But it didn’t happen. The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union collapsed. The EU have integrated former communist countries into a partnership based on trade and cooperation, not fear and armaments. I live in a future that my parents would never have dreamed of forty years ago.

I’m a father myself now: what makes me hopeful is that people of goodwill, of all colors, creeds and political persuasions, want to work together to make the future viable for all of us, and that’s certainly what I’m raising my own kids to be part of. What makes me fearful is that it might not be enough.

Now’s your chance to say something nice about Americans.

Sorry about that. But it’s not like other countries have had it easy, either. Britain has ceased to exist as a political entity, Ireland is entirely depopulated, Russia is a barely-functioning kleptocracy, the European Union couldn’t come to a joint decision on anything more complicated than which biscuits to serve at meetings and Japan has sunk beneath the waves. The U.S.A. voting a highly conservative, isolationist, quasi-religious party into power is mild in comparison.

I have been to the U.S., and everyone was uniformly lovely to me, even immigration and customs officials. The beer, on the other hand, was pretty dreadful.

You don’t shy away from religious characters or using theology in your plots—which is not the norm for SF books.

Which is a fancy way of asking, why the god-bothering? Faith is something that seems to be hard-wired into many people—like music or storytelling. Faith, in whatever form it comes in, can inform and direct someone’s choices, show in their characters, lead them to points of crisis and moments of decision. It doesn’t have to be an individual’s religious faith: it can be a child believing their parents love them, or a society believing in scientific progress.

It’s often an important part of people’s lives, along with class, wealth, nationality, race, sexuality, and politics. I’d find it strange to have smart characters who didn’t consider the big questions that science, philosophy and religion try to answer, and stranger still that they wouldn’t try and behave differently because of their beliefs.

That doesn’t mean that their behavior is predictable, consistent or compatible with the general good, though. Much like real life.

You’re on record as saying that reading science fiction is a virtue.

It is. For example, a reader is simply smarter for having picked up this book. Not just because I wrote it, but because it’s a science fiction book. One of the biggest questions anyone ever asks themselves is ‘what if?’ Science fiction is all about ‘what ifs,’ and SF stories are deliberately told to explore the possibility of, whatever—time travel, genetic engineering, computers in people’s heads, teleportation, what happens when the oil runs out, what do we do if we’re contacted by aliens.

It doesn’t just explore though, it works through the scenarios—it trains you to think differently, to dream differently. Ray Bradbury, one of my all-time favorite authors said: ‘People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it.’ I’m certain that if more politicians read science fiction, we wouldn’t be in half the messes we’re in now, because they would have foreseen the problems beforehand.

Ray Bradbury went straight on to say: ‘Better yet, build it.’ Science fiction inspired me to become a scientist: he, and the other great writers I read all those years ago helped to make one scruffy, awkward English kid think about all his possible futures, and made him want to live in the good ones. We’re not there yet: we may never arrive at our destination.

But the journey? Oh yes…

introducing

If you enjoyed

THE PETROVITCH TRILOGY,

look out for

THE CURVE OF THE EARTH

by Simon Morden

WELCOME TO THE METROZONE. Post-apocalyptic London, full of street gangs and homeless refugees. A dangerous city needs an equally dangerous savior. Step forward Samuil Petrovitch, a genius with extensive cybernetic replacements, a built-in AI with godlike capabilities, and a full armory of Russian swear words. He’s dragged the city back from the brink more than once—and made a few enemies on the way. So when his adopted daughter, Lucy, goes missing in Alaska, he has some clue who’s responsible and why. It never occurs to him that guessing wrong could tip the delicate balance of nuclear-armed nations. This time it’s not just a city that needs saving: it’s the whole world.

Chapter 1

Petrovitch wanted to be alone, to worry and to brood, but he was part of the Freezone collective and that meant never having to be alone again. Company was built in, through the links they wore. Except for him. He didn’t wear a link: he was so connected that, at times, it felt like it wore him.

So he’d taken himself off so he could pretend – not far, just to the top of the hill which overlooked the collection of different-sized domes below. The narrow strip of land before the sea looked like a collection of luminous pearls cradled in the darkness of a winter night.

He’d reached the summit, as determined by at least four satellites spinning overhead, and sat down on the wet, flowing grass to wait. He faced the ocean and felt the first tug of an Atlantic gale stiffen the cloak he’d thrown around him.

[Sasha?]

“Yobany stos.” He’d been there for what? A minute? Less. “When there’s news, vrubatsa? Otherwise past’ zabej.”

He hunched over and stared at the horizon. The last vestiges of twilight were fading into the south-west, but the moon was almost full behind the racing clouds. Enough light for him to see by, at least, even if the climb up would have been crazy for anyone else.

Somewhere over there, over the curve of the Earth, was his daughter, his Lucy, and she had been out of contact for fifty-eight hours and forty-five minutes.

These things happened. Once in a while, the link technology they all carried failed. It meant a break in what kept each individual bound together with the rest of the collective, and a quick trip to the stores for a replacement.

White plastic pressed against bare flesh. A connection restored, and the collective was complete once more.

Lucy was beyond the reach of any Freezone storeroom. She was on the other side of the world, and even he couldn’t just pop over and present her with another link. There were difficulties and complications, not entirely of his own making.

The clock in the corner of his vision ticked on, counting the seconds. Relying on other people still didn’t sit easily with him, though he’d had a decade to get used to the idea. Relying on the Americans and their ultra-conservative, hyper-patriotic, quasi-fascistic, crypto-theocratic Reconstructionist government?

His heart spun faster just thinking about it. They had a joint past, one that barely rose above mutual loathing, and he was certain there was something they weren’t telling him. There’d been – a what? At this distance it was difficult to tell. The Freezone had only just started the laborious process of gathering the raw data and trying to fashion meaning from it.

He pulled his cloak tighter around him, not for warmth but for comfort.