Hello and welcome to Track of Words, where today I’m delighted to present an Author Interview with Jeff Noon, co-author (alongside Steve Beard) of Gogmagog, the first in a new fantasy duology from Angry Robot. Subtitled The First Chronicle of Ludwich, and featuring one of my favourite fantasy covers in a long time (from the incredible Ian McQue), Gogmagog is a bonkers but brilliant weird fantasy novel. I’ll leave it to Jeff to describe the book, but I recently read it myself and can confirm that it’s excellent, and I jumped at the chance to chat to Jeff for this interview.
I love a duology, and even more so when both books are released in quick succession – Gogmagog is out now, and Ludluda is due out in November 2024. Read on to find out all about Gogmagog, Jeff’s working partnership with Steve, the genesis of this project, the characters, the setting and loads more.
Track of Words: To start things off, could you tell us a bit about Gogmagog and what readers can expect from it?
Jeff: First and foremost, it’s a Fantasy novel. That’s the genre of the book. But I think it tackles the genre from maybe a different angle, one very true to the combined interests of Steve and myself. For instance it is not set in a quasi-medieval period, but in the mid-twentieth century. That’s a very different starting point, which brings with it a very particular atmosphere, and a whole new set of period details, all of which merge in various ways with the more usual Fantasy elements. In story terms, it’s a travelogue: a river journey by a small, rickety steamboat through the sixty-mile-long ghost of a dragon.
ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do readers need to know about them?
Jeff: There are four people on the boat, all representative of the various tribes of Kethra. Cady, of the Wodwo tribe, is the captain of the Juniper, and she’s the focus of the storytelling. She’s an old lady, very old, much older than you might imagine. She’s crotchety, bawdy, sweary, a force of nature. Her crew mate is Yanish, a member of the Azeel tribe, a young man who’s just stepping out into full adulthood. Then there are two passengers. Lek is a Thrawl, a rundown automated being. And finally we have the Alkhym girl Brin, just ten years old, who is very ill, and desperately needs to reach the city of Ludwich. The journey of this first book details the struggles of the four to work together, and to get the Juniper to its destination safely, battling the dangers of the river and of the dragon’s ghost along the way. The day’s journey will test them all, and change them all.
ToW: In the same non-spoiler vein, what can you tell us about the world in which this story is set?
Jeff: The country is Kethra, the capital city is Ludwich. The river Nysis runs down from its source in the hills, through the city, and on to the sea. The Juniper is sailing upriver towards the capital. A long stretch of the Nysis is haunted by a dragon’s ghost, and that I suppose, gives the world its flavour: the entire society is really built around that ghost. But Steve and I were really interested in grounding the fantasy, so in our minds the book is set in 1947. So it’s a post-war world, very much based on Britain after the Second World War. All the dress codes, the social mores, people’s attitudes, the technologies, etc. are coming from an intense focus on that particular year.
But after the book was written, we removed any mention of the year. So 1947 was a kind of clay mould for the storytelling, which was then broken and removed, leaving a more ambiguous period behind. So imagine London in 1947, and the River Thames, then push that reality through the distorting lens of Fantasy fiction, and that’s a big clue to the book’s atmosphere.
ToW: I read in an interview in Interzone that you’ve been gradually creating this setting together over a number of years, which sounds like an amazing creative exercise to work on! Can you remember when it was that you started doing this, and what prompted the initial decision to start building up this idea of an imaginary city?
Jeff: The earliest document I have in the Ludwich folder is more than five years old, so this project is long in the making. We first started it as a TV series about a group of psychic explorers in contemporary London. That never got anywhere, but out of it came the desire to explore some of the same themes, but in a Fantasy or Science Fiction setting: we would build our own alternative version of London. And once we had started that project, the ideas just flowed. We kept adding new materials to the folder; I mean, there is a lot of stuff in there, hundreds of documents! Methods of magic, new sciences, religions, different tribes, place names, historical timelines, maps of the river, of the city, of the dragon’s ghostly body… on and on it goes.
And then one fateful day, Steve told me about an idea he’d had for a novel, to retell Conrad’s Heart of Darkness but set in England, to send a boat on a journey through modern-day England, in search of Old Weird Albion. And I said to him, “Well, that sounds like a Ludwich novel.” So that was the starting point for Gogmagog, as it finally turned out.
ToW: I love the tone of the setting, all gnarly, grubby, beat-up and rundown. Was that a conscious decision when you started working on it, or something that developed over time?
Jeff: Well that comes naturally out of the post-war setting, the clay mould that later vanished. It’s more evident in Book Two, when they journey through the city, but it’s still there in the first book: bombed-out areas, broken machinery, deserted riverside factories, and so on. So this is a country recovering from a massive war, and all that follows from that, in terms of economic and social upheaval. We talked about WWII as being a kind of origin story for contemporary Britain, and indeed for Europe as a whole. So it enabled us to explore Modernity and its various effects, whilst telling a Fantasy adventure story. We thought about a number of possible eras for the book’s setting, going back as far as the sixteenth century, and forward to the early 1970s, but when we decided on post WWII, that was when the novel really clicked into its next stage.
