Hello my friends, today I’m SO EXCITED to start a new blog post series called UNDER THE COVER! This will be a new weekly series where I interview some of favourite authors and authors I’ve recently read and discovered. I’m trying to refresh my blog and I love interviewing authors and getting an insight into their storytelling, hence Under the Cover was born.
Today I’m excited to interview A.Connors known as Adam Connors debut author of The Girl Who Broke the Sea – my favourite book of the year so far which I reviewed earlier this week. If you haven’t picked it up you need to. I want to say a massive thank you to Adam for being my first guest on my new blog series.
So sit back, grab a coffee or tea and delve into the mind of A. Connors with an in-depth look behind the scenes of the book and its origins.
- Can you share with us something about the book that isn’t in the blurb to introduce your brilliant debut The Girl Who Broke the Sea?
At its heart, it’s a book about communication.
I wanted to write a book about someone who feels like an outsider, someone for whom social interaction doesn’t come easily. I was a pretty socially awkward child at school, so it felt like something I could do a decent job of writing about. It also felt like something readers would recognize and relate to.
I work as a software engineer when I’m not writing, and we think a lot about human-to-computer interaction (and more recently, human-to-AI interaction). I had a hopelessly geeky phrase in my head which probably sums up the book pretty well: Humans have rubbish user interfaces.
So in the book you have problems with: Human-to-human communication; human-to-computer communication; and human-to-vast-unknowable-deep-sea-intelligence communication.
- Your book is a mix of Science Fiction, Thriller and Adventure, hence why it’s impossible to put down, how did you come up with such a unique plot line?
Thank you — I’m glad you liked it!
I think it was Stephen King who said stories come together when two or more ideas find each other. The Girl Who Broke The Sea was definitely born in a few separate pieces, which collided and, fortunately, meshed together.
I started with Lily, who doesn’t find it easy to get along with people. So it was almost inevitable that I’d have to send her to a place where she absolutely couldn’t escape other people. Somewhere cramped and claustrophobic, with an enclosed community that wouldn’t necessarily welcome her.
At some level, all stories are about putting a character in an adversarial situation like that and forcing them to change. But I wanted to write something that was kind of the opposite of Lily “reinventing” herself. I wanted to write a story in which Lily goes somewhere completely different and finds that, even there, she can’t escape herself, and so has to learn how to accept herself instead.
In an alternative universe, I guess the book could have been set in a rural village community in 1940’s England.
Except that my first job was as a physicist at the Large Hadron Collider, and I work as a software engineer in Google Research, so it was always going to be a bit more techie than that.
I hit on the idea of a deep-sea mining rig because one of my friends is an ROV driver (Remotely Operated Vehicle, think: mini-sub) and it just seemed perfect. Cramped, stuffy, smelly, noisy. Everything Lily is not good at. But I wasn’t married to the setting at first. I considered Antarctica as well, space would have worked, except I think space is a bit overdone.
Then, as soon as I started getting deeper into the research, everything just clicked into place. Every time I learned something new about the deep-sea it just got more interesting. I started with a bit of Googling and ended up speaking to a bunch of marine biologists. I realised that I had never given the deep-sea that much attention before, and that there was a world of incredibly new science going on down there that I was completely unaware of.
The battery technology, material science, and computer systems that have enabled the systematic exploration of the Abyssal Plains where my book is set (think: vast, undersea flatlands, 5km under the ocean surface) has only really come together in the past 10 or 15 years. One of the marine biologists I spoke to told me that it’s all so new they still “discover something entirely new to science every time they look.”
That thought blows my mind.
And then amongst that research I started to learn about deep-sea mining and the fact that there are around $200 trillion worth of metal in the Abyssal Plains that the mining companies really, really want to dig up. It’s not an easy debate. The metals down there will help to build the generators and batteries that’ll enable us to decarbonise our economy, but at the same time there’s a sense that industry is strong-arming science, rushing to start commercial mining sooner than we should. If we allow deep-sea mining to become a gold-rush there’s a very real possibility we could wipe out entire ecosystems before we know they ever existed — and that would be, well, bad.
Somehow these pieces just started to slot together while I was writing. Lily struggles to fit in on board the rig; there is tension between the scientists and the rig workers; and then the sentient something that Lily encounters is, like Lily, both a threat and threatened.
This was my first book, so I don’t know if this is right, but I suspect at some level that this always happens, and that it’s the best and worst thing about writing — you never end up where you thought you were going to end up.
- It’s a classic question, but one I love to ask debut authors, what started your love for writing and why now?
I don’t remember when the idea first took hold. I have a friend (a fellow writer) who calls it an affliction, like it’s some kind of chronic infection you pick up in childhood that comes back to bite you in later life. The first time I displayed symptoms of wanting to be a writer was when I was about twelve or thirteen, and I spent many months with my best friend roaming around the playground at school with a notebook. We were writing a novel about hapless and accident prone spies who come good in the end. My friend’s handwriting was neater than mine, so he did all the actual writing, and I was just the ideas guy.
The novel we wrote was later acquired by Rowan Atkinson and turned into the blockbuster movie, Johnny English… Ok, that bit is a lie. But if I ever find that notebook I think I could definitely make a good case against Rowan.
