An Alternative Ulster by Jo Zebedee

Today, I’m very pleased to introduce my guest author Jo Zebedee as she explains the inspiration behind her newest book:  Inish Carraig.

INISH CARRAIG by Jo Zeedee. Out 21st August 2015. Available for pre-order now on Amazon.

An Alternative Ulster

Well, Belfast, actually. But you get the gist.

My brain being what it is, I was minding my own business when the Writing Angels sang to me. I should write a book set in a post-alien invasion Belfast, they said, very loudly. Once I moved past the obvious jokes of whether anyone would notice the difference, I found myself in the position of taking a place I knew well – I live about 15 miles from the city – and re-imagining it.

That the place I wanted to change was Belfast added to the complexity a little. I wasn’t writing the future of somewhere where a breakdown of society in the wake of an alien invasion would be simplistic, or nuance-free. This is a city where a descent into rioting, or the bombing of one sector of the city over another, could be seen as sending a message. And the one thing I didn’t want to write was another book about Belfast that was all about our past, or future, or anything other than pure entertainment.

So, before I sat down, I laid out a few ground rules.

Firstly, I didn’t want the book to be dominated by religion. I get fed up reading books that focus on it as the inevitable upshot of a story in Belfast.

Secondly, I wanted to portray a changed Belfast after the invasion, but still have it feel like Belfast. I imagined a world where society hasn’t quite broken down. Whilst the book is bleak, it’s not a full dystopia. The city has been abandoned: whoever survived the alien invasion is living in a crumbling city, scavenging for food, for heat, for safety. This is Maslow’s Hierarchy at its most basic. But there are still law-keepers, and limited structures of governance. It’s just that everything has got stretched to the point where the cracks are wide enough to slip through.

In any city that happened in, I reasoned, some people would rise to importance. They’d be the people with enough strength to stockpile supplies. People with existing contacts. In short, they’d be those who could wheel and deal, who knew how to control things – and in any city, that would be someone with access to some dodgy networks. In short, my antagonist was a hard-liner before the war, and remains one now. I make no apologies for that – I simply can’t imagine how any other structure would fill the vacuum left by the invasion in the time scale I’ve set.

What of the city itself? What would be left? Before I answered that I took a short survey from people on an worldwide internet forum, and asked what images they associated with Belfast. They were depressing, of course, given history. Soldiers and checkpoints. Rioters and petrol bombs. Booby-trapped cars. Murals. Now, people can say that’s not fair – hell, I don’t think it’s fair – but that was the dominant theme that came back. So, what to do? That picture of Belfast wasn’t the one I wanted in my book.

What I tried to do was filter some of the imagery into the story and make it part of what gave a sense of place, without letting it dominate. For instance, I used the perhaps-urban-myth about Castlecourt shopping centre being a glass structure to withstand bombs. I made the odd reference to rioting. I showed a peace wall shattered by alien bombs and a mural re imagined to reflect the alien invasion. And all the while, I knew I walked a tight-rope, that not everyone would like what I had chosen to reflect back on the city.

In all, I’m happy with what I came up with. The voices feel authentic to Northern Ireland. The geography, with its mix of sea and Lough, hills and cityscape jostling beside each other, is pretty well what I hoped for. It made the story very real for me.

I hope, when people read it, that’s what they take away from it – the sense of a place I’m very fond of, with a feeling all of its own. And, perhaps, a sense of a city and land moving beyond the clichés of the past. A place where a story can be set without a wider agenda, but just because as a setting, Belfast is great. It’s got fabulous voices and characters, changing landscapes, a sense of identity that was fun to try to capture. I hope I did it justice.

INISH CARRAIG by Jo Zebedee out 21st August

Post-alien invasion Belfast. Earth has been defeated. Pity the locals aren’t listening.

Belfast teenager John Dray will do what he must to survive. When he’s offered desperately needed food in exchange for dispersing a mysterious compound over the city, he takes the job. The compound turns out to be a virus lethal to the city’s invaders, and John is charged with xenocide.

He’s sent to Inish Carraig, a forbidding prison, where he uncovers the secret behind the virus – a secret that threatens Earth and everyone he loves. He needs to unveil the conspiracy.

He just has to get out of prison first.

Jo has been writing for five years.

Her début science fiction novel, Abendau’s Heir, came out this year and is the the first of a space opera trilogy.

More about Jo can be found on her website, www.jozebedee.com, including links to her blog and facebook pages, and she can be followed on twitter on @joz1812.