ToW: It’s fun to navigate and get to know the different elements that have made their way into the setting and the story, but how did you decide the mixture, in terms of what goes in and what doesn’t? Were there times when you realised that something just didn’t work in the context of the setting? “Cool, John Dee – he works. This guy/idea though? Too much…”
Jeff: There is crossover between London and Ludwich, but only to a very small amount. I think in Gogmagog, it’s the ghostly appearance of John Dee, and the use of the name Romeo to designate a romantic character. Book Two, Ludluda, reveals the true relationship between the two cities, and, to be honest, I can’t wait for people to read that bit!
We chose Dr John Dee as the only definite crossover character: in a certain sense, he lives in both worlds. Steve is an expert on Dee’s life and work, so that character crept in via our weekly discussions. It happened without any real decision; very much an organic process, at least on the first draft. In fact, we made a conscious decision to exclude any other characters from our world, so that Ludwich is very much its own system. There is a slight bleed-through, where the two worlds rub together. Dr Dee, being an expert magician, can journey across.
ToW: Are there any tantalising tidbits of background you can share with us that didn’t make it into the books?
Jeff: Tons! There’s the bunch of docs that preceded this novel, many with unused materials. And then a couple of things were written for Gogmagog, and for Ludluda, that were later thrown out. There was an entire chapter set in Ludwich Museum that Steve really didn’t like, so that was removed, and rewritten in a different setting. There was a huge dragon skin map of the entire river that I wish could have stayed in, but we had to be strict with the length of the two books.
I also remember a cool visit to the Ludwichian equivalent of the Oval cricket ground, in Ludluda. Gone. In fact, the first three chapters of Ludluda were removed, because we decided to start the story of the second book much later on in the day that we initially planned. I’m really glad we did that. Sometimes you just have to be cruel, even with your favourite bits. And with a collaborative partnership, that process is even more important, because both parties have to be happy, and various compromises have to be made along the way. I find that quite fascinating, actually, the constant push and pull of the creative act shared between two people.
Another example: in both books, the area of Tolly Hoo is mentioned quite a lot: it’s our version of London’s Soho district. We had a chapter prepared for Ludluda where the crew would visit Tolly Hoo: it never happened. But the mentions of the place remain, like a ghost. I think that adds a nice touch of world-building. Another example of the clay structure later removed. There was a lot of clay over the floor, by the time we had finished! Our approach throughout was to keep the world-building subtle: we only show what Cady experiences, and what she thinks about. So a lot of tiny details are gradually built up into a complex world, rather than having the whole thing explained to the reader from above.
ToW: Getting back to characters, I have to ask about Cady, who I absolutely love. Where did this cantankerous, irreverent character (and her incredible facility with deeply satisfyingly cursing) come from?
Jeff: I remember thinking that I would like to tackle someone who was really old, because I had never done that before, not as a main character. We wanted her to be over the top, very much a highly individualised creation. A strong person, a survivor, and a fighter, but also with lots of flaws and foibles, and vulnerabilities, etc., sometimes even tipping over into unpleasantness. We wanted her to go on a journey, during the few days of the narrative.
I had a vision in my head of my old Grandma, late of this world, and some of her behaviour that I remember as a kid. We also looked at actresses of the post-war period, and later also, from our own youth in the 1960s and ’70s, especially British female comic actors like Thora Hird, Irene Handl, Hylda Baker. So many of them! Really tough women, unrestrained, often ribald, and they don’t take to fools kindly. So we drew on a lot of different sources. Cady comes from a working class family, and that adds to the tough exterior. She has created a hard shell for herself over the years, but that is about to be broken, once the journey is underway. And beneath that shell, a softer heart is present. It was great to chart that process, that breakdown of the armour.
She is also a woman who carries within her a great secret, a mission in life, that not even her closest friends know about. So that’s another set of pressures for her to cope with. And finally: we wanted to push her to the extremes, to really test her, again and again, to have her lose battles, be beaten, and then to come out of her corner, roaring for action. The swearing was a joy to work with; we both contributed choice examples, most of them freshly minted for the book, but sometimes going back to things like Victorian swear words, to add extra flavour.
I love how the two covers fit together to create a single piece of artwork, from the incredible Ian McQue!
ToW: Moving onto the practical writing front, how did it come to be that this ended up as a two-volume story with a pleasingly short gap between the releases of each part? Was it always intended as a duology?
Jeff: We intended a trilogy; in fact our initial synopsis document broke the story into three parts. But for various reasons, we had to get it down to two volumes, and I’m really glad we did. It forced us to tighten up the storytelling. As I mentioned before, the whole beginning of the second book was thrown aside. Now the action really moves along. We do have an idea for a third book, something set about twenty-five years later; in our time that would be 1974. We would both love to do the Ludwichian version of the Seventies! But we shall see.
