Friday Fiction: David Wellington (Interview)
From planet Earth to outer space
Here’s the weekly Friday Fiction post, and this time it’s an interview with David Wellington. I reviewed some of his books last time.
We meet in the abandoned World War 2 bunker I’ve refitted to be my refuge to survive the apocalypse. The concrete walls are stacked with supplies on old steel shelving. Tinned food, plastic sacks of grain, demijohns of water. The sniping holes have been boarded over with any wood I could find, and the entrance door triple bolted.
When I peered through the cracks between boards I couldn’t see any movement outside in the woods. We’re safe, for now, as long as we don’t make too much noise.
I drag two chairs across the dusty floor and we sit where we can easily watch the bolted entrance. I press “record” on the ancient tape-based device I salvaged from the stores. The big wheels turn, squeaking at the same point in each revolution.
Karl: Hi David, how are you today?
David: Doing great! Excited to talk about books, especially my books.
Karl: I guess that author mindset shows our dedication. Even in the most horrific situations where humanity faces extinction, we still focus on our craft. Tell us a bit about your writing.
David: Well, I’ve written a bunch of books. The first was Monster Island, which started out as a web serial. I had a friend who had a blog he didn’t want to write for anymore, and he said I could put my book there. I said, great, give me six months, I’ll put together some characters, think of a plot. He said, no, you start on Monday. So I wrote that book in realtime, writing a chapter every Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I’ve been doing this professionally ever since.
Karl: That’s an excellent habit to develop, and a discipline that I need to work on. I’m always getting distracted by other things, such as going on perimeter patrols in the woods to check the pits.
David: Well, we always have to keep an eye out for … them. Anyway, I write a lot of horror stuff, and a lot of science fiction. I’ve done spy thrillers and medieval fantasy and some weird stories nobody seemed to understand. My big series are: Monster Island (three books), 13 Bullets, (five books), and my latest, the Red Space trilogy, which started with Paradise-1. The second volume, Revenant-X, is coming out November 5th, 2024. In 2019 I was short-listed for the Arthur C Clarke award for my book, The Last Astronaut, which was quite personally gratifying.
Karl: Well done!
David: Thanks. I’ve worked on comic books and video games as well but the books have always been my main love.
Karl: I first came across your work when I was shopping in Hay-on-Wye (book town) during a work away-day. I saw the Monster Island trilogy and snapped it up to take a chance on it. And loved the books! I became a fan, and count them as some of my favourite entertainment reads, along with The Descent (Jeff Long), Housebroken (The Behrg), Neuromancer (William Gibson), and Damnnation Alley (Roger Zelazny). I liked the way you took a potentially stale genre and made it fresh. Instead of using the standard tropes and setting, you had child soldiers from Africa, zombies that evolved and gained new powers, and other things that kept me surprised. Was that a key part of you diving into that genre, or just a happy coincidence? And why zombies?
David: It was zombies because I’d seen the Dawn of the Dead remake and got very excited –
Karl: I loved that film too, though the original from 1978 is still my favourite. Sorry, carry on.
David: Monster Island actually started out as a science fiction novel. It was going to be the story of an astronaut who lands on Earth and finds everyone gone, a plague or something had wiped out the entire human race and he doesn’t know what will happen if he takes off his space suit helmet. Obviously, it changed a lot along the way! None of that is in the finished book.
Karl: I think that was the right choice. Losing the astronaut made the opening of Monster Island more grounded, whilst still having a suspenseful reveal of what reality we face. Akin to One by Conrad Williams, that began with a tense undersea oil rig disaster, and only when we get to land does the protagonist realise how fucked up things have become. I love books that have an opening which charms me, and surpasses my expectations with some unexpected world-building.
David: When I started writing a zombie novel I absolutely wanted to do a fresh take on it. Every time—I always want to put my own spin on things. I could write like Stephen King, but he would always be better at it. When I write like David Wellington, I’m the best there is.
Karl: True! I followed your career from a distance, and saw that next you turned your hand at vampire and werewolf fiction, no doubt creating fresh approaches for those as well. (I have to admit I haven’t read them yet: I own a huge amount of books and fear it will take me a lifetime to read – and reread – what I own already, especially if I ever want to make room to expand further into this tiny hobbit hole.) Was it a market-based decision, or just where your interests lie? What was your inspiration and driver for those new series?
David: The vampire books came about because at the time, the Paranormal Romance genre was just starting to hit its stride. Laurel K Hamilton had written Guilty Pleasures—this was before Twilight, actually—and sexy vampires were the trend. To me, Dracula had always been scary and super creepy so I wanted to write about the nastiest, most disgusting vampires I could think of. Again, I wanted to put my own stamp on things.
Karl: And now I want to read your series even more! Along with the Necroscope books by Brian Lumley, which I’ve only ever read bits of.
David: Well, long story short, the sexy vampires won that particular war. I actually read some of those books and it turned out Laurel K Hamilton was actually a really, really good writer. So the werewolf books were my attempt at a kind of apology for everything I’d said about the sexy vampires. I wanted to do sexy werewolves, though of course anyone who reads those books (Frostbite/Overwinter, or, in the UK, Cursed/Ravaged) will quickly find that they’re not your usual love story.
