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The Machinery will be published on September 10th, so one month from today – I can’t believe it! To mark the occasion, here is the first chapter. I hope you enjoy!

The Machinery – Chapter One

I am breaking, the Machinery said.

Alexander had not heard it for days.

I am breaking.

It sounded different tonight: like a child.

‘Again,’ said Amile. The tutor’s voice seemed distant, as if it came from another room. ‘Recite it again.’

Alexander looked to the window. His sister was below, playing with marbles in the courtyard. I’ll try to speak to father again tonight. He knew he would be called a liar. But there was no other choice; he had to make them understand.

The boy turned to face Amile, and started over again.

‘On the third day, the tribe gathered on the Primary Hill, to be entertained by the madman.

‘“This is when all shall change,” the madman said. But the people did not believe him, and laughed in their ignorance.

‘“You will be punished,” said one.

‘“Punished by the Gods,” said another.’

I am breaking.

Alexander paused, and looked to the ceiling. There was nothing there.

Ruin will come with the One. You know who it is.

‘Continue.’ Amile’s hooked nose twitched. ‘And mean it; as things stand, you are lying to us both.’

Alexander looked once more to the window. Clack, clack, clack, went the marbles.

‘The prophet Arandel lifted a stone. He held it before his people and said: “This is matter; it too has energy. It too is understood by the Machinery, which knows the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea, the rocks at the core and the reptiles of the South. These words have been spoken by the Operator.”

‘The people laughed again. “If he told you all this, Arandel – where is he?” Arandel dropped the stone and looked to the sky.

‘“He is here.”’

Amile was smiling.

‘In the centre of the ground, at the peak of the hill, ten paces from where they sat, a fire had started to burn, as if of its own accord.

‘“Arandel, what have you done?”

‘“What witchcraft is this?” But their talking ceased, for they had seen something in the fire. A man stepped forth from the blaze, his cloak burning with flames of its own, dark and cold. The people wept, for they saw in this cloak the reflections of their own souls.

‘“He has come from the ground itself,” said Arandel. “From the ground and into flame, to the salvation of us all.”

‘This man came amid them and, as the tribe fell back and cowered before him, opened his arms. “It is your first Selection year,” he said. “You have been chosen. Nothing will be the same for you now.”

‘He walked among them.

‘“I have come from the Underland. I have come to save the Plateau.”’

Amile clapped his hands. ‘In seven years, Paprissi, that is the best that you have read.’

Alexander bowed.

‘What happened next?’

The boy cleared his throat.

‘And so the tribe received the Machinery, the power of the Underland. It would choose the greatest leaders of the Overland, its Tacticians and Strategists, from now until the end of time, be they bakers or butchers, merchants or artists, boys or girls, men or women. And thus, the Overland would grow under their wisdom, to become the envy of all the great Plateau.

‘In return for this gift, the Operator asked only one thing; that the people must never question the Selections of the Machinery.’

‘And long may it continue,’ said Amile. ‘The Machinery knows.’

‘The Machinery knows,’ said Alexander. And I know the Machinery.

Before Alexander was a red velvet curtain, fastened by a golden knot. The boy stood still for a moment, wondering if he had been noticed.

‘Come.’

Sucking in a breath, Alexander pushed through.

The study was an airy, spherical, stone-walled space, its ceiling formed of thick clear glass that could be winched open at points to allow the entry of cooling airs. It was night, now; starlight illumined everything. This room, unlike its counterparts in other parts of the dreary mansion, was in constant flux. Perhaps it reflected the mind and travels of Jaco Paprissi, Alexander’s father, the head of the Paprissi Financial House and lord of the manor.

Jaco and his men were the only Overlanders allowed to sail from the Plateau, and he had just returned from his most recent voyage. Items were still being unpacked from the wooden chests that filled the great courtyard, the most interesting or curious gravitating upwards to this study where they could be examined more closely. Alexander drank it in: on the second shelf to his left, a wooden statue depicted a man and a woman locked in primitive combat; above this, a row of silver instruments, like finely wrought blades; and on the floor to his right, a bronze representation of some kind of war machine, what appeared to be a trebuchet lined with cannon, rolling forward of its own accord.

In the centre of the room was a brass contraption, a long thick tube covered in golden letters in some foreign tongue. At the bottom of the tube was an eyepiece, into which Jaco peered.

