Seeds Of Memory

Or, the end of the beginning.

Memory Seed began with lots of long walks.

It was 1988. I was living in Surrey at the time, having left university just up the A30 five years earlier, and nearby lay the green spaces of Virginia Water and Windsor Great Park – part manicured, part wild. On my many walks I’d think about the novels I was writing, or planning to write. One day, a couple of years after I’d written my first attempt at a novel, I was inspired by the greenery to think about a scenario where a coastal city was surrounded by, and then invaded by rampant vegetation. I had two mental images: one of a series of moss-covered roofs leading down to the sea, the other of a high class bordello that was a cover for some other operation. Later I imagined characters who might inhabit this city, which, after the supercomputer, I named Kray (for some reason I imagined a supercomputer at the heart of the place). This novel, I knew, would have a strong environmental theme. Soon the characters and scenario began to grow wild in my imagination.

The first draft wasn’t great so I put it aside, but four years later I was inspired to return to the scenario – the first time I’d ever done that. Something in Kray called me back. The second draft was much better, and, excited and reinvigorated, I began sending the first three chapters and a synopsis around to publishers. Nobody bit.

But then random chance stepped in to aid me. It turned out that somebody at Orbit Books had read the chapters and been deeply struck by them. At the end of 1993, just days before I moved house, he wrote to me. (Had I moved even a week earlier I would never have received that letter!) But by 1994 I had a third version of the novel prepared, and this I sent back to Orbit. The year passed by. I gave up hope. Then, at the end of the year, I was told there was a chance my novel would be accepted for publication. A couple of months later, it was.

Needless to say, I was gobsmacked. Much later I discovered the odds against being plucked from the slush pile – had I known those odds I might never have bothered sending my chapters around the London publishing companies. But I did get lucky all those years ago, and a while later my debut was published under the title Memory Seed (a title we had to come up with just weeks before the deadline, and which a friend, suggesting ‘Seeds Of Memory,’ created for me).

The novel encapsulates all my early interests and influences, some of which I have retained. There is a strong green theme – the Earth fighting back against a self-centred humanity which has ruined it. Almost all the characters are women – I had been a committed feminist since my mid-twenties. There is a sense of enigma and gothic mystery encouraged by my love of Gene Wolfe’s books, matched with my vivid imagination, which for some readers recalled Jack Vance. All in all, I was told, this was a striking combination, and later on reviews confirmed this.

In later years I wrote three short stories, linking them to the Spired Inn, inside which, at the start of the novel, Zinina begins her actions against Kray’s Citadel rulers. The Spired Inn epitomised Kray for me; that combination of ancient tradition, modern technology, weird neighbours and peculiar clientele.

To this day Kray intrigues me. Fourteen years ago I acquired the rights to the novel from Orbit, but by then all digital copies of the novel had been lost, so I had to buy a paperback copy, tear each page out to OCR scan it, then reassemble the text in Word. Because of that process, I read the novel and gave it a light edit, finding the qualities of the place still mesmerising: the plants, the people, the rain, the strange societies, the sense of doom and regret. The atmosphere of Kray represents me in a deep way. So I was delighted when, completely out of the blue, Ian Whates asked me to write two new Tales From The Spired Inn for a new collection.

It was marvellous to smell the reeking air and feel that warm rain once again. Some novels you write without realising you are mining your own psychological depths. Memory Seed was one such for me, which, after that first terrible draft, was why it called me back. Much of the work of an artiste is done in their subconscious without them realising it.