Karl: Ah, thanks for clarifying the namings. I was searching through the rubble in the burnt-out remains of bookshops and when I found the ash-coated covers of Frostbite and Cursed, with nothing else of the books remaining, I had thought they were two different series. I hear there’s a fabled warehouse of books that hasn’t been destroyed somewhere over the mountains, and I plan to make an expedition there once I’ve sharpened my axe. Anyway, I saw you moved into space horror/suspense with The Last Astronaut, then Paradise-1. I bought those just before THE EVENT, and am really excited to read them and see what you did with a genre I write in (horror space opera with creepy spaceships and a female protagonist – I have avoided reading your blurbs for fear of spoilers, so forgive me if I haven’t summarised your two books well!) What led to your change of genre? And am I right in thinking The Last Astronaut is standalone, but Paradise-1 is the first in a planned (or written) series?
David: Yes, that’s correct. Paradise-1 is the first of a trilogy but The Last Astronaut will forever be a standalone book (unless I change my mind later).
Karl: Author’s privilege!
David: Space horror wasn’t much of a stretch for me. I’ve always been a big science fiction fan. As I mentioned, Monster Island was originally a science fiction novel. Science fiction, especially space opera, was the first genre I loved and I always keep coming back to it. I wrote three huge tomes about starfighter pilots, starting with a book called Forsaken Skies, but they made me write it under a pseudonym—it’s listed as being authored by someone named D Nolan Clark, but that’s me. The Silence Trilogy, as it’s called, wasn’t a major commercial success but it got me to a point where I could write The last Astronaut under my own name. Hey, did you hear that?
We both listen. Only the grating squeak of the tape reels. I pause it with a chunky click. Wind rustles the trees outside, but the sounds could just as easily be legs moving through long grass. I had better wrap this up. I press record again, with a shaking finger.
Karl: Plotter or pantser? Tell me a bit about your writing process.
David: Plotter, but I always reserve the right to change my outline as I go along. I often write books backward. I’ll imagine the ending, some big explosive scene and then I imagine what events had to happen to lead up to that climax, what kind of characters need to be in the story to get there, etc.
Karl: That makes sense to me. I use a mix as well. I lay out the main story events, but not always what happens, or what the ending is. I let the characters surprise me, just as they try to outwit each other. Which of your books are you most proud of, and why?
David: So many different answers to that. 13 Bullets has the best story, I think, and my favorite character, Laura Caxton, who I keep coming back to. Monster Island is incredible anarchic fun (and its sequels get even crazier). The Last Astronaut is genuinely scary, I think, and also a hell of an adventure. I don’t know. There’s something there for everyone.
Karl: What are some of your favourite books to read?
David: There are authors whose books I will pick up the second they hit the shelves, people like Matt Ruff and Ian MacDonald. I’ve never found myself going wrong when I pick up an Urusla K Leguin book, of course. Adrian Tchaikovsky is quite good, isn’t he?
Karl looks up from scribbling names on a scrap of paper. He has a slightly embarrassed air.
Karl: Oh yes. And my “to read” list grows again. Hey, have you got any exciting stories planned for the future?
David: Many! Right now I’m working on the third volume of the Red Space trilogy. It’s going to be a real roller coaster.
Karl: When an author is excited about their work, it’s always a good sign! I’ve just realised that I have been an awful host. I should have offered you something more than the bandages for that –
Karl nods to indicate white wrappings around the still-raw wound on David’s arm. Crimson has begun to bloom through the bindings.
Karl: For starters: what’s your favourite cake?
David: Spice cake. That might be an American thing. I love a good almond croissant.
Karl: Oh shit. All I have is three-week old rock cakes.
Karl taps one against the floor. It’s hard to know which surface is the more solid.
David: I’ll pass.
Karl: What do you do as downtime?
David: I read and play far too many videogames—I think I have four hundred hours in Baldur’s Gate 3 (Astarion, if anyone’s asking).
Karl: Me too. Not much else to do in the long waiting hours until it’s safe to venture out. Thankfully my emergency generator holds up long enough to get a few hours in before the exhaust fumes start to choke me. I’m planning on playing System Shock 2 again in the near future, and have also just got a Commodore 64 emulator running in Linux so I can revisit some of the games that got me through school. Seems so long ago now.
David: My wife and I love to travel but that can mean going to a town fifty miles from home and seeing what’s happening over there. We did go to Paris for the Olympics, that was quite exciting.
Karl: I bet. Especially with THE EVENT Event occurring shortly afterwards.
David: I don’t like to think about that bit. So much death. And so much that was worse than death.
Karl: I’m sure your arm isn’t infected. I used carbolic soap.
A pause, while both glance nervously at the bandages for signs of wriggling.
Karl: Last question. How are we going to fix all the things wrong in the world today?
David: If you’re asking a genre author, we really are in trouble. I imagine apocalypses for a living, I’ve never been any good at staving them off in real life.
Karl: Thank you for your time.
Karl presses Stop on the tape recorder. Wind moans through the boards at the windows, its fingers seeking inside, possibly passing information back to anything in the undergrowth that has been creeping closer.
“I’d best be going,” says David. “I promised my wife I’d be back with supplies.”
“I understand. Please, load your bag up with anything from the shelves. Seed potatoes, cutlery, and a pile of legal indexes that make great kindling. It’s all yours. Are you going to be okay on the journey back?”
David undoes the zip on his long carry-all and removes a machete. It’s flaked with rust. Or maybe, on second glance, the reddish patches aren’t rust.
“Of course,” he says. “I have this. For close encounters.”
The sun is setting. Soon the moon will be our guide for the dash through the woods to the main road. And I hope there are no close encounters for any humans still alive who need to head out tonight.