‘This is new,’ the older man said. ‘It is … incredible. You can see things … well, it matters not.’

He turned to the boy and grinned.

‘It’s much better than banks and credit, eh?’

Jaco left his new toy and walked to his son, putting a hand on his shoulder and smiling down at him.

It is coming. The voice had grown weaker.

‘How was the lesson, Alexander?’

I’ll tell him, thought the boy. I’ll tell him. But he was afraid. Why should he believe me this time?

‘It was all right, but Amile made me do—’

‘The same thing all over again?’

‘Yes!’

‘The arrival of the Operator and the Gifting of the Machinery?’

‘Yes!’

Jaco laughed. ‘I hated it too, when I was your age. I wondered why I had to learn this stuff, when there was a whole world out there waiting to be found. But as I grew older, I began to see things differently.’

‘How?’

‘Well, things change. Your life goes off in different paths. And the Overland changes, too. Even the Plateau changes. The city grows, Tacticians and Strategists come and go. But one thing remains the same: the Machinery. It is the constant. It is important that we remember its birth.’

‘The Machinery knows.’

‘The Machinery knows,’ his father echoed, before leaping to his feet and returning to his lettered tube. Alexander hesitated before taking the plunge.

‘Father … I think I have heard it again.’

Jaco stopped dead, his hands falling to his side.

‘No, boy. You have not.’

Silence fell on the study.

‘It told me again, father. The Machinery told me who it is. I know who will bring Ruin.’

‘No.’ Jaco turned his eyes upon his son. ‘No. This is the madness of old women and Doubters.’ He held the boy’s gaze for a moment, then turned back to his machine. ‘I assume you are going to play in the Great Hall tonight?’

‘Yes, father.’

‘Good. Take your mind off this foolishness. And don’t stay up too long; it is already late.’

The elder Paprissi leaned down and put his eye to the telescope.

‘Yes, father.’

 

The Great Hall covered the entire southern section of the ground floor of Paprissi House. It was one of the oldest surviving parts of the building, its stone walls the remnants of an ancient keep: a place of faded nooks and crannies, dark snugs and cubbyholes. The summer light was fading as Alexander entered, casting shadows that darkened the aspects of the Paprissi forebears staring blankly down at their young descendant.

Alexander sat with his legs crossed in the middle of the cold stone floor, just next to the dining table, swinging a thin piece of white parchment through the air in a kind of sporadic dance. This strange, private little ceremony helped unleash his imagination. He was transported to other realms: to flaming battles on open plains; to dynastic struggles with Doubter kings; to the ruins of ancient cities, heavy with sorcery. Here, he could control events. Here, he did not feel like a plaything of a voice.

The One will come here …

The boy’s gaze floated to the Operator shrine, at the back of the hall. It had been there for as long as the hall itself, a grey statue on a black chair, proud and solemn. The sculptors of the Middle Period were renowned for the subtlety of their work, Amile had told Alexander; hence the fine detail of the wrinkled face, the perfect smoothness of the bald head, the laughing wisdom of the eyes. The cloak, though, was the symbol of the Operator; it had been refreshed in more recent years by one of the new artists of the Centre, and the talent of this master shone through, from the strange swirls of purple and black to the hints of faces in the ether.

GET OUT.

Alexander swung round. The voice seemed closer now, more urgent, as if the speaker was behind him. There was no one there. I can do nothing.

He turned back to the statue.

There was someone in its place.

‘Play, play, playing, like the little child you are.’

He – it – regarded Alexander thoughtfully, steadily rapping the arm of his dark throne with his sharp fingers. He was filth itself: his mangy skin red with scabs, his grey tongue flickering at the sides of his mouth. A torn gown billowed out onto the floor around him, coating the flagstones like oil on water, its colours in perpetual motion like the sky in a summer thunderstorm. The faces were ghosts in a silken prison.

‘Do you know who I am, Alexander?’

The boy was silent.

‘I am the Operator.’

The voice echoed of another world. A time before the Machinery.

‘I have known it for a long time,’ the Operator said. ‘You here, on your Plateau, you have known only ten millennia of it. But it has been my companion for much, much longer.’

Alexander steeled himself. Somehow, he always had known that this would happen.

