Over the coming weeks in the run up to the launch of Man O’War, I’ll be posting a few lines on each of the main characters in the book, about who they are, what they do and their role in the book. They’re a varied and diverse bunch, in more ways than one, and I have a soft spot for them all. I’ll also be posting a little bit about the creation and inception of each character, and why they are the way they are. I won’t be posting anything spoilerific; these will be more like musings of the author.

The six POV characters are, in order of appearance: the jellyfisherman Dhiraj Om; the corporate Head of R&D Nita Rhodes; brutal gangster Agarkka D’Souza; black market engineer Salazar Gomez; oil heir and civil servant Adem Johnson; and hard-nosed policewoman Tilda Boulton. This week it’s Adem Johnson.

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Ademuyiwa Johnson is the son and heir of Joseph Johnson, who heads up the powerful Johnson Petroleum Corporation in the Niger delta. Adem’s character and story is one of the most multi-faceted in the book; like D’Souza, he straddles multiple identities and struggles to define himself against several different contexts. More than any other character Adem allowed me to explore ideas and themes that aren’t overt in other parts of the book, such as father-son relationships, sibling rivalries, and responsibilities disposed towards two different countries.

I’ve been asked a couple of times why I picked Nigeria as the setting for the latter half of the book and, therefore, the country of Adem’s and his family’s birth. The simple answer is that on a high level it satisfied many of the geographical and political criteria I set; it’s oil rich (and getting richer), it has a coastline, and it has a colonial history with the UK, allowing for geopolitical ties to be easily established in my imagined world. Nigeria is also the site of a long-running and tragic historical grievance, which allowed me to easily imagine its evolution into a bloody insurgence run by guerrilla Marxist revolutionaries who hid and moved in the delta, much like the Marxist revolutionaries of Colombia. I almost chose Saudi Arabia as the foreign setting instead of Nigeria, particularly because of the Al-Yamamah business deal, but settled on Nigeria because of the watery wilds of the delta, and the fact that I was lucky enough to know people who’d worked in the oil and gas industry over there.

So Adem Johnson is Nigerian, but his career in London means he feels – and, to his father, seems – more like an Englishman than a Nigerian. I wrote Adem as a sort of well-to-do throwback, with more accentuated genteel English mannerisms than many of the English members of the cast, but his father’s shadow looms large, and he is not so genteel. At a basic level all Adem wants is to win the affections of his father, but beneath that his intentions and schemes are more Machiavellian.

The difficult relationship Adem has with Joseph – and, by extension, his squabbling siblings – is a result of this slightly fragmented sense of self he has. His brother Remus is an undeconstructed boor, while his sister is a left-wing firebrand who doesn’t hold truck with her family’s nefarious dealings in the oil sector. In every sense Adem is the Golden Boy of the family; he’s the eldest, he has a respectable job, an excellent network of contacts, and the business acumen to hold him in good stead during his future position at the head of the family business. And yet. Families crackle with relationships that don’t make sense. Joseph is hypermasculine, unrefined and direct. Families are rarely as close knit as they ought to appear on the surface. Conflict brews within every in-joke and every dig. But it makes for good writing!

Like all the characters in Man O’War, I like to think that, under Adem’s scheming skin there beats the heart of somebody who wants to do something good, both politically and personally. I don’t buy into the notion of evil very easily; in some way every ambition can be justified, however skewed and warped that justification may be. Like the rest of the cast, I found Adem’s written sweet spot snared somewhere between bad decisions and good intentions. In this respect he makes for a perfect associate for Nita Rhodes, who also is trying to balance those multiplying spinning plates. They really are made for each other, because I made them that way.

I always felt Adem was my classically tragic character, the man who is dragged to his fate by his own designs. The question is: can he draw himself back from the brink? As he covers his tracks he finds himself dealing with Tilda Boulton, the DS with a grudge. We’ll take a look at Tilda next week.

 Over the coming weeks in the run up to the launch of Man O’War, I’ll be posting a few lines on each of the main characters in the book, about who they are, what they do and their role in the book. They’re a varied and diverse bunch, in more ways than one, and I have a soft spot for them all. I’ll also be posting a little bit about the creation and inception of each character, and why they are the way they are. I won’t be posting anything spoilerific; these will be more like musings of the author.

