Hello and welcome to this Track of Words Author Interview, this time double the value with two authors – Chris and Jen Sugden, talking about their new novel High Vaultage, which is out now from Gollancz! Set in the same world as their fantastic podcast Victoriocity, High Vaultage is a fun, genuinely funny blend of retrofuturism and historical science fiction set in a wildly inventive version of Victorian Britain complete with a sprawling London, oddly cheerful automatons, a vast horde of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s engineer followers, and an assassination-immune, mostly-machine Queen Victoria. Whether you’re a fan of Victoriocity or (like me) High Vaultage is your introduction to this wild new world, read on to find out more about how this novel came about, what it’s like writing a novel in the same world as a podcast, and loads more.
Track of Words: To start things off, could you tell us a bit about High Vaultage and what readers can expect from it?
Chris & Jen: High Vaultage is a sci-fi detective thriller comedy set in the reimagined Victorian megacity of Even Greater London, which has grown to encompass the lower half of England. It centres on a series of inexplicable and unsolvable bank break-ins across the city, from which nothing valuable appears to have been stolen. This baffles Scotland Yard, forcing the city’s first private detectives to dive into the mystery.
ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do readers need to know about them?
C&J: Ex-Inspector Archibald Fleet, formerly of Scotland Yard, and journalist Clara Entwhistle, formerly of Yorkshire. The pair are mere months into their partnership as a private detective agency, and have had few serious cases to occupy them.
ToW: What can you tell us about the world in which this story is set?
C&J: Even Greater London is a vast megalopolis. Imagine London in 1887, but it never stopped growing and has absorbed the entire lower half of England, stopping only at the Midlands, where authorities planted a forest from coast to coast and populated it with wolves to discourage illegal crossings from the North. At the centre of this London is the Tower, which beams electricity through the sky across the entire city, unleashing a frenzy of mechanical innovations.
ToW: For anyone not familiar with Victoricity, could you give us a quick potted history of the podcast, what to expect and where to find it?
C&J: You can find it on any podcast app such as Apple Podcasts or Spotify. By the time this comes out there will be three full seasons. It’s the same world and protagonists as High Vaultage, but in radio drama format, so it’s produced with sound effects and of course the performances of a full cast of actors. Expect similar SFF comedic thriller hijinks, with each season (and the book) an independent mystery.
ToW: How does High Vaultage fit in with the narrative of the podcast?
C&J: It’s a new beginning, so it doesn’t need any prior listening. At the beginning of High Vaultage, Inspector Fleet and Clara Entwhistle have set up Even Greater London’s first private detective agency, and they’re finding their feet working together and building a business. You can view the first few seasons of the podcast as a sort of prequel to this, where Fleet and Clara first meet and begin to work side-by-side, but like classic detective stories they each stand alone.
ToW: How did the idea come about to write a novel set in the world of Victoriocity?
C&J: The original version of what became Victoriocity was a novel! But an abandoned one, and for good reason. Later, we picked up the concept to develop an audio drama after several years of writing for stage. We did have the idea in mind to write a novel eventually, but we were prodded into action by a publisher.
ToW: How did you find writing a novel compared to writing a podcast? Did anything change in terms of what you enjoyed working on the most, or which characters you particularly enjoyed writing?
C&J: You can go inside people’s minds! You can spend time perceiving the world literally from their point of view, with their thoughts, rather than the audience inferring it from characters’ words and actions, as is the case with most drama. So there was a lot of richness and humour to be found in that. With our protagonists of course, but we also jumped into some minor characters’ minds, such as the chaotic-good Detective Chief Inspector Keller, and that was extremely fun.
ToW: How does it feel to know that listeners to the audiobook edition of High Vaultage will experience the story via a single narrator, rather than the usual cast from the podcast?
C&J: The novel is quite a different thing. It’s the same world, and some of the same characters, and people who enjoy the humour and world-building of one will enjoy the other for the same reasons. But the timing is different, because it’s prose. And you go into people’s minds. So it’s best to deliver it differently too. Otherwise we might have had an uncanny valley effect of being similar to the podcast but not similar enough. Also, the audiobook reader is Peter Wicks, a phenomenal actor who has been in the show before, so he knows the characters very well and can bring them to life in their essences. So it will be familiar to listeners, without being similar-but-unnervingly-different.