‘How did you do that? How did you make a statue come to life?’

The Operator seemed surprised by the question. ‘I am a child of the Underland, boy. I know all its pathways and byways.’

He leaned forward in his throne, placing his head in his hands.

‘You have evaded me for some time, Alexander. I heard the Machinery speaking, you know. Oh yes. I could hear it, in the night, though its words were hidden from me. It took me a long time to find you, such a long time.’

‘It does not trust you. It knows you do not believe it.’

The Operator laughed, and the room seemed to darken. ‘I like you, Alexander. I like that you think you can talk to me, in such a way, about my own creation.’

‘You do not understand it fully, Operator. If you did, you would believe the words. Ruin is coming.’

The Operator slammed his fist on the arm of his chair. ‘Tell me what it has told you. Then we will see what I believe.’

Alexander approached the Operator. ‘Your enemy has returned, Operator. You thought you had destroyed the One, all those years ago. But you failed. The One has returned, and the One will bring Ruin.’

The Operator was on his feet in an instant, and loomed over Alexander. The faces in his cloak cringed, afraid of their master.

‘That is a lie,’ the Operator said, his voice trembling. ‘You have read a book about the past, I think, one that I overlooked. I have been too lenient with you all. You use these words you do not understand. The One is dead, and the Prophecy is a lie.’

The boy did not answer. He looked hopefully at the door, but no one was coming for him. Was his grandmother outside, sitting in her old chair?

There was a pattering of rain on the windows.

‘That is not what the Machinery told you,’ the Operator sighed. ‘It cannot be. Something is wrong with it, and it has told you, and you will not tell me.’

‘I have already told you the truth.’

The Operator shook his head. ‘No. No, that is not what it told you. But I will find the truth.’ He glided over to Alexander’s side and wrapped a long arm around the boy’s shoulder.

‘We will go to the Underland. You will be happier there. Yes, oh yes. We will be able to study your broken brain.’ Alexander snatched a quick look at a jagged smile; he willed himself to resist, but something had encircled and taken power over him, and he could do nothing but follow the strange creature to the window.

The Operator gathered him in his arms, smiled, and leapt into the rain of the night. They seemed to fall slowly, like feathers in the breeze. The authority that had been exerted over the boy allowed no room for fear. There was no need to scream, it assured him, no need to cry out or fight back. We are floating, not falling.

As he fell, he looked up and saw a face at the window: a girl gazing down at him; a girl with round black eyes and long black hair; a girl with marbles in her hands.

But then Alexander Paprissi was gone forever: gone below the earth.

 

I interviewed science-fiction author John Ayliff as part of #VirtualVoyager from HarperVoyager UK. John’s debut novel, Belt Three, is available now in ebook format on all good electronic bookstores, and will be published in paperback in December. I finished reading it recently, and highly recommend it.

GC: Belt Three is unusual in that it’s set after the bad guys have won and Earth has been destroyed. Where did you come up with the idea?

JA: It started as a story about a space pirate. I decided that she was using her piracy to fund a personal crusade against some kind of enemy, and then I had the idea that the Earth had been destroyed by alien machines and she was hunting these machines. I think I had been reading books about humanity fighting wars against much more powerful aliens (Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee books and Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space), so I decided to take these sorts of aliens and reduce them to a simpler version, an unintelligent, almost elemental force of destruction.

GC: You weave a lot of technical details into your writing – how much scientific knowledge is needed to be a sci-fi writer? Do you have a science background?

JA: The highest level of science education I have is A-level Physics. I’m never going to be able to write the kind of hard science fiction that takes a cutting-edge scientific idea and dramatises it, complete with pages of accurate technical detail–but I don’t think you need to have a science background to write science fiction of other kinds. What I think you need is a good grasp of the basics, which you can get from popular science books and documentaries, and a willingness to research details as you need them.

GC: The Worldbreakers are a terrific invention: implacable planet-destroying machines. They’re like a mix of the Borg from Star Trek and the Death Star from Star Wars. How did you come up with them?

JA: You’re right about Star Trek, but you’re a generation too late! One of my big inspirations was the original series episode ‘The Doomsday Machine’. The titular machine blows planets into debris and consumes the debris in order to power itself. It’s simple, predictable, and unintelligent, but it’s a threat because of its sheer size and power–unlike the godlike energy beings that are the more usual kind of advanced threat the Enterprise faces. In Belt Three I basically imagined a whole fleet of Doomsday Machines, working over a longer time-scale but just as implacable, and without Star Trek technology to save the day.

