News

Interview: Cam Winstanley, Author Of Noir Future Thriller B-spine

Update: B-Spine is free until June 21 for the Amazon Kindle and Kindle app! Check out a terrific, thoroughly original book!

By Heath McKnight (doddleNEWS)

Cam Winstanley is the British author of B-spine, a crazy, futuristic and neo-noir thriller that is epic and definitely a dark tale of what the future could bring. The story is about is set in 2098, and is about ‘the North American Union and biotechnology isn't creating a better tomorrow, it's maintaining a cold, dark and bloody today. A crumbling dystopia of breathing buildings and weaponized insects, where corporations rule cities and mercenaries conduct business takeovers at gunpoint. But unless Kirsty Powell can discover what really happened at Arclights nightclub, it's a future that ends for her in seven days... ‘ As a long-time comic book fan, the book reminds me of the dystopic future seen in Dredd, but this story is wholly original and gripping.

Cam Winstanley: Tall, English, father, cyclist, 43. To a much lesser extent, writer, kickboxer and mediocre-yet-enthusiastic Xbox Live Battlefield participant.

Cam Winstanley: I've spent my whole career on magazines, starting out as a video game reviewer in the mid-90s then working my way up the chain of command on titles about technology, snowboarding, cinema, puzzles and sport. For the last three years, I've been the editor of Procycling, a magazine about professional road racing. Check out our assembled ramblings on Twitter at procycling_mag.

Cam Winstanley: Like the Beatles song, I've always wanted to be a paperback writer, so a decade ago, I quit my job to write B-spine in a self-funded six month splurge. Five days a week every week, 2,500 words every day, no excuses. I went back to work, hawked this first draft to secure a literary agent, then followed his advice through three more drafts before he pitched it to book publishers. It made it as far as a meeting with one big name but they were confused by the story -- was it sci-fi or a crime thriller? So that was that for a few years until the Amazon Kindle self publishing route came along.

Storywise, B-spine started out as a vivid migraine dream, where I crashed and then shot a living, wounded, screaming motorbike. Over time, I reverse-engineered the details of the B-spine world, where oil sanctions have forced America to adopt ‘livedrives’ as a poor quality power replacement (editor’s note: livedrives are basically ‘living engines’ that power pretty much everything in the book, and where the term B-spine comes from). The dream itself appears as the book's opening event.

My writing inspiration came from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash -- still my favorite sci-fi book -- and hard-boiled American crime fiction. Authors such as Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy have this amazing, harsh brevity to their dialogue and descriptions. Ever read Run by Doug E. Winter? The opening chapter of that blew me away.

Purely for "research", I fired a shitload of battlefield weaponry into the Arizona desert. My conclusions? It's hard to miss anything with a Steyr TMP and guns are WAY louder than in the movies. Then I read a lot about topics related to the B-spine universe and just made the rest up -- such is the advantage of a near-future setting.

The more you look into energy consumption, resource mismanagement and water over-use in the USA, the easier it is to envisage a future of declining global living standards, food rationing and power outages, if not for our children then for our children's children -- the generation depicted in B-spine. So it was always going to be a gloomy setting. My own view is that the period of optimism after the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 was the world's one and only chance to alter global behavior and, in doing so, to limit environmental change. That the western world has spent the intervening years consuming even more power and generating way more greenhouse gasses means that we can say nothing when the emerging middle classes of China and India follow in our footsteps. We all have a car, fridge and central heating, so why shouldn't they? And what will THAT do to the planet when those extra billions all start living the consumer dream?

I'm ranting now and I never wanted to turn B-spine into some lame treehugger's manifesto. That's why I packed it full of swearing and gun fights, and added suicide bomber rabbits and SWAT bears in body armor. Hopefully, B-spine strikes the balance between being entertaining yet also relevant and informed. Anyone reading it should get a sense of my eco-outrage without being distracted from all the sickening violence.

Cam Winstanley: Would love to, given time. The book's format was inspired by James Ellroy's American Tabloid, which follows numerous fictional characters connected to the assassination of JFK. Some meet, while others don't, and I lifted that idea for B-spine, adding incidental characters who I figured could enjoy a life of their own outside of the one book.
I've actually pencilled out another two books that would form a trilogy of 'equals' rather than 'sequels'. The rather ambitious concept is that every book will take place in the same time period and could be read in any order, giving a snapshot of B-spine's North America of 2098.

That's something to aspire to for now, as it's already taken over a decade to get the one book out. When I started writing it back in 2002, I imagined a device called a Slate that was every communication device packed into a single, flat, touch-screen device. Now of course, everyone's got an iPad. Time marches on...

Cam Winstanley: Inexplicably, Hollywood's yet to come knocking, but I'd love to see B-spine filmed with a crime movie aesthetic, rather than as a slam-bang sci-fi actioner – like Joe Carnahan's Narc, Steven Soderbergh's Haywire or the HBO series The Wire. That'd really set it apart from other sci-fi movies.

I deliberately avoid physical descriptions of characters, but attached actors to characters while I was writing it. For me, the central character Kirsty Powell was always a Rocketeer-era Jennifer Connelly, but a reader who emailed me said that he'd imagined her as Zoe Saldana. She's clearly meant to be hot but I guess there are no references to her ethnicity.
Bishop, the corporate enforcer, was modelled on Bob Peck, who died some years ago (editor’s note: I actually pictured him, too, or Charles Dance). Hemblen, the mercenary, was based on John Schneider, the Dukes of Hazzard actor who was playing Clark Kent's dad in Smallville at the time. There's also a fast-talking enforcer based on John Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank. I called him Cusack.

Cam Winstanley: It's a modern-day thriller about the Disneyfication of experiences and how anyone with enough money can buy a safe, controlled version of anything. Look at all the millionaires dropping deposits for Richard Branson's Virgin space flight, or all those idiots literally queuing up in Everest's death zone, to inch up one after the other. Anyway, it's about what happens when that illusion of theme park safety pops. Think Michael Crichton's Westworld in the style of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, and you're not far off the mark.

——-

I'd like to thank Cam Winstanley for the interview. You can check out his terrific B-spine?eBook on the Amazon Kindle (click here) or the Kindle app (I myself read it on my iPad). If you're in the UK, check out this link. Cam also has a 100 page sampler called B-spine Fractured? available to? ownload here free on October 08 and 09. If you're in the UK, click here.

The post Interview: Cam Winstanley, Author Of Noir Future Thriller B-spine appeared first on Doddle.