ToW: I’m always interested in writing partnerships, and the practicalities of writing a novel with someone else. Could you tell us a bit about how the two of you worked together on this?
Jeff: First, as mentioned, we created the world. Then an idea for a story arrived, set in that world. We made a decision early on that the book needed one clear voice throughout, rather than two different voices. So we came up with a writing method. First of all, working together over a number of sessions, we created a very detailed synopsis of the whole story, both books, beginning to end. That was about fifteen pages long. That would be our guide, all the way through the writing process. Quite often we veered onto a new pathway, but always, we came back to that initial outline.
Now, to begin. We met in a cafe and together we worked out the events of the first chapter. I took notes. I then went away and wrote that chapter, working quickly, not worrying too much about getting it right, just getting something down on paper. This would take me about four days, say. I sent that to Steve. He sent me notes back, which I incorporated into the chapter. But I never sent him this newly edited chapter, as that would hold us up. No. The aim was to keep moving forwards, like the Juniper on her journey. The next week we met up again, and repeated the process.
So the book was built up like that, chapter by chapter, or sometimes part of a chapter at a time, if it was a very long or complicated episode. At the end of that process, we had a rough first draft. Steve then read through it, sent me lots of notes, and from that I created the second draft. We kept working and working at it, until we had something we were both happy with.
There is one very important rule in all this. We called it the Number One Rule. Namely: I would always do what Steve asked. And we kept to that rule, more or less completely. There might be a couple of occasions where I really argued to keep something as it was. But that rule was so important. It’s all about giving up the writerly ego, so that the story lives in the space between us. To use Steve’s term, we conjured up a Third Mind. And, as the process went on, we really did feel that we were in sync.
ToW: Looking back now that this book is finished, are there any writing-related lessons that you learned during the process of working on this together?
Jeff: Sure. Steve was very strict about what he calls my “purple prose”. Ha! So he would often knock that back a bit, so that I wasn’t going off on too many flights of fancy. “More mauve, than purple”, that was his preference. So I learned about restraint. Although, of course, I will go mad in future, left to my own devices! He was also strict about any sign of self-pity in the characters. So all that went. That was good. I guess our working process is quite strange. But if you consider it in musical terms, you might say that Steve is Brian Eno, to my David Bowie. So think of him as the very hands-on, creative producer, and myself as the singer, but instead of recording an album, we are writing a Fantasy novel.
ToW: Could you see yourselves collaborating again? And if so would it likely be a similar sort of project, or something in a different medium perhaps?
Jeff: We did a more experimental novel together, a few years ago, called Mappalujo, which was influenced by Oulipo techniques, where we created a writing game that enabled us to write alternate chapters. We have also, over the years, written a lot of film scripts, none of which went very far. We’ve been working together for years, and I hope that continues. The partnership rises out of our friendship, more than anything else. We are actually quite different, in artistic tastes, and temperaments. Steve, for example, is much more interested in experimental fiction than I am; these days I’m a dedicated storyteller. And he has a lot of deep knowledge, whereas my mind flits about, here and there. But I think we make a good team. That Third Mind, again. If we come up with a good idea for a new collaboration, then it will happen. And the extra Ludwich material is extensive: there are plenty of stories to be told.
ToW: Can you talk about what’s next for each of you, once Ludluda is out?
Jeff: Steve has started a Substack called Pop Heresiarchs, to showcase his experimental fictions and essays. I’ve just finished the first draft of a novel set in 1968, about a kid learning how to be a science fiction writer. A little bit autobiographical, but really taking off from real life, into strangeness.
ToW: To finish off, if you could live in or around Ludwich, where would you choose and what would you do?
Jeff: I asked Steve about this. He said that he would be a market trader crying his wares in Maddenholt, the last outpost before the dragon’s ghost takes over the river. And he reckons I will be mending broken-down Thrawls in a workshop, maybe in Witherhithe, in the East End of the city.
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Jeff Noon is an award-winning British novelist, short story writer and playwright. He won the Arthur C Clarke Award for Vurt, the John W Campbell award for Best New Writer, a Tinniswood Award for innovation in radio drama and the Mobil prize for playwriting. He was trained in the visual arts, and was musically active on the punk scene before starting to write plays for the theatre. His previous book, The Body Library, was nominated for the Philip K Dick Award.
Steve Beard is a writer who experiments with making essays and fictions from theory, history, testimony and psychogeography. He has written various speculative novels and documentary fictions and contributed to the anthology London: City of Disappearances, edited by Iain Sinclair. He previously collaborated with Jeff Noon on the novel Mappalujo (2016).
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Huge thanks to Jeff for taking the time to write such brilliant answers, to Jeff and Steve for a fantastic book (I can’t wait for Ludluda), and to Caroline at Angry Robot for facilitating this interview!
Gogmagog is out now from Angry Robot – check out the links below to order* your copy:
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