At that age I liked both writing stories and writing computer programmes — fun fact: I sold my first computer game when I was thirteen, for £50! They were kind of the same thing in my head, both ways of getting all the ideas that were tangled up inside my brain, out and into a place where other people could engage with them. Being a pretty awkward, anti-social kid I had a lot of time on my hands.
I’ve sometimes wondered what would have happened if I’d focused on writing instead of taking the technical path I did. It’s kind of a shame that “being a novelist” lacks the structured career-path that regular jobs have. I have heard many writers say that they “didn’t take being a writer seriously” in the beginning.
I was definitely one of those. I have massive respect for people who have the conviction and confidence to commit themselves to a creative career from a young age. I didn’t have the guts for that. Instead, I found science (I did a PhD in Particle Physics at CERN) and then computers. But the affliction was always there, I was always writing even though for the longest time I thought I’d missed the boat on mainstream publication.
Why now? That’s just kind of how long it took to learn the guts of what writing really is and what makes a book work or not work. Thirty-five-ish years. Although, to be fair I was doing a lot of other things at the same time. One mistake I made, that is easily fixed by anybody reading this, is that it took me a very long time to join a writing group. For the longest time my writing was sort of a shameful secret, and the idea of joining a group of other people who wanted to talk and think about writing was unthinkable.
That was pretty stupid in hindsight, and I wish I’d joined a group and started the path of learning how to write properly sooner. But I made it in the end.
And if I ever find the notebook I was using while I was doing my PhD at CERN, I’m coming for you, Dan Brown.
- What books or authors have most influenced your own writing?
I remember that we had a library on the corner right opposite our school, and we had a habit of going in to take books out. This might be unfair, but I remember it as a bit of a joyless affair. Books weren’t really a big thing in our household so I’m sort of surprised we were in there at all. But I remember one day picking up Robert Heinlein’s The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and my brain just kind of exploding.
I don’t think I’d engaged with a book before that, and to be fair I was probably too young to really understand it.
But it had everything a twelve year old boy from a small mining town in the Midlands could want… a devil-may-care anti-hero who is (for reasons not immediately apparent) being chased by multiple assassins. A mysterious woman who saves him, and who appears to know more than she’s letting on. A mission to save a decommissioned sentient computer from being destroyed. And a cat who is too young to know that walking through walls is impossible.
I’m not sure what I’d make of the book now, it’s probably showing its age a little bit and I don’t think it was ever considered a particularly good book. But Heinlein (along with Asimov and Clarke) pretty much created mainstream Sci-Fi, and I have a special affection for him because he was both a writer and an engineer like me.
For me, it’s always been Sci-Fi. It’s hard to separate whether it just followed on from loving Heinlein so much, or whether I loved Heinlein because his subject matter triggered so many of my own obsessions. I went from Heinlein, to Clarke and Asimov (of course), to Philip K Dick, and then Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game). Of course, it was also the era when Star Wars and Tron had just come out, so…
The trouble is that there is so much bad Sci-Fi out there it gets a bad reputation. Creating new worlds that the protagonist is familiar with but the reader is not, is hard. You can get a lot of exposition. Some Sci-Fi writers get pulled so far into the exposition that they forget that all books are really about people, and the people in a book need to feel real. Sci-Fi seems to be a genre that’s particularly susceptible to repetition as well. You get a lot of cliches: intelligent computers with zany personalities; faster-than-light travel; laser weapons; aliens; etc, etc.
I think Margaret Atwood (starting with Oryx and Crake for me) was a bit of a revelation to me, and is much closer to how I aspire to write now. She defines her writing as speculative fiction. a “no Martians” form of science fiction.
That’s what I’m going for. I didn’t want to write about a deep-sea base that was all slick and futuristic, I knew it’d be too easy to create something kind of saccharine and derivative that way. I wanted the technology to be as close to where we are now as I could get, so it would feel plausible. Because, I think, getting the setting to feel real is part of how you get the characters to feel real. And without that, books tend not to work very well.
- Your book is set under the sea, in a deep sea mining rig, why did you choose this setting for your book? And have you been on one before? If you haven’t, would you like to?
Like I said, the deep-sea part wasn’t well thought through at first, even though it feels weird now to think that the book could ever have been set anywhere else.
It was when I started researching the deep-sea that things changed. It just started opening out and getting more and more interesting. Basically, we live on an ocean planet. If you look at the Earth from directly over the Pacific ocean you can hardly see any land, it’s all water. As one of the marine biologists I met liked to say: if aliens ever visit Earth, they probably wouldn’t even bother to check the sticky up bits of rock on the back.
But, land-dwelling, fruit-eating mammals that we are, we tend not to think about it like that.
So you have this vast undersea world filled with entire ecosystems that we have only just begun to understand (the world’s deepest fish was only recorded a few weeks ago). You have this immense, dark, cold, airless void, the loneliest place on the planet, which has to be a metaphor for every psychological fear that ever existed. And you have industry trying to come in and drive combine harvesters through the whole thing.