ToW: There’s a real sense throughout the novel that scale is important – the bewildering (sometimes traumatising) size of Even Greater London, the (possibly) organised chaos of the Brunelians and their vast engineering works. Did you put any limits on yourselves in terms of imagining all of this, or was it a case of anything goes/the bigger the better?
C&J: No hard limits on scale, and for the reason you say – bewilderment is the state of living in Even Greater London. Technological progress and urban growth have been unyoked from most limiting factors, and what results is a world changing around people in a way they are utterly unable to fully grasp. But the trick is to pace the scale in the story. The sense of scale escalates throughout, one way or another. And for the same reason we wouldn’t include anything that makes the scale a nonsense – we wouldn’t have the moon crash into Piccadilly Circus and just have people carry on with their day. Although, don’t hold us to that – that actually sounds quite fun.
ToW: Clara’s chirpy optimism and Fleet’s world-weariness make a lovely pairing – what would be your own attitudes to facing down dastardly criminal plots, maddening bureaucracy, and lost beagles?
C&J: There’s definitely some of that glass-half-something dichotomy in us – as surely there is in everyone, depending on the weather and how decent a breakfast you’ve had. But Clara and Fleet are much more comfortable leaping into danger than we are. Dastardly criminal plots we would probably pass along to the police, unless it was them doing it, in which case we would inform the papers and go into hiding. Lost dogs we have a good track record with, as we have two dogs of our own – they tend not to run off, but on walks we’re often encountering lost dogs or lost people and helping to reunite them. Maddening bureaucracies are the abyss – you can’t win or change them, just turn away before you lose your mind.
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?
C&J: A mixture of working side-by-side and separately. We conceive of the plot, key locations and characters together, while walking about and in between helping dogs find their lost owners. Then we structure it together, with our walls covered in post-its for weeks at a time, and visitors trying to hide their looks of concern. Then we write it into a detailed outline and divvy up the chapters. We write our bits, hand them over, the other person rewrites or gives feedback, and we go round and round like that until we’re happy with the result. But it only works if you view the entire piece as belonging to both of you – if we don’t both like something, it’s gone.
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?
C&J: It’s tempting to think that we could have saved some editing pain by planning more, somehow, but it’s equally possible that you just can’t – you need to write a novel once to know how it should go, and then you rewrite it. And we’re improvisers by nature – if we over-structured a story in the playground of Even Greater London, we would be missing out on getting the best out of it. Everything interesting is a mess before it’s done. That said, we did get our editorial notes back a week before our son was born, so there’s definitely some scheduling learnings to be had there.
ToW: To finish off, if an unsuspecting tourist were planning a trip to Even Greater London, what are some of the sights they should see, and what precautions should they take in order to hang on to their sanity?
C&J: The best precaution is to just not look up, and avoid any hills or tall buildings where you might accidentally see how far the city stretches. And be sure to visit Buckingham Palace, with its majestic, jet-black lookout towers spearing out of the ground and its battle airships circling overhead. But pick a date when Queen Victoria’s not at home – the Coldstream Guards will be less edgy if she’s off getting a tune-up and an oil change.
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Chris and Jen Sugden are the creators of the audio drama podcast Victoriocity. Originally from Yorkshire, they met as undergraduates at the University of Oxford and hold PhDs in Science and Technology Studies and Victorian Literature respectively. They were part of the writing team behind Murmurs (BBC Sounds) and have spent many years writing and performing scripted and improvised comedy around the UK. They live in Oxford with their son and two intermittently obedient terriers.
Find out more at Victoriocity.com
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Thanks so much to Chris and Jen for agreeing to this interview and writing such great answers! Also thanks to Sian at Orion for facilitating, and for sending me an advance copy of High Vaultage – which I can confirm is excellent fun!
High Vaultage is out now from Gollancz – check out the links below to order* your copy:
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