Hi, Mark! Welcome to The Great Raven and thank you for
agreeing to do this interview. I’ve read and reviewed all your books, so this
is a great treat! The posts reviewing your books are among the most popular on
this web site.
1. Tell
us about yourself – how did a person with your background in games design
come to be writing young adult fiction?
Part of the reason that I started writing was down to the
fact that I was becoming extremely frustrated with how uncreative the games industry
was becoming. The teams that
develop video games are so massive now that it's rare that one person can have
very much creative input or control and so I turned to writing as a way to
produce something that I had complete creative control over. It might make me sound a bit
ego-maniacal (which, of course, I am), but there's something really liberating
about being able to create something by yourself and also not having to answer
to accountants or project managers.
Video games are “big business” these days and I'm afraid that's taken
some of the fun out of making them.
- What
inspired the H.I.V.E series?
My best friend's cat.
No really, I haven't forgotten my medication. My friend has a big, fluffy white cat that looks just like
the cat that sits on Blofeld's lap in the old James Bond movies. So, I was playing with this cat one day
and it got me thinking that those old-school Bond villains always just seemed
to appear out of thin air with very little back story and that got me thinking
about how they became world- conquering megalomaniacs in the first place. It was only a short mental walk from
there to HIVE. My best friend's
cat is also called Otto, so he helped in more ways than one....
3.
Sometimes, I feel as if I’m playing a computer game in
my head when I read your books - do your games-designing skills actually give
you ideas for your fiction?
I think that they give you a good sense of what makes an
exciting action sequence. I think
that the reader should be just as immersed in an exciting action-packed scene
in a book as they would be in an equivalent section of a game. So I suppose that some of my past
experience has helped in that respect.
- Tell
us about your main characters, without too many spoilers for those who
haven’t read the series and may want to. What did you have in mind when
you created each of them?
I think that the main characteristic that I wanted Otto and
the gang to share was that they were all clever and resourceful. Otto especially is the sort of person
who uses his brain to get out of
trouble rather than his physical strength and that's something that I
personally find much more fun to write than the more traditional action
hero. It also means that I can
have more fun with the dialogue between the main characters as they've always
got a smart-ass answer for everything!
- The
first H.I.V.E. novel was very funny, with a sort of Hogwarts for villains,
as well as teasing references to the Bond movies and the often-hilarious
reasons why our heroes came to H.I.V.E. After that, the stories become
darker, although there’s still humour. Was this planned out from the
beginning?
Yes, it's all leading to a point where the main characters,
Otto especially, are going to have to ask themselves where life at HIVE is
leading them. A school for
villians may be a neat high-concept idea, but when you actually stop and think
about it, it will inevitably lead in to some pretty dark places. Having said that, I don't ever want to
produce a completely straight-faced HIVE book, as the tongue should always be
in the vague proximity of the cheek where Otto and the gang are concerned.
- Is
it difficult to create sympathy for characters who are, after all,
training to be villains, without making them too nice?
Yes, but part of the point of the series, right from the
start was to make the readers ask themselves what exactly defines a
villain. Without getting too
philosophical about it, I don't think that the bad guy ever really sits there
and thinks of themselves as the villain. More practically speaking, if the
central characters of the books were truly evil it would be very hard to make
the reader root for them. For my
money, the mark of a really great villain is that the reader likes them just as
much as the hero any way.
- Your
action scenes and your technology are oddly convincing (with the possible
exception of the giant marauding plant in the first book!). I’ve just read
about the development of a “cloaking device” for war planes that reminded
me of the Shroud planes in your books. How much research do you do for
your books and what, if any, are your favourite sources of information?
I'm a massive techno-geek and I put a lot of effort into
basing the technology in the books on bleeding edge research in the real
world. Most of the technology in
the books is just over the horizon from a real world point of view and while
there are a lot of science fiction elements it is usually based in reality in
some way. I do a lot of research
on-line, although I do sometimes have to be careful. For example, while I was doing some research for Dreadnought
I realised afterwards that I'd just Googled the effects of a nuclear
detonation, the details of the President's secret service security team and the
internal layout of Airforce One.
To be honest, I'm surprised I didn't end up in Guantanamo Bay!
Thanks, Mark, for the fascinating insight into your work!
Additional:
The following question and answer appeared on the Good
Reading Magazine web site. I’m reproducing it with permission, because I'm sure Mark would have given me the same answer and I thought readers might like to know. If
you’d like to read the whole Good Reading interview, here’s the link: http://www.goodreadingmagazine.com.au/meettheauthor.cfm
Paramount
has acquired the film rights to your ‘H.I.V.E’ series. Do you have any hints as
to when the movie will be coming out?
No, not
really. I’m told that quite often the author is the last person to hear
anything anyway, unless you're J.K.Rowling, so I'm not holding my
breath. I do think that movie versions of books can be a double-edged
sword though, the idea of a movie of HIVE is certainly exciting, but you can't
help but worry how it might turn out. For every good book adaptation it seems
like there are ten bad ones.
2 comments:
When is book 9 coming put,eh? Mark
Looks like I’m way behind! I didn’t know the series had gone that far. No idea when Book 9 is due, Book 8 came out in 2015. Did it end on a cliffhanger?
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