Tim Lebbon’s latest novel Eden is out now in ebook in the UK and print in the US (with a May release in hard copy in the UK). Set in the not that distant future, it posits a world where specific places – Virgin Zones – have been set aside to let nature try to combat climate change. But of course, those present a challenge to those looking for something different – and in Eden, things aren’t as pleasant as you might hope. A few days before publication, Lebbon chatted with Paul Simpson…

Where did the idea come from for this? The books I’ve read of yours cover very wide topics, whether fantasy, SF, tie-in series. This one felt more personal.

There’s two aspects to it. There’s the endurance sport aspect which is my hobby; endurance running is what I love doing. Eden is the second book I wrote with that as a theme; the first was a thriller called The Hunt, which was one of the few non-supernatural, non-fantastical books I’ve written.

The other aspect is climate change which is becoming more worrisome for everyone. My daughter’s a geography student and she’s quite into the environmental side of things. We talk a lot about it and I read her essays so I developed an interest.

The whole idea of an adventure through wilderness quite interested me, so I combined those two ideas, endurance sport and climate change and came up with what Titan call an “eco-horror-thriller”. That’s mixing genres but I’m quite happy with that.

There’s quite a detailed backstory to what’s happened in the world that we find out mainly through the epigraphs at the top of the chapters. How much of that had you planned out before you started writing or was it more a question of you knew what the zones needed to be in order to tell the story and then reverse engineer?

A bit of both actually. In the original draft there wasn’t an epigraph to every chapter; there were certain chapters headed with one of these, others weren’t. When I got to editing the book I realised it was such a great way of communicating the wider backstory to the reader without having info dumps – the characters sitting around the campfire and saying ‘Oh do you remember the other zone where this happened?’ They’re really concise. I don’t think any is longer than a page, maybe less. I also did it in The Silence as well with social media and people seemed to like that.

I don’t like readers knowing stuff that the characters don’t but in some cases it is quite important that they do. It’s just a way that in half a page you can tell so much by using an epigraph as opposed to using dialogue and interaction between the characters. I’m quite wary of staying away from info-dumping, if I can help it, especially in a novel like this which, once it gets going is fairly fast paced. You don’t want the action to stop for two characters to talk about their experiences in another zone and what’s happening there.

Part of the world I had in my mind, but in the first and second edit I put in different epigraphs, where there’s quite a few with statistics from the Zone Defence Force. That was all after I’d written the novel.

Did you find that the reality of climate change worked at times against the needs of the novel?

It sort of extrapolated into the future a little. I don’t say what year the novel’s set in

No, I’d noticed that

In my mind, I call it alternate present almost, it’s twenty minutes into the future, that sort of thing, as opposed to 2090?

The Doomwatch idea

Yeah, like that a bit. I don’t call it alternate history; it’s like almost alternate now.

There’s two things like that I don’t do in the novel. I don’t place it timewise really, although I think most people will think it’s a few years in the future maybe 20 or 30 years in the future…

I was guessing around 2052.

That feels about right, even though some of the zones in the book are 50 or 60 years old hence it sort of is alternate reality.

Also I don’t actually locate Eden in the book. The reason I didn’t want to locate Eden was that immediately I say it’s north-east America or south America, there’s preconceptions about the landscape and the flora and fauna there. My agent read it and said, ‘Oh it’s North America right?’ and probably in my head it’s somewhere in North America but it’s also almost allegorical as well. So by not locating the zone I can say this can take place anywhere really.

Well, also when you start using terms like Eden you’re automatically going into a certain amount of allegory.

There’s no real fantasy elements in the novel but in some ways that’s the sort of fantasy element. It’s on Earth somewhere.

To me, a lot of it, particularly in the middle section, feels like they’ve landed in Middle-earth or at least the New Zealand filming location they used for Lord of the Rings.

