locusmag 0 Comments DAVE HUTCHINSON was born in 1960 in Sheffield, South Yorkshire in England. He attended the University of Nottingham and went on to write for The Dundee Courier and The Weekly News as a journalist for many years. Hutchinson’s earliest published fiction was his collection Thumbprints (1979), and he has written more than fifty short fiction pieces since, some published in collections such as Torn Air (1980), As the Crow Flies (2004), and Now Wash Your Hands (2020). His first novel was sci-fi thriller The Villages (2002). His sci-fi espionage novel Europe in Autumn (2014), a nominee for a Clarke Award and a BSFA Award, began the Fractured Europe Sequence, which he continued with Europe at Midnight (2015), Europe in Winter (2016), and Europe at Dawn (2017), which collected several major award nominations. Europe in Winter won a BSFA Award in 2017. He also wrote The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man (2019), apocalyptic novels Shelter (2018) and Sanctuary (2023), and another novel in the setting of the Fractured Europe Sequence, Cold Water (2022). His next novel, The Essence, is forthcoming. Excerpt from the interview: “Europe in Autumn was meant to be completely standalone. It’s about conspiracies and secret societies and the fracture of Europe. It all came together by accident, really. I’d been wanting to do an espionage thriller for years and years and years. I started putting Europe in Autumn together, but some of the ideas for Autumn – actually, some of the ideas for Midnight, the book that came after Autumn – I had written them down before the fall of the Berlin Wall, a long, long time ago. By the time I was writing Autumn, the Berlin Wall had come down, and there was just a borderless Europe, a borderless community, and the thing about spy thrillers is they’re all about crossing borders. They’re all about going places where the people can’t: going over a line, going into hostile territory. So, I figured I would have to either ignore the fact that Europe was one big country, or I’d have to think of a reason for it not to be, which meant setting it in the future, which meant it would be science fiction. “I thought up this background, and I just started writing these stories about this place, and it was a conscious imitation of Alan Furst’s The Polish Officer, which is an absolutely staggering novel, all done in a series of linked short stories. It seemed to work. I literally had no idea where it was going, but there was a sense that it was moving towards something, though I didn’t know what. I needed a thing to happen to boost it. Without it, it would have been a book of short stories, and it would have been quite pleasant and interesting, but nothing particularly special. “So, I just stuck a short story into it that I’d written about a map, and that kind of worked. I thought, ‘Yeah, this is interesting,’ and I went back, and I retrofitted the novel to take account of the short story, and then it got brought forward for the rest of the book, and that was Europe in Autumn. I’m just happy that people enjoy it. I was really pleased with it. I know I rushed the ending, but I couldn’t think of any other way to end it. I sat and thought about it for a long time, but I know I didn’t get it right. I just thought, ‘Yeah, that’ll do.’ “Autumn really was just meant to be a one-off, but I had some ideas left over that I hadn’t been able to put in the first book. As you’re working on something, you’re always having a lot of similar ideas, and you can’t put them in the book you’re working on, but you might be able to use them for something else. “When Autumn seemed to do quite well, I said to the publishers, ‘Do you want another