Title: From Darkest Skies
Author: Sam Peters
Genre: Science Fiction
Publisher: Gollancz
Release Date: 16th February 2017
BLURB from Goodreads
After a five year sabbatical following the tragic death of his wife and fellow agent Alysha, Keona Rause returns to the distant colony world of Magenta to resume service with the Magentan Intelligence Service. With him he brings an artificial recreation of his wife's personality, a simulacrum built from every digital trace she left behind. She has been constructed with one purpose - to discover the truth behind her own death - but Keona's relationship with her has grown into something more, something frighteningly dependent, something that verges on love.
Cashing in old favours, Keona uses his return to the Service to take on a series of cases that allow him and the artificial Alysha to piece together his wife's last days. His investigations lead him inexorably along the same paths Alysha followed five years earlier, to a sinister and deadly group with an unhealthy fascination for the unknowable alien Masters; but as the wider world of Magenta is threatened with an imminent crisis, Keona finds himself in a dilemma: do his duty and stand with his team to expose a villainous crime, or sacrifice them all for the truth about his wife?
PURCHASE LINKS
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
How long did it
take you to write From Darkest Skies, from the original idea to finishing
writing it?
Such
a simple question, such a complicated answer…
From
the point of having a fully formed set of ideas on the world, the characters
and the overall arc of their stories, it took about nine months including a few
gaps between rewrites; but that starting point was a very long way away from
where the original ideas grew. Parts of the world of Magenta, parts of some of
the characters and a few nuggets of the plot go back years to a table-top
role-playing game set on Magenta where the players were the local equivalent of
the FBI investigating crimes with a slightly occult twist. A lot has changed in
the evolution of those ideas into something that works as a coherent story –
there was no Alysha back then, the sinister secret of Settlement 64 was
something quite different and so were the Masters – but I think the world will
still be very recognisable to those of us who played in that game.
Then
there was probably six months of back and forth while I settled on a plot
before the actual writing started. That took quite a while to get right.
Where did you
get your book plot ideas from? What/Who is your inspiration?
All
sorts of places. I think the theme of grief and coping with loss that runs
through the story certainly has a lot to do with a death in the family. The
idea that bringing someone back from the sum of everything they left behind
doesn’t necessarily bring back quite the person you remember owes something to
the dementia they suffered in their last year and to a couple of people I’ve
known who’ve gone through intense trauma and come out the other side changed. I
think those things gave me the desire to write story about how our ideas and
memories of the people we know aren’t necessarily the people they actually are.
Then
there’s the more superficial plot which unashamedly owes a lot to the noir
thrillers of the forties and fifties. The fact that a passing character is
called Royja Bhatti might betray a love of Bladerunner but really that’s
already noir dressed up as SF; and while the replicants of Bladerunner offer a
parallel to Liss, I think she owes at least as much to Frankenstein. Throw in
some Twin Peaks, X-Files (I’m showing my age here I know), some Scandi-Crime
(The Killing and The Bridge in particular) and a really good conspiracy
thriller like State of Play and you’re about there.
The
Masters probably owe something to Chaoseum’s interpretation of Lovecraft’s
Cthulhu mythos for the sense of something unknown and unknowable.
How did you
come up with the Title and Cover Designs for your book? Who designed the Cover
of your books?
I
wasn't conscious of this at the time but it’s the title of a My Dying Bride
album which I suspect lodged somewhere in my mind better than the music ever
did. I know I knew that particular album once. I suspect my subconscious pulled
a fast one, latched onto the theme and pulled it out of deep storage without
telling me where it came from.
The
Gollancz art department did the cover. The cover image is by James Macey. The
closest I got to any say in the matter was suggesting a riff on the iconic
image of Maria from Metropolis:
Did you basic
plot/plan for From Darkest Skies, before you actually began writing it out? Or
did you let the writing flow and see where it took the story?
A
bit of both. I think there are two very different sides to From Darkest Skies.
On the one hand the plot very much aims at being a crime/conspiracy thriller. I
think that to make a thriller work you need to know exactly who did what and
why and what clues are there to be found in order to unravel the mystery; then
you need to give thought to the order in which the clues need to be found to
unravel the mystery in the right way, pacing little breakthroughs with bigger
ones and mixing in the odd red herring. I find for that side of things it helps
me to lay out that backstory in quite a lot of detail – but the rest tends to
be more a case of letting the story flow to see what happens, particularly with
characters. They start to talk and act and come alive and often turn out not to
be quite the people I thought they were once I start to write them. Then
whenever the story feels like it needs to twist or slow or make a breakthrough
I go back to my careful plan and look at all the clues that might have been
left behind and pick the one that seems to fit best.
The
result is usually a mess and takes several rewrites to get right.
Could you ever
see a time in the world’s future that could actual recreate a person?
It’s
the strangest thing: if you’d asked me that before I started From Darkest Skies
then I think I would have said yes. Writing the story (and some of the rather
peripheral research provoked by it) has convinced me that no, I can’t. I can
certainly foresee a time when it’s possible to recreate a convincing simulation
of a person, even a specific one… but that’s what it would be: a simulation. We
all have our secrets and you can’t recreate something you don’t know exists. A
true recreation akin to resurrection? No.
If recreating
someone you lost was an available technology would you ever do it?
I
don’t think they’d ever be quite the same person (as From Darkest Skies starts
to explore and we're back to Frankenstein again). I’m not sure I'd want the
responsibility of creating life and I’m not sure I could find the hubris to
bring a new life into being purely to service my own needs. Again another topic
I wouldn’t ever have given much thought until I started writing about it.
Social Media Links
liss.ai
@sampeters679
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