There had to be a girl. She would be a Victorian girl, with all the baggage that the word brings with it. She would have to be prim, and by the standards of the trouser-wearing peoples of the Northern Hemisphere, well brought up. But, under those stiff Victorian clothes, she would be as tough as nails. I took that as a given, because my creativity always appears to fail me if I try to write a soppy girl. I just can’t. You could poke me with sticks, and it would have no effect. Oh, they sometimes start out soppy as anything, but as soon as they find that it doesn’t work, they tend to become a reasonably close relative of Miss Piggy.
And so on. In short, I practically nearly drowned under the force of this book. In my mind, it is still totally visual, a sequence of images rather than words, as if I was getting a glimpse of the movie that was yet to be made (and probably never will be. See later.).
Authors tend to have pack rat minds as a matter of course, and I suspect that my mind packs more rats than most. Nation became a happy dumping ground for the hoarded junk of fifty years of joyfully undirected serendipitous reading. Henrik Willem Van Loon’s story of the Pacific gave me a good background. Various accounts of the Krakatoa explosion and its aftermath were dredged up. A whole three shelves of accumulated world folklore got distilled into the affairs of one island. Scientist friends dug out esoteric information on how you can measure the age of glass. And—this was a real coup—I found myself at a dinner sitting next to a man who not only knew that bullets can be slowed very, very rapidly by water and also that in some circumstances they might even ricochet off the surface, but who was able to set up some tests in his big tanks, just to check for certain. Blue Jupiter—viewing the giant planet in the daylight—is something I discovered for myself, one evening in early autumn, when I spotted Sirius just visible in the sky and realized that the highly sophisticated go-to function on my shiny new telescope would be able to use this data to locate Jupiter right at that moment.
And, five minutes later, there it was, blue and white like the daytime moon and with three of its own satellites visible.
They kept the universe turned on even during the daytime! I had always known that to be true, but it was a moment of epiphany; by whom, from what, and why I don’t know, but any epiphany is worth having.
Even now, more than a year since the deed was done, I am still not sure what Nation is, because it seemed to me that I channelled half of it. I have a reputation, or possibly a crime sheet, as a comic writer, and indeed humour does break out sometimes in the book and a smile will force its way through. Yet it begins with a boy burying the corpses of almost everybody he has ever known. I admired Mau’s dilemma as he single-handedly invented humanism, railing at the gods for not existing, while at the same time needing them to exist to take the blame. I find it difficult to remember that I invented him: he seemed to create himself as the book progressed.
At this point, people say, in a kindly voice, the novel was clearly influenced by the fact that I was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease during its completion.
That would be interesting if it were true, but it is even more interesting because it is not true. The first, and quite complex, draft had already been finished when I was diagnosed, and posterior cortical atrophy, which is the official term for my variant of the disease, is quite hard even for an expert to discover. From what I have been told, the disease may have been quietly and unobtrusively taking over the territory for very many years before I had an inkling that anything was wrong.
All authors must occasionally wonder where the magic comes from, and sometimes I wonder where the strength of Daphne came from, and about the source of Mau’s almost incoherent rage. Wherever their origins, I believe that Nation is the best book I have ever written or will write.
Finally, or perhaps I should say climactically, I must thank my editors on both sides of the Atlantic, who got the best out of me with Nation by pushing needles under my fingernails, an ancient skill of the craft. I know it was for my own good, and I am grateful. Sincerely grateful, and this time I’m not kidding.
I would be astonished and gratified to be standing in front of you today, if indeed I was, in fact, standing in front of you today, because it would mark something very special—a second chance that worked.
Up until the mid-1990s I was barely known in the United States, while already selling in great numbers almost everywhere else in the world. The publishing situation was woeful. I remember that one edition, in paperback, went out across America with my name spelt wrong on every other page. And yet, when I went to U.S. science fiction conventions, I would be faced by a huge queue of fans, all burdened down with grey import U.K. editions—hardcover ones at that.
My agent did some calculations, and presented the publisher with figures to show how much their sloth was costing them. Things began to move. Not long afterwards my publisher either took over somebody else or got taken over themselves; in practice it’s always a little difficult to be certain in these matters, because publishers tend to collide like galaxies, and you are never quite sure who ran into who, only that some stars have exploded and some constellations have gone freelance.
But, in short, I ended up with bright star editors who knew my work and cared about it, and even publicists who knew my name, which is always useful in a publicist.
Strange things began to happen. I began to get royalties, I began to get big crowds at events; at one signing a few years ago where the independent bookshop was stripped of all my titles within minutes of the beginning of an event, the crowd surged down to the nearest Barnes and Noble and did the same thing there. Who would have thought it?
Am I proud? Well, I am English, and a Knight and, of course, properly modest and diffident. Hooray! Bingo! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!
I have always treasured having one of my novels named an Amelia Bloomer Book by the feminist task force of the ALA, because there is something heartwarming about a man with a beard receiving accolades for strong feminist writing. But this is the Boston Globe–Horn Book award. I am truly honoured to receive it, especially so, as it is given by people who, if they are not librarians themselves, are often in league with librarians.