Hello and welcome to this Track of Words Author Interview, where today I’m talking to A.E. Warren about her new novel Subject Twenty One – the first instalment in her Tomorrow’s Ancestors series. If you fancy a post-apocalyptic tale full of isolated communities, genetic engineering, repopulated species and Neanderthals, this is definitely one to check out – and it’s published by Del Rey in the UK (in paperback, ebook and audiobook editions) on the 1st of July. Once you’ve had a read of this interview, there’s a link at the bottom of the page to my review of Subject Twenty One as well – and suffice to say I can definitely recommend it!
Without further ado, let’s get straight on with the interview.
Track of Words: To start things off, can you tell us a bit about the premise of your Tomorrow’s Ancestors series?
A.E. Warren: We’re following a young woman who wants to escape her stagnating life in an ostracised and impoverished community by volunteering to be a Companion to a Neanderthal, Subject Twenty-One, who has been brought back from extinction. She lives in a tightly controlled society and it’s only when she starts working in the Museum of Evolution that she begins to unpick the lies she has been raised on. As the series continues, her world expands beyond the borders of Thymine base, where she was born, and alongside her we learn more about her world.
ToW: What’s the elevator pitch for the first book, Subject Twenty-One?
AEW: What if our future lies 40,000 years in our past? Subject Twenty-One is a debut novel in which a young woman’s refusal to accept the status quo opens her eyes to the lies her society is built on.
My editor also sums it up in a very neat way: ‘Sapiens meets Jurassic Park.’
ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do we need to know about them?
AEW: Elise is the main character and she is a Sapien, who are the lowest order of humans as they are held responsible for the damage inflicted on the world by previous generations. The entire book is told from her perspective but as the series expands another point of view is added with each book.
Kit, or Subject Twenty-One, is the other main character. He is a Neanderthal who has been brought back from extinction by the Potiors, who are the leaders of the bases, as they claim that they want to reverse the wrongs of the Sapiens. Kit is kept in the Museum of Evolution and initially he is an enigmatic character but this is because Elise has to earn his trust.
There is also a group of misfit friends (how I love groups of misfit friends in fiction!) including Samuel the Collections Assistant, Luca the Companion to the other Neanderthal and Georgina the museum nurse.
ToW: What can you tell us about the world in which this is set?
AEW: It’s set two hundred and fifty years in the future and around two hundred years after a pandemic that, along with food shortages, results in the loss of 95% of the world’s population. Following the devastation of the population all restrictions on genetic engineering have been lifted and three distinct classes of people have emerged. I can’t say much more about this as what Elise is told from birth and what we know to be true aren’t aligned!
ToW: What prompted you to write about post-pandemic genetic engineering, repopulation and neanderthals?
AEW: For a few years I had wanted to write a book about genetic engineering but it wasn’t until I started to read about the ethics surrounding it that the world in these books was fully formed. Who has access to it? How much does it cost? What happens if it is withheld from parts of society? And if some traits are deemed more desirable than others, then does that mean that others are seen as inferior? Woven into this is a restriction on education and access to information because whoever controls those two, largely controls the population.
I had also begun reading about Neanderthals and also the efforts that are being made by scientists to bring back extinct species of animals. I thought that if I set the book in the future then something could come of these two ideas.
I liked the concept of pulling the future and the past together and the original tagline was: ‘What happens when the future recaptures the past’?
ToW: How much research have you had to do as you’ve been writing these books? Have you come across any particularly fascinating/bizarre/disturbing (delete as appropriate!) information along the way?
AEW: I spent most of my research time reading non-fiction books on the topics I was interested in. Once you start diving into an area you are constantly bombarded with fascinating and bizarre information. One thing that stood out to me, though, was the number of other species of human that existed at the same time as us, such as the one-metre-tall Homo floresiensis that lived on an Indonesian island. They hunted miniature elephants and died out around 50,000 years ago so may have crossed paths with our ancestors. It makes me think of what it must have been like to have stumbled on another species of human. Would there have been immediate hostility between the groups or would we have been inquisitive about each other? I imagine that, as in modern times, it would depend on the dispositions of the leaders!
ToW: How did you come up with the societal structure of Sapiens, Medius and Potiors? Was that inspired by anything in particular?
AEW: The names were a continuation of the taxonomic categories with the genus and species. So, Homo medius and Homo potior following on from Homo sapiens. I always wanted to explore how those without genetic engineering would be treated, so I thought that to build a deeply set societal structure founded on this difference would work. It’s a way of setting people apart and seeding distrust.
ToW: As I understand it, you originally self published the first two books in the series, before they were picked up by Del Rey. What has it been like revisiting them and seeing them published a second time?
AEW: Yes, that’s absolutely right. I self-published the first two books in the series and was about to publish the third but held off as I had found an agent. Because I’m still writing the series, I’m always revisiting the first two books either because I need to be reminded of a specific detail or because I think my writing style is significantly changing and I need to pull it back again (I must have read them at least thirty times by now). But to have them published a second time by Del Rey is, well, it’s a dream come true really. I generally have a pretty rubbish memory, but I can remember every single detail of receiving that call with the news.
ToW: What do you hope readers will get out of this by the time they’ve finished it?
AEW: I hope that it has drawn them in and provided a few hours of escapism because fundamentally I’m a storyteller. If it’s also given them something to ponder or sparked an interest in reading around some of the topics that are discussed, then that’s a bonus!
ToW: Can you tell us a bit about what’s next for this series?
AEW: The next book – The Hidden Base – is partially set in another base, Cytosine, where we meet Twenty-Two who is the twenty-second Neanderthal to be revived and one of my favourite characters in the whole series. As she and the other Neanderthals have always been treated as exhibits with no freedoms or the chance to be self-sufficient, I wanted to look at what would happen when the Neanderthal Project is abandoned.
There are four books in the series and all of them will have been released by July next year.
ToW: Finally, if you could repopulate one extinct animal species which one would you choose and why?
AEW: This is such a tempting question as your mind always jumps to the most visually impressive animals we have lost – the megafauna such as woolly mammoths or giant ground sloths. And, of course, if it’s a magic wand we’re waving why not go even further back to the time of dinosaurs?
But then I begin to think of the multitude of species that are currently teetering on the edge of extinction and if I was given this gift, I would look to what we are about to lose rather than what has gone already. I would therefore repopulate the northern white rhino, as there are only two of them left in the world, they’re both female and can’t carry a pregnancy to full term. I think the situation is termed ‘functional extinction’. Scientists from all over the world are working on creating embryos with preserved sperm and will then try to use the closely related southern white rhino as surrogates but this hasn’t been successful so far.
Perhaps I should have chosen the giant ground sloth, would that have provided a lighter note to end on? I don’t know, but imagining a lumbering four-metre-long sloth sitting on his hind legs to delicately strip the leaves from trees always makes me smile. But maybe that’s just me…
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After spending eight years working as a lawyer, A.E. Warren began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK who are the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. Subject Twenty-One is her debut novel and there will be four books in the Tomorrow’s Ancestors series. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.
Check out aewarren.com for more information!
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I’d like to say a big thank you to A.E. Warren for taking the time to chat to me for this interview, and to let us know what to expect from both Subject Twenty One and the Tomorrow’s Ancestors series as a whole! Subject Twenty One is published by Del Rey on the 1st July in paperback, ebook and audiobook editions.
Also check out my review of Subject Twenty One!
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