The six POV characters are, in order of appearance: the jellyfisherman Dhiraj Om; the corporate Head of R&D Nita Rhodes; brutal gangster Agarkka D’Souza; black market engineer Salazar Gomez; oil heir and civil servant Adem Johnson; and hard-nosed policewoman Tilda Boulton. This week it’s Salazar Gomez.

Salazar Gomez

When I had the original draft concept for Man O’War I had three POV characters whom I knew would drive the story: my jellyfisherman, Dhiraj; my corporate leader Nita Rhodes, and my gangster Agarkka D’Souza. Appropriately they are the first POV characters we meet, and their conflicting ambitions are what open up the first half of the story. As the web of plots and subplots became more intricate it became apparent I needed more points of view from which to tell the main story, and that there were many more types of people who’d be affected and dragged into this kind of story. So I created my “second wave” of POVs: Salazar Gomez was the first of these.

On the face of it, Salazar is like Dhiraj – another everyman character. He just wants what’s best for his daughter, his beloved Lily (his “Chou Chou”), and to try and improve the wretched lot he’s found himself in. But he’s more than just an everyman. His ambitions are familiar to us all, but unlike Dhiraj, he is already immersed in darkness when we meet him, and his story peers through a glass, darkly. Salazar is an engineer of advanced robotics, specialising in sexual plastics and systems. In the world of Man O’War, such a niche specialism might be legitimately used for prosthetics or medical purposes; in Salazar’s case, awful decisions taken in his past life have scuppered any chance of a medical career, and so he has turned to working on illegal sex robots manufactured in the French underworld.

Salazar’s world is violent and seedy, but unlike D’Souza, he doesn’t revel in it. He wants out. But he has enough street smarts enough to manipulate his reprehensible situation for his benefit. When we meet him, he’s secured an interview with Nita Rhodes’s firm, EI Systems. And he’s willing to do anything to get him and his precious Chou Chou out of the slums of Lyon.

More than any other character, I think Salazar represents the potential for what I’ve called the “secondary use of technology”. That is, where tech is being adapted or co-opted or manipulated for purposes that not related to the original intended purpose of the system. To be frank, nobody really knows how technology is going to be co-opted and used until it is dragged from the testing conditions of the lab and into the pool of human ingenuity that is reality. An amusing example would be how magnetrons developed for radar arrays were accidentally adapted to create… ta-da! The microwave oven! A less salubrious example would be the way in which terrorists adapted mobile phone devices to act as triggers for Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). I wonder how robotics will be adapted by enterprising individuals, for good or ill? It’s almost certainly going to happen, and I wonder how much thought goes into this area of thought? It’s not really an engineering discipline, and it’s not really a philosophical one. It sits somewhere between the two, I think.

One of my hopes for Man O’War is that it sparks off ideas about these possibilities for technology. Engineers often have a blind spot about how their technologies might be co-opted in the real world, because they are – understandably – distracted by the technical excellence of the product or capability they have created. It’s frequently down to artists and amateurs to explore how these things might be used in different ways. Salazar is an engineer, but for him, necessity becomes the mother of invention.

He might not have been inventive had Adem Johnson not leant on Nita Rhodes quite so heavily. We’ll come to Adem next week.

Over the coming weeks in the run up to the launch of Man O’War, I’ll be posting a few lines on each of the main characters in the book, about who they are, what they do and their role in the book. They’re a varied and diverse bunch, in more ways than one, and I have a soft spot for them all. I’ll also be posting a little bit about the creation and inception of each character, and why they are the way they are. I won’t be posting anything spoilerific; these will be more like musings of the author.

The six POV characters are, in order of appearance: the jellyfisherman Dhiraj Om; the corporate Head of R&D Nita Rhodes; brutal gangster Agarkka D’Souza; black market engineer Salazar Gomez; oil heir and civil servant Adem Johnson; and hard-nosed policewoman Tilda Boulton. This week it’s Agarkka D’Souza.

Agarkka D’Souza

In 2011 my wife and I took a holiday in Sri Lanka, driving in a rough clockwise circle that began and ended with the capital Colombo. We stopped off in Negombo, a small city few miles northward up the coasts from Colombo. Negombo comprises a coastal strip of beach, from which a looping, crooked finger of spit languidly curls out into the Indian Ocean, creating a beautiful lagoon peppered with fishermen’s huts on stilts poking up from the waterline like rustic HG Wells War Machines that have decided to hang up their heat rays and retire by the sea.