That’s a good analogy. I wanted to steer away from setting it in jungles because I’ve never been to a jungle, so it’s heavily forested mountains, ravines, rivers. There are landscapes like that in Wales and I go to them sometimes.

I wanted it to be something I could write about with some sort of conviction as opposed to the Amazon, which I’d love to go there but I’ve never been there.

I wondered if your Canadian trip had had some influence on it as well.

I think it did a little. More the sort of running stuff that I do. I don’t do many road races, I do more sort of trail running and that certainly fed into it. I’ve never been hunted by bears (laughs)

Something to keep on the bucket list.

Absolutely! When I did Iron Man Canada last year for my 50th there was a bear on the bike course. I didn’t see it but the bike course is just up and down dual carriageways and apparently a black bear crossed. I really wish I’d seen that.

There’s a lot of endurance running at the heart of the book and also family relationships; the two intertwine. Were you using the endurance running as a sort of metaphor at all within it or is it purely a very good mechanism for propelling the plot forward?

It was that really. It’s what I love doing. There’s no metaphor behind the fact that they have to endure, I guess. They have to endure lots of things.

The family things are always important to me. Certainly in the last 6 or 7 books I’ve written, the core family thing is really important, in The Silence certainly and this one. There’s the small nuclear family in this which is Jen and her Dad and the mother they’re looking for, that’s the driver of the story really, but also the team spirit, the team family unit. They’ve all got quirks and secrets from each other but they’re still a tight core when they go into Eden.

I wanted it to feel claustrophobic almost, even though you’re in the vast empty landscape. I wanted the team to feel oppressed from the outside as soon as they get in there and to feel the claustrophobia from their surroundings.

That definitely comes across. Whenever they stop for the night or don’t stop, the environment is closing in on them.

That’s how I wanted it to feel. It’s not a good comparison but something like The Thing feels so oppressive because of the landscape. I wanted this to feel the same in some places. I wanted it to feel dangerous for any of them to think “I’m going there on my own”. Even when they go off to the loo on their own, there’s an element of “oh God I shouldn’t be doing this.”

It’s interesting you say The Thing because there is a John Carpenter feel to the book. That dialling up of both the internal and the external pressures that’s also there in Prince of Darkness. Particularly there’s that feel of the tight knit group, its tightness is almost a weapon against it.

That’s right. I wanted a lot of interaction in the group as well.

What was the biggest challenge for you in writing this as opposed to The Silence or The Hunt or the Aliens books?

The first third of it is fairly slow but I wanted it to be fast paced when it kicked off so I compare it to something like Aliens. The first hours of Aliens, not much actually happens but it’s unbearably tense and you know something’s going to hit the fan very soon and it heightens all the way.

It’s how you get to know the characters as well. I love Aliens, it’s my favourite film of all time. The characters and their interaction they’re all so distinctive so when the shit hits the fan you care about them all when they die.

I wanted to try and do that as well without making it too slow or making people put it down because nothing was happening. So even though I wanted the last sort of half or two thirds to be really fast paced action horror thriller, I wanted them to care about the characters as well.

That was the challenge, to make people care about a large team of characters before the obvious starts to happen. Anyone starting to read this book is going to know they’re not all going to get out at the end because it’s a Tim Lebbon book and it’s a horror story.

You’ve also got another book coming out this month, from PS Publishing.

It’s called Studio of Screams and it’s written as if there’s a film studio in the 60s called Blythewood similar to Hammer and Amicus. Chris Golden, Stephen Volk, Mark Morris and I have novelised those films. We’ve each written a novella based on an imaginary film that was never made.

Steve Bissette has written interstitial pieces, including an interview with the head of studio, talking about all these films. His interstitials are almost as long as the novellas in places but he’s done a fantastic job of weaving it all together. So we each came up with a story that we thought was 60’s 70’s Hammer Amicus type things from this imaginary film studio that never existed.

 

Eden is out now from Titan Books; click here to order from Amazon.co.uk