GC: In a funny way Belt Three reminds me a bit of The Walking Dead TV show; much of the tension in the book comes from the relations between the human characters, and the way they their society has developed in the face of this unhuman foe. In a way, the ‘monster’ element could be anything; the focus is really on the humans. Is that fair? Is it something you set out to cultivate?

JA: Yes! I’m glad you picked up on this. I was consciously thinking of zombie movies when I wrote Belt Three, especially movies like Dawn/Day of the Dead, set after the apocalypse and dealing with survivors in a zombie-dominated world. Like zombies, Worldbreakers are easy to avoid if you have a means of transport and know what you’re doing, and they’re even easy to kill, individually–but there are so many of them and so few people that fighting them is futile, and they’ve already destroyed civilisation. Also like zombies, the Worldbreakers aren’t really villains because they’re not really characters: they’re more like a natural disaster, and the conflict is between human characters trying to survive in the zombie- or Worldbreaker-dominated world.

GC: One of the things I enjoyed most about the book is the depiction of a highly segregated society, in which tank-born clones are treated as an expendable worker class. Is there a political point to the book? Are you concerned about how our civilisation might respond to the development of cloning and genetics?

JA: I didn’t start with a political point and write a book around it, but you can’t write about future societies without politics coming into it, and I like to think I’ve written a book that shows political awareness. I’m not concerned with cloning and genetics specifically: people haven’t needed technologies like that to create highly unjust societies in the past, and they won’t need them to create an unjust society in the future. I’m more concerned about social change: what capitalism might evolve into, or what might come after it. My concept for Belt Three was unrestrained capitalism that has developed into a kind of feudalism, with true-born city-owners as lords, true-born business owners as their vassals, and tank-borns as serfs. The real problem with the world of Belt Three isn’t that tank-borns are clones as such, but that you have one social class that has nearly all the wealth and power and another social class that begins life in debt to the first social class and has fewer legal rights. The fact that the tank-borns are machine-produced clones exacerbates the problem, because true-borns can concentrate wealth by passing it down to their children whereas tank-borns can’t, but you can imagine a similar situation arising without any cloning technology, and you can imagine a much more just and equal society in which some people are tank-born clones.

GC: I find as I write that certain characters grow on me through the story, and I am surprised by how much I like them. Which character did you enjoy writing the most? I got the impression it was Keldra.

JA: Your impression was correct! Keldra was the core around which the rest of the book grew. All the other characters took some development before I really knew who I wanted them to be, but Keldra sprang fully-formed from my original idea–I fleshed out some of her details later but didn’t change the core concept. I enjoyed writing a character with such powerful emotions, so much aggression, almost a primal force. I knew I never wanted the reader to get inside her head, though, so you always see her from someone else’s point of view.

GC: What’s next for you? Is a sequel in the works?

JA: I conceived Belt Three as a standalone novel and that’s how I intend it to be read…but I do have a couple of ideas for possible sequels. Right now I’m still unsure whether my next book will be a Belt Three sequel or an unrelated science fiction novel.

**

Belt Three is on sale this week on ebook at the discounted price of 99p/$1.99.

Belt Three on Amazon UK

Belt Three on Amazon US

A couple of big things happened this last week in the life of The Machinery. The cover of the novel was finally revealed, and I submitted my structural edits. Both of these turned out differently – but better – than I had expected, and got me thinking about the big difference between expectations and reality in producing a novel.

I absolutely love the cover. The guys at the HarperFiction Art Department did a fantastic job, not just with my cover but with all my fellow digital submissions authors – you can go see all of them and read a nice blog on the process here: http://harpercollins-design.tumblr.com/post/122495076560/the-maiden-voyage-designing-the-voyager-firsts

Like every new author, I started thinking about the cover pretty much as soon as HarperVoyager told me they wanted to sign me up. We all know the old chestnut about not judging a book by its cover, but I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t excited about how it was going to turn out. I had all sorts of vague thoughts about what it might look like, none of which resembled the finished product. It wasn’t what I expected at all. It’s much better. The conceit of the book is that the Machinery Selects the leaders of the Overland, and could be about to break and Select a ruler who will bring ruin to the world; I think the cover really captures that, with the mysterious figure bathed in a strange light.