It’s a seaside town with the sort of languorous pace of life typical of most of Lanka. One evening we were walking to a restaurant by the sea and on the opposite side of the street I saw a sight so incongruous it’ll never leave me. There walked a gang of youths that looked like they’d escaped from the set of Back To The Future 2. Despite the sun pumping down temperatures of thirty degrees and the rest, they wore leather coats, showed off Mohawk haircuts, twirled motorcycle chains and boisterously laughed and joshed with each other. Their leader was taller than the rest, sported a huge, Lasith Malinga-style kinky ‘fro, chiselled cheekbones, and wore what must have been a sweltering, full length leather trench coat. He had big, wild eyes and a crazed grin, like he had business to attend to, and business he intended on enjoying.

When it came to writing my London gangster character for Man O’War, the initial knee-jerk idea was to create a Ray Winstone character to take the reader through the underworld, but something kept telling me to avoid the clich, and at some point the vision of this odd character from Lanka came back to me. Who knows whether he was really a gangster or hoodlum or just had a most unlike Lanka-like aversion to sunshine, but I’d already created one British-Asian character, and the unique look and aura this guy had just seemed to fit perfectly. Plus it meant I could bring a whole other strand of interesting and different cultural characteristics to the character, rather than yet another “Shooters, fags and Granadas” character that I might otherwise have propagated. D’Souza practices a Sri Lanka martial art called Angampura, and fights using an edged weapon called an ethunu kadawa. Thus, D’Souza is the only character who is based on a real life person, even though I’ve no idea who that person was, or what he was like.

D’Souza exists in a kind of no-man’s land, constantly teetering on the brink of several identities. He lives in London and is unquestionably a Londoner, yet constantly thinks about returning his Sri Lankan homeland, a kind of one-man diaspora; he is bisexual; he exists outside the boundaries of civil and legal society, preferring to ply his trade in the black market robotic sex trade; and physically… well, perhaps that facet of his story is best left to be read organically. I felt quite strongly towards D’Souza; he is not a pleasant character and one wouldn’t necessarily want to be caught in his company, or his crosshairs, but I hope he comes across as more than simply a violent thug. Of all the main POV characters, his story was the most satisfying to write.

The flashpoint in D’Souza’s story that marks the change in him is due to the actions of Salazar Gomez, the black market engineer trying to improve his lot. We’ll take a look at Salazar next week.

Over the coming weeks in the run up to the launch of Man O’War, I’ll be posting a few lines on each of the main characters in the book, about who they are, what they do and their role in the book. They’re a varied and diverse bunch, in more ways than one, and I have a soft spot for them all. I’ll also be posting a little bit about the creation and inception of each character, and why they are the way they are. I won’t be posting anything spoilerific; these will be more like musings of the author.

The six POV characters are, in order of appearance: the jellyfisherman Dhiraj Om; the corporate Head of R&D Nita Rhodes; brutal gangster Agarkka D’Souza; black market engineer Salazar Gomez;oil heir and civil servant Adem Johnson; and hard-nosed policewoman Tilda Boulton. This week it’s Nita Rhodes.

Nita Rhodes

Nita Rhodes is the Head of R&D Programmes for the fictional engineering firm EI Systems (Emotional Intelligence Systems). She and the brains trust of engineers and scientist under her direction at EIS have developed a truly remarkable new technology: the ability for robotic systems to learn, develop and apply human emotions. She is, understandably, highly enthusiastic about this tech, and when we meet her, she is eagerly seeking approval from central government to provide her with a regulatory framework against which to test in a large demonstrator programme.

Hmm. Regulatory frameworks… demonstrator programmes… All that corporate speak doesn’t sound like it makes for a riveting plot, does it? Maybe, maybe not. But having such rigid frameworks in which to operate (which reminds me of the old cartoon where a boss says to his subordinate, “Give me some innovative thinking, and make sure you follow these rules!”) can be frustrating, and perhaps can make people as though thwy’re forced into “alternative” methods of operation.

Nita was one of the characters I had very little problem in fleshing out, because I meet Nita Rhodes almost every day in my line of work. I’ve dealt with a raft of brilliant companies, of all sizes, all seeking to grab some funding to develop their technology and get it to market. She’s an amalgamation of several people I’ve met over the years, brimming with enthusiasm, ideas and with what looks like a fantastic prototypical product-in-waiting.

