ambition, disappointment, success - and all the permutations thereof - that occur in more sophisticated adult fiction. The reader, whether an adult or a child, wants to share in the adventures of a character he or she finds believable and sympathetic. To this end I constructed the novel with plenty of twists and turns, chases and escapes, revelations of character and insights... or at least I hope I did.   I delivered a third draft to Simon before the deadline date in September. He came back with lists of comments and suggestions, both to improve the novel as was and to make it fit with the other books in the series. The publication of the series would commence with two books in July '97, the next two in October, an the last pair of titles in the February of '98. One comment from Simon, about the finished series of novels in general, was about how each of us had brought to our respective books interests and preoccupations exclusively our own: although each book conformed to the specifics of the future Simon had envisioned and we had fleshed out, we had used the template to explore themes and ideas interesting to each of us. Stephen Baxter's book, Gulliverzone, is set in England and in a vast Web theme park based on Gulliver's Travels, furiously paced and full of throwaway ideas and detail: for instance, in 2027 Boris Becker is the Chancellor of United Europe, and the Poet Laureate is Damon Albarn. Dreamcastle by Stephen Bowkett introduces to a group of children from a small town in New England who use the Web to access D&D style adventure zones, until their games lead to unforeseen consequences. In Lightstorm by Peter Hamilton, a young invalid boy uses the Web to investigate the ecological corruption by a realworld energy company, at great risk to himself and his Web-friends. Graham Joyce's Spiderbite is set in England and follows the adventures of three friends who call themselves the Tech-Rats and their involvement with the sinister Planetologists, a religious cult intent on brainwashing the populace through the manipulation of the Web. Maggie Furey has the unenviable task of wrapping up the series with the last book of the six. Sorceress, set in Greece, links with the other books in the culminating story of the eponymous sorceress who, obsessed with avoiding death by attempting to achieve immortality in the Web itself, endangers the lives of the two Greek girls and the young English boy who stumble upon her plans. Orion books have put a lot of effort into the marketing and advertising of the Web books, which looks likely to pay off if pre-publication interest equates to sales. The series has already been translated into Italian, German, French, Norwegian, Portuguese and Chinese, and a second series of six books has been commissioned for publication in 1998/99.
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