Sci-Fi Month – An Interview with Cristin Terrill

All Our Yesterdays
By Cristin Terrill
Publisher – Bloomsbury
Release Date – August 1st 2013
Purchase – Amazon | The Book Depository

Em is locked in a bare, cold cell with no comforts. Finn is in the cell next door. The Doctor is keeping them there until they tell him what he wants to know. Trouble is, what he wants to know hasn’t happened yet.

Em and Finn have a shared past, but no future unless they can find a way out. The present is torture – being kept apart, overhearing each other’s anguish as the Doctor relentlessly seeks answers. There’s no way back from here, to what they used to be, the world they used to know. Then Em finds a note in her cell which changes everything. It’s from her future self and contains some simple but very clear instructions. Em must travel back in time to avert a tragedy that’s about to unfold. Worse, she has to pursue and kill the boy she loves to change the future.

1. All Our Yesterdays is one of my first time travel books and I loved it, what inspired you to take on Time Travel as a genre?
I’ve always loved time travel stories, but I never thought about writing one until the idea for ALL OUR YESTERDAYS came to me one night. I couldn’t sleep, so I got up in the middle of the night and turned on the television. The Terminator was playing, and I started drowsily thinking about how the story would have been different if the killer robot from the future was the good guy instead of the villain. Then, because I write YA, I started wondering what it would be like if that character was a teenage girl instead of a robot.

2. Are you a Doctor Who fan and if so which is your favourite timelord? 

I love Doctor Who, so that’s a tough question! I’ve only watched New Who, but even between those three it’s hard to decide. I was a fan of David Tennant’s many years before he became the Doctor (I saw him in a play in London called The Pillowman that I loved so much I saw it five or six times), so I think I have to go with Ten. I adore Eleven too, though!

3. As its Sci-Fi Month, do you have any favourite or aspiring authors or films/TV shows now or when you were younger?
I grew up reading Madeleine l’Engle, Ursula Le Guin, and Lois Lowry, and I still love those books. Stars Wars and The Terminator movies got frequent play at my house, and many of my favorite television shows (like Firefly, Doctor Who, Misfits, and Battlestar Galactica, among others) are science fiction. I actually didn’t realize how much of a sci-fi fan I really was until I took a good look at my DVD collection one day!

4. What research did you have to do in order to create the perfect time travel novel?
Actually, most of the research I did for this book was for things other than the science. Since time travel doesn’t exist, I could just make stuff up and not have to worry about being too accurate! Cassandra is loosely based on the Large Hadron Collider, so I did some research there, but the actual explanation of how time travel is possible in the book is basically wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey nonsense!

1. Cybermen or Daleks?
 Daleks! Their seeming non-scariness is what makes them scary.

2. Favourite sci-fi heroine? And was it based on your character Em? 
Tough one, but I’m going to have  o go with Sarah Connor from the Terminator franchise. I wouldn’t say she’s based on her, but Em definitely has a little Sarah Connor DNA inside.