Alas, getting something to market in what we refer to as the High Value Manufacturing sectors (not phones and tablets and stuff, but things like aeroplanes, helicopters, large robotic platforms, satellites, etc) is not easy, and the road is particularly difficult for emerging technologies, which moves quickly and is sometimes not well understood by people such as the Sir Ingham Fitzwilliams of this world, the Government regulator whom Nita meets in her first scene. Luckily for me I’ve never sat in Sir Ingham’s chair, but I’ve sat in enough rooms and conference halls with Sir Inghams and Nitas to know how it goes. And sometimes, business can be a bastard.

Behind the push of every great idea is not simply money, or innovation, or ingenuity, but will. In a vast sea of competitiveness throbbing with genuinely brilliant ideas, which ones rise to the surface? The best ones? Maybe. You’d like to think so, at least. But – and this isn’t limited to the technology and engineering sectors – it’s often the ideas with sufficient will, influence and persuasion behind them that make it. That sounds like quite a right-wing appraisal, but given that Nita is a hard-nosed businesswoman, I think it’s also an appropriate one in this instance. It’s common to portray engineers and technical scientists as Oppenheimers and Frankensteins, particularly in comic books – people who seek to develop new technologies for the sake of the technology itself without thought of the consequences. The art of the possible. But when technological progress is married to a cause, that’s when business cases become persuasive, powerful and seductive.

Nita’s cause is the emancipation of girls, women (and some boys and men, too) from sexual abuse and rape, both at the domestic front and abroad. In her mind, the marriage of powerful new technologies and important human issues makes the case for development ineluctable. As her story progresses, she is faced with an ancient question: when you know the cause for which you fight is right, at what point do the means stop justifying the ends? Nita’s story is corporate and skulduggerous – her world is shot through with spinny slogans such as Champion English Industry! –  but also driven by her hopeful vision for humanity. Part of the power of Nita’s will to succeed is the fact that she’s female, and a woman working in what has traditionally been a male-dominated industry: science and engineering. While I wouldn’t expect that to be the case in the mid-22nd century, when MOW is set, it remains an issue today (though, I sense, a moribund one), it’s still her sense of sexual injustice in other walks of life that drive her to implement this technology for societal benefit. And, in my sad opinion, some of the problems she is trying to address with technology – sexual abuse, rape as a weapon of war, and the dysfunctional and primitive men who perpetuate them – will certainly not have been eradicated by the mid-22nd century. Indeed, another conversation for another day may be how technology doesn’t in fact eradicate (re)primitivisation, but enables whatever is already there to flourish.

The ramifications of Nita’s actions are felt from London all the way to Port Harcourt, a city at the southern tip of Nigeria, the gateway to the Niger Delta, and one of the people affected is the gangster Agarkka D’Souza, whom we’ll meet next week.

Over the coming weeks in the run up to the launch of Man O’War, I’ll be posting a few lines on each of the main characters in the book, about who they are, what they do and their role in the book. They’re a varied and diverse bunch, in more ways than one, and I have a soft spot for them all. I’ll also be posting a little bit about the creation and inception of each character, and why they are the way they are. I won’t be posting anything spoilerific; these will be more like author musings, which hopefully will provide more background to the characters and their world.

The six POV characters are, in order of appearance: the jellyfisherman Dhiraj Om; the corporate Head of R&D Nita Rhodes; brutal gangster Agarkka D’Souza; black market engineer Salazar Gomez;oil heir and civil servant Adem Johnson; and hard-nosed policewoman Tilda Boulton. We’ll start with Dhiraj Om.

Dhiraj Om

Dhiraj Om is my essential “everyman” character, the one with whom I’d expect the majority of the reading audience to relate. His apparently simple decisions at the start of the book act as a catalyst for everything else that happens, while his relatively basic wants and needs (to provide for his family, to stay safe) are the anchor for his fish-out-of-water story.