Have I been on a deep-sea mining rig? — well, they don’t exist yet. The current plans to collect metals from the deep-sea mostly involve driving remotely operated combine harvesters along the seabed. There are some plans (although the green credentials of these companies are not water-tight) to use neutrally buoyant deep-sea rovers with mechanical arms as a less destructive way of accomplishing the same thing. In my book, I’m stretching current science a bit further, and imagining that we have a permanent base down there, which allows the autonomous robots to crawl less destructively around the seabed and collect the nodules, while the science team oversees the process.
The thing I’ve wrestled with while writing and learning about this stuff is that I’m not flatly saying no to any kind of deep-sea mining, however uncomfortable it makes me. We currently rely on oil for the lifestyles we lead and that needs to change, and I don’t think humans will change their habits so dramatically that we won’t need some alternative. By some estimates, we’re going to need more metals in the next ten years as we decarbonise our economy than we’ve used in the entire history of humanity up to this point. That has to come from somewhere, and land-based mining is not without its social and environmental impacts.
But I do think science needs to take the lead here, not money. And that’s where the real problem is right now.
Would I like to go on a deep-sea mining rig? — of course. But I get pretty sea-sick, and when I get sick it sometimes triggers seizures (I’m epileptic), so I think the journey out there would be pretty traumatic for everyone involved.
- What were your highlights and challenges to writing your debut novel?
The worst part of writing is that quite often you do the vast majority of it not knowing if the book will ever see the light of day.
I had an agent by the time I started writing The Girl Who Broke The Sea, because I’d won Undiscovered Voices 2020 with a previous novel, which had been enough to sign with an agent, but which unfortunately didn’t get published.
But having an agent (as I’d just learned) is no guarantee of publication. So you pour all this effort into this thing, you make compromises in terms of the time you spend with your family, or pursuing other interests, you have moments where it’s like dry-retching over a toilet bowl, and moments where you just have the biggest grin on your face … and you don’t know if anybody else is ever going to know or care.
Writing is just the most wonderful feeling when the pieces of a story start to come together and the characters start to come alive. Usually, it’s a snippet of dialog that comes to me while I’m lying in bed or out for a run, and then I rush to my desk and make a note of it, and then I have to wait patiently until my next clear window of writing before I can unfurl the idea to its full glory.
But it takes too much time and love to do it and then not get to show it to anyone else.
- I loved Lily’s character and how she develops throughout the book, can you give us an insight into what makes Lily’s character tick and what did you love most about her?
Quite a few people have commented on Lily and her dad’s neurodiversity. My favourite Amazon review says: “It is really refreshing to see neurodiversity represented without being made into a problem or the whole story.”
That felt like an achievement.
But I didn’t set out to write a book with neurodiverse characters. I started, to be honest, with a socially awkward girl who was quite a lot like I was as a child; and a geeky, techie dad who was … well, me.
Lily’s character really started to crystallise for me the first time I wrote Chapter 9, when Lily meets her new classmates for the first time. The rig has a pretty exclusive school on board, and the kind of people who choose to live on a deep-sea rig are a pretty extreme bunch. So I just had Lily being introduced to all these over-achievers and getting more and more filled with self-doubt and anxiety.
I guess Lily is the kind of person who feels pretty down on herself, and will sometimes lash out when she feels cornered. But it’s balanced by the fact that she’s pretty smart, and observant, and there’s a kind of gallows humour to her which is good fun to follow.
It comes back to that theme of communication — the gap between the person we are inside and the person we allow other people to see. On the inside, Lily is smart and resourceful, and caring, and funny… but on the outside she’s just the kind of person that people write off as a bit of a troublemaker.
- If you could write a story from the perspective of a different character in TGWBTS, who would it be? (I think for me it would either be Evan or Ari?)
The co-star of the show is really the euglenoid — a bioluminescent, sentient something that forms a bond with Lily. The euglenoid is an outsider, just like Lily, it’s evolved alone at the bottom of the ocean for millions of years. It’s never encountered humans before, it can’t even imagine what humans are, but as it rifles through Lily’s memories in order to understand the world, its loneliness finds Lily’s loneliness.
I knew from the beginning that I wanted Lily to find something down there. Something beyond current science. But I didn’t want her to find Atlantis, or fish-men with bubbly voices. I knew she had to find something very different to us, but something that would share some similar traits. Curiosity. Loneliness. Confusion. These are the lines along which Lily and the euglenoid’s connection forms.
I think a book told from that perspective would be … kind of hard to write. It would either be brilliant or utterly terrible.
- What’s next? I can’t wait for more, do you have another book in the works and if so can you describe it in 3 words?
I have two ideas I’m really excited about. I’m busy trying to sketch them out and get some feedback before I pick one to commit to.
For the one I think I’m most likely to go with right now: Neuroscience. The Stillness. Escape.
I cheated, that was four words.
- Finally, if you could recommend one book for everyone to read, what would it be?
The Scythe Trilogy by Neal Shusterman. It’s a bit more intense than my book, so not all readers of my book would be up for Scythe. But for me, Scythe is the ultimate in human-led speculative storytelling, and exactly what books are about.
