The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

It’s always a pleasure to have authors and artists on the blog for our What The Author Says feature. It’s an even bigger pleasure when we’re introducing a good new writer to the SF&F reading community. I’m lucky in that I have a number of authors whose work I’m always eager to read, but there is always something special about coming across a new talent, reading them for the first time; for readers it is the equivalent of an explorer finding a new realm. Alan Campbell may be a name new to many readers, but I can tell you after only being halfway through his impressive debut novel Scar Night that it is a name you are going to remember.

The first in The Deepgate Codex series, Scar Night is wonderfully atmospheric, beginning with a genuinely scary introduction, featuring church assassins (the Spine as they are known), a terrified priest, an unknown beast in a tower and blood-soaked chains. Lots of chains. In fact the city of Deepgate has hung suspended by many criss-crossing chains over a deep abyss for generations, wherein is said to lie the dark god Ulcis, the hoarder of souls, while above the priest perform rituals to protect the souls and keep out the dead (and worse). The sense of imminent menace and dread is one admirers of Edgar Allan Poe will recognise and approve of as the goosebumps rise on their flesh. The opening prologue is all the more disturbing because we simply don’t know what is in the chain-choked tower, killing the silent assasins left, right and centre.

This bizarre city covers from precarious hovels hanging off the edge of the chains by ropes and boards to upmarket town houses; Alan’s prose is very descriptive, giving the reader a real feel for the sights and smells of this odd town over the pit, as well drawn a setting as China Miéville’s New Crobuzon. In fact think Miéville meets Milton and you start to get some of the rich flavour of this Gothic-tinged fantasy. Don’t just take my word for it – Neal Asher and Hal Duncan have also lavished praise upon Scar night:

“With undead armies, psychotic angels and exploding airships, Scar Night is a gripping, ripping yarn which rattles along at a great pace. Tether all that to the knock-out image at the heart of the novel – Deepgate, a Gothic city built on a network of chains over a great abyss – and you have urban fantasy at its best.” Hal Duncan, author of Vellum.

“Scar Night” was born in Budapest back in the early nineties. I had graduated from Edinburgh University, but couldn’t find a programming job, so I ended up working for Directory Enquiries. After a year of that I had saved enough to fund an Inter-rail trip around Europe. When I stepped off the train in Budapest a month later, I had £30 left in my wallet and no ticket home. Luckily I found a job within minutes, working for a backpackers’ hostel.

While I saved up enough money to continue my trip (working on trains rolling into Hungary, persuading people to choose our hostel rather than all the others) I decided to write a story. I managed a few pages, then put them away and pretty much forgot about the whole thing. Only one sentence of this early work remains in the finished book. The rest of it was bloody awful.

I returned to the UK several months later, now jobless again and facing a looming overdraft. As luck would have it, a company called DMA Design was looking for games programmers. I’m a huge fan of games and had written a few of my own for fun on the Commodore 64, so I applied for the job… and got it.

One of the guys at DMA had developed a graphics engine which had originally been planned for a dinosaur game (this is why the GTA executable was called dino.exe), but because of its limitations would be better suited to rendering a city. Our brief was something like: “we want mission-based cops ‘n’ robbers driving game set in a city”. The working title was “Race and Chase”. There was supposed to be the option to play a cop, but early in the development, the team decided it would be much more fun to play a criminal instead. I proposed we create a reactive environment with realistic emergency services and police – you could drive around and obey the law if you wanted to, but you weren’t going to get the missions done by sticking to speed limit – so I was given the task of programming the AI for that element of the game.

During this time, I didn’t write a word of “Scar Night”, but the book must have been lurking at the back of my mind. Instead, I wrote game design proposals. DMA bought a couple of these from me (a comic zombie romp and a weird sci-fi thing with floating elephants – no kidding), but sadly the company folded and these never saw the light of day. After a brief stint on the Playstation game, Formula One 2000, for Visual Sciences, I ultimately joined Rockstar, who had started to develop a full 3D version of the original GTA.

Rockstar has some of the very best technical coders, artists, level designers and producers around, and what these guys did with the old top-down slaughterfest was incredible. Outside of my own coding, I had virtually no design input into that game (other than to put in the hookers-in-the-squeaky-bouncy-car, which rubbed a few people up the wrong way – such is life). But after GTA 3 and Vice City, I was growing frustrated. I wanted to do work on something new. I was also ill at the time, losing weight and sleep and visiting increasingly grave-faced doctors who couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me, and I found it too difficult to concentrate on the job. In the end, I resigned.

The break from Rockstar gave me the opportunity to sit down at last and write. I wanted to create an original fantasy, but I soon discovered that constructing readable prose isn’t as easy as it looks. So I read every book on writing I could find and joined a wonderfully helpful writers’ group in Edinburgh. Three years and many drafts later, my agent, Simon Kavanagh, plucked “Scar Night” out of the slush pile. Thanks to his help, and the wonderful people at Tor and Bantam, I have a new job at last. It beats working for BT.

Alan Campbell

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