I had many more thoughts and expectations regarding the structural edits. The way it works is you send your manuscript in to the publisher, and they send you your edits in two waves. The first is structural, the second copy editing. The structural edits are the most daunting: the editor is scrutinising your narrative and looking for any inconsistencies, things that don’t make sense, characters that are underdone or overstay their welcome, etc. I had identified a whole host of potential problems, and while my editor saw most of these, she also pointed to a load of other issues that I never would have seen in a million years. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks going through these, cutting back some stuff, building up other stuff. By the time I sent it back in to her, I never wanted to see my book again.

But it was all for the better. I think the story and its general flow are so much stronger now, thanks to the things she identified. As for the things I was worried about that she hadn’t raised, I did mention these to her separately, and she didn’t see them as being much of a problem at all.

So there you go. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of this book-publishing experience, it’s the importance of viewing your book as a collaborative effort. If I was publishing the book myself, had the ability to design my own cover (which I do not) and the ability to edit it dispassionately (ditto), I would probably have done things differently, and The Machinery would have suffered for it.

The next thing, then, is the copy edits. And then … it will be done. My book will be coming out. I wonder if everyone’s going to spot the problem on page …

Hi all, I thought I’d give a quick update on where I’m at with The Machinery and its sequels. Book One (The Machinery) is coming out on September 10^th. It will initially be available on ebook format, so can be found in all good electronic bookstores (Amazon, iBooks etc). There will then be a paperback edition six months later, in March 2016.

I sent in my last version of the book a couple of weeks ago and am just waiting on structural edits now. I’ve no idea what to expect, but I’m looking forward to the process. I don’t think I’ll be particularly precious about anything, having had my articles torn up for years and done some tearing myself. But we’ll see!

Apart from this my major focus has been drafting the second book, the imaginatively titled Book 2. (I’ve got a few proper titles in mind, but nothing set as yet. I thought I’d see how the book develops first before making my mind up). The idea at the moment is to bring out a book every six months, so the second book would be released on ebook next March, around the same time as the paperback edition of The Machinery. The final book would then come out in September 2016.

This obviously creates a fairly hectic writing and editing routine, as the draft of the second book will need to be with my editor around October, while I’ll be editing The Machinery at the same time, writing these blog posts and getting stuck into promotion etc as best I can. It took me about two and a half years to write the original manuscript of The Machinery, so this is a much more compressed timeframe.

That being said, it’s actually easier in many ways. When you write your first novel you are essentially writing into a void. Unless you’re a celebrity or something, you have no way of knowing whether anyone will want to read your book, either in the publishing industry or just among your friends. You have no idea whether it will be successful, and are constantly told online of all the struggles and pitfalls a wannabe writer faces. So actually having a solid deadline and an awareness of the path ahead makes things much easier.

Also, you will have developed your own writing routine by the time of the second novel, so it’s easier in that respect. And in my case, Book 2 is a direct sequel, so the story is already mapped out in my head pretty clearly, though I’m sure it will take certain detours as I go along.

Anyway, sorry for the rambling post – I’ll let you know how I get on with my edits!

Recently I read Arnold Schwarzenegger’s autobiography, ‘Total Recall,’ and enjoyed it as much as any book I’ve read in the last few years. Everyone talks themselves up in their autobiography, and Schwarzenegger is a great salesman. Still, the guy’s achievements are staggering. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more impressive CV.

You’re talking about a man who went from a small town in Austria to the Governor of America’s biggest state. Along the way he became a businessman, Mr. Universe, and Mr. Olympia. He was a real-estate mogul and he hobnobbed with presidents. He also found time to star in a few movies.

Anyway, I haven’t decided to jack in writing and aim at becoming Mr. Universe. But I think there’s a lot that writers can take from Schwarzenegger’s attitude and approach to his work.

Before I started working seriously on my book I had totally the wrong idea of what writing was all about. I think I had a romantic idea of blasting through my novel in an artistic fever, preferably in a garret on the Left Bank of the Seine. I would sit down at my computer every now and then, staring at the flashing cursor on my word processor, waiting to be inspired by the muse. Unsurprisingly, nothing much got done; I spent about a year and a half rewriting the same couple of paragraphs, and worked on it very sporadically, maybe once or twice every few weeks.

