Mslexia

Mslexia, the magazine for women who write | www.mslexia.co.uk

Interview

Naomi Alderman

talks to Daneet Steffens

Issue 44 ◊ Jan/Feb/Mar 2010

When Naomi Alderman was little, one of her favourite books was Masquerade by Kit Williams. ‘It was a puzzle-treasure hunt book,’ she says, her dark eyes gleaming with enthusiastic recollection. ‘It had a series of beautiful pictures with clues in them which would lead you to where Williams had buried a golden hare. I spent hours poring over it.’ In what can only be described as a serendipitous case of serendipity, in 2004 Alderman reacquainted herself with Masquerade. (‘You know how that happens with creative work, where you become very excited about something and then there’s a period of dormancy and then whatever it was about the creative thing suddenly comes up again?’) And then what happened was this: ‘I was going to email a friend, and – you know those quotes that some people have at the bottom of their emails?’ she says. ‘I had one, and I was suddenly very bored with it. I spent about two hours thinking about what it should be – I was obviously putting off working on my novel’ – (this would be the 2006 award-winning Disobedience) – ‘and eventually I put in a quote from Masquerade.’ As soon as she’d sent the email, her friend emailed back saying, ‘Omigod! Do you like Kit Williams? I met someone at a party last night that you have to talk to!’

That someone was Michael Smith, head of computer games company Mind Candy, who wanted to produce a game with a Masquerade-like treasure hunt element to it. Mind Candy already had some thoughts about a backstory, but they looked to Alderman, as lead writer, to flesh things out: ‘So they had gone, “Well, there’s this Cube and the people of Perplex City have lost their Cube and there’s this character of Violet who was stolen by The Cube and taken to a parallel dimension, and she has a geeky friend called Kurt, and a sister called Scarlett….” And I was like, “Okay but when the story starts, then what happens?!”’ The first thing she did was tackle the characters (because, as she points out, ‘you can’t have the character of Violet just being quote unquote “sexy librarian,”’), then constructed a complex, interactive, virtual world. The set pieces included a daily newspaper, a Cube-worshipping cult and other facets of living so steeped in verisimilitude that even real-life corporate entities got fooled. ‘Perplex City was a geek paradise where being clever was more important than being gorgeous, so we thought, “Well, what kind of prescription drugs would they have?” she says, referring to pharmaceutical company Cognivia, whose website incisively reflected (and subverted) earthbound equivalents. ‘Obviously,’ Alderman grins widely, ‘drugs that would enhance your cognitive abilities.’

In fact, for an actual, real-life party, the Perplex City game crew wanted to get M&M’s candies printed up with their fictional drug Ceretin. ‘Normally you can get anything printed – your name, etc. – so we sent in the request, and M&M’s called us and said, “We can’t do this. We’re not allowed to print them up with the name of a drug.” Alderman’s glee is palpable – and infectious. ‘They had googled it, found the Perplex City website and thought it was a real drug!’

World-building for fictional properties, she asserts, is an intriguing writing arena – think movies, television, games. To create the Perplex City perspective, Alderman and her colleagues started with questions: what kind of problems would the world have? ‘We wanted them to be more technologically advanced than us,’ says Alderman. ‘We thought they’d probably be better at detecting crime, so, in the newspaper, we didn’t want a lot of mystery murder stories. But we had a lot of stories about environmental protection, and we had celebrity gossip – we had this whole long-running thing about this singer, Joya, and her boyfriend Alejo. They were on-again-off-again and then she was pregnant but she wouldn’t say who the father was…that was really fun to do.’ In fact, generating a fictional newspaper meant the world inevitably got stretched in all sorts of directions. An innocuous story about the governing council of the city, say, would offer up a new storyline tangent: ‘Hey! we’ve just mentioned that Nathan Earlywine has won the Council Leadership of the city so why not make him a character and have something happen with him?’

NAOMI ALDERMAN was born in London in 1974. Disobedience won the Orange Award for New Writers in 2006.

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