Appropriately enough for a fish out of water, he’s most comfortable at sea. When I started writing MOW, I had images for three key scenes in my head: the opening, the critical middle scene, and the ending. The opening image was the discovery made at sea. Therefore, the discoverer was only ever going to be someone who worked at sea, and someone who worked alone. Therefore Dhiraj Om was to be a fisherman, and with a little 22nd-century extrapolation (the impact of catastrophic overfishing, pollution, and extinction of some species), he became a jellyfisherman, scouring the freezing waters of the North Sea for bounties of moon jellies. (It seems I’m developing a pattern of giving my protagonists otherworldly, portmanteau job titles: in Hole In The Sky Grub Teng is a “psychitect”.) So we meet Raj first on his autonomous fishing skiff The Lion’s Mane, going about his business, when the chance happening upon a rare, valuable and illegal bounty in his nets – the pleasure robot, or kokeshi, called Naomi – thrusts an ordinary man into an extraordinary situation, for which he seems ill prepared and equipped, both physically and emotionally.

Dhiraj is the only character – the only human character ­– for whom there wasn’t some real-world anchor upon which I could base him. In short, I don’t know any jellyfishermen. In that respect writing an everyman (or everywoman, but because Dhiraj is a man, I’ll stick with everyman) character is relatively simple. One doesn’t need a specific point of reference in based in reality, as the everyman could be any of us, and is the person whose thought patterns will most closely resemble our own, which when the going gets stressful, most of the time can be boiled down to, “how the hell did things get to this?” I’ll be honest, I think that each time my one year old throws yoghurt on the floor, so throwing some violent and vengeful gangsters and a few deaths into the mix must really only be an amplification of this yoghurt-on-the-floor emotions. I’m guessing, anyway (isn’t that what writers do? he said cheekily).

As Dhiraj and Naomi spend time together, trying to get through the situation in which they find themselves, they help each other in very unexpected ways. One of the major themes of the book is the way in which technology is commandeered and used (and I’ll write a bit more about this when I tackle the characters of Nita and Adem) in a secondary fashion. In my line of work there’s a lot of talk about which new technologies will enter the market and when, and how they will help the economy and society at large. I usually contend, with my writer’s hat on, that it’s not possible to truly know how the technology will impact society (and the economy) until it’s been dropped into society. In a sort of distortion of the Observation Principal, once you start using a piece of technology, you change it – and it changes you. It’s a given to say that a robot will help humans to lift bigger things, or get to places more efficiently, or communicate more easily, or work longer hours. But when they reveal new things about ourselves is when things get really interesting, and potentially dangerous.

Dhiraj and Naomi undergo literal and figurative changes in the course of the book, that reveal to Dhiraj things about himself he would never have understood or thought about. And in return, he begins to feel certain things for this artificial being. It’s easy to say that we can become connected to robots, in the same way that we become attached to objects of little outward importance – a trinket of some sentimental value. But when robots are used in new ways, and that in turn reveals new things about the user, then they transcend being mere items, or things, and could be thought of as something else. Perhaps one might think of them as not engineering but art, moving us in the way a painting, a book, or a piece of music might. Or, if you’re like Nita Rhodes, you might think of them as something else entirely. But we’ll come to her character next week.

The title says it all, really. owing to some extenuating circumstances to do with my publishers, I’m slightly sorry (and in other ways, slightly relieved) to say that the publication of Man O’War is going to be postponed to early 2018.

The reasons for doing so are sound, but shan’t be divulged, which makes it sound more conspiratorial than it is, so let’s just say that the book will be better served by a launch in the early Spring.

At first I was mildly irritated (a mildly irritated author. Oo-er.) by the delay, mainly because, well, because. It’s my debut, and I’m chomping at the bit for it to be released and Out There. However, the rational part of me reminds me that I’ve waited all my life for this moment, and a few extra months won’t make too much difference. It’s possible that the book could have been rushed out to meet the original proposed launch date, but what would the point be? It’d only be shooting myself in the foot, and the extra time gives me a few precious more months to try and drum up some interest and word-of-mouth. Plus, it give me more time to focus on completing my next novel, Hole In The Sky. Hopefully it will mean a smaller gap between publications as well, which is definitely a good thing.

We’re all human, even writers (especially writers). It’s only normal to want to se our work out there, as soon as possible. I see it (and have also been guilty of it) in the self-publishing sector often: books rushed out with little thought to crucial (but frequently perceived as boring) parts of the process such as cover design, editing, proofreading and marketing. I’m determined to do it properly, and so will greet the delay with, yes, a certain slight amount of disappointment, but mostly I’m phlegmatic about it.

More info as it comes. For now, attached are two draft covers for the book. I’d love to hear any comments!