I only really started making headway when I developed a routine. I would spend 30 mins to an hour every day working on it before I went to work. Eventually it just became second nature.

How does this all relate to Arnie? One of the key themes of his book is his emphasis on ‘reps’, ie how many times you do the same thing, over and over until it has an effect and you build up the targeted muscle. But he extends this to other parts of his life – he includes in the book a photo of an important speech, which is covered in scratch marks, one for each time he has practiced it.

It’s only through this type of mundane repetition that you get anything done, and I’ve found it’s the same with writing. When I made it part of my everyday routine, and did a small bit at a time, it brought my goal of finishing the book that bit closer. After a while you are genuinely surprised at how much progress you have made.

So my advice to anyone wanting to write a book is to do reps, reps, reps of writing every day, over and over, even if you don’t feel like it. You’ll be surprised how much you can get done in a relatively short period. Less tortured artist, more Arnold!

We’ve entered some kind of Golden Age for film trailers. Batman Vs Superman. Jurassic World. Terminator Genisys. A host of classics are storming back to the cinemas.

But one towers above them all: Star Wars.

I’m not sure how many times I’ve watched it now, but it’s certainly in the double figures – and I’m not even a hardcore fan. There’s just something about Star Wars that sucks me right in: the sheer epic scale of it all.

The build-up to The Force Awakens has brought me back to the late nineties, when the world was gearing up for another new entry to the canon. If possible, people were even more excited about Episode I than they are about Episode VII, maybe because there had been a longer break between the movies. I remember going to see the Special Edition trilogy in the cinema and gobbling up any article I could find on George Lucas and his creations. I remember thinking, ‘how cool would it be to create a world of my own?’

This thought had been bubbling away in my head since I was a kid and fell into Tolkien, Lewis, Pratchett and the other greats. I loved Games Workshop (though I was pretty terrible at it) and played Fighting Fantasy in the back of the car when we were out and about. I’ve been reading in the genre ever since, and feel that same sense of awe when I enter the worlds created by George RR Martin, Mark Lawrence or Joe Abercrombie. The drive to invent my own imaginary places has always been with me.

It would be easier in many ways to set my books on 21^st-century earth. I do live here, after all. I could have a good crack at guiding my characters around South-East London (where I live) and North-West Ireland (where I’m from), and I could pull out a map if they wanted to head somewhere else. There are real streets they could get lost in, rivers they could swim in, mountains they could climb. All these things already have names, too.

But there’s something about creating a place and setting a story there that is hard to beat. Some of the reasons are obvious. This world follows its own rules, as set down by you, the author. The setting for my book – a vast continent called the Plateau – is dominated by a city-state, the Overland, whose leaders are picked by something called the Machinery, which is itself hidden away in a strange place called the Underland. It’s hard to imagine this working in South-East London or North-West Ireland.

There’s also a lot of entertainment to be had with the creative process. It’s good fun deciding on the names of characters, of streets, of geographical elements. It can be interesting to create a political model for a society, or to work through the history of an international rivalry, and not have anyone say you got it wrong. How would they even know?

For me, though, the real attraction is the powerful sense of possibility. You are of course bound by certain restrictions; you can’t suddenly place a temple where once there was a barracks, or close a plothole by inventing some new type of magic. You can’t mix and match different types of names. But in each book you get to explore more and more of the place you’ve created, which is good fun.

There’s another part to this, too, which might sound a bit mad. I’ve always felt that if a fantasy world (or galaxy) is constructed with enough depth and detail, it begins to take on a life beyond that of the author. It’s as if it exists at all times, quietly ticking over with trade and warfare and construction and art, and the book simply provides a microscope with which to view it at a particular point in its history. Of course the world lives in the imagination of the author, but if it’s done properly, you’re almost convinced it exists in and of itself.

So I’m looking forward to returning to a galaxy far, far away, to find out what happens 30 years or so after the events of Return of the Jedi. What I love about the science fiction and fantasy genre is the powerful sense that, in those three decades, something really happened in that galaxy, and it wasn’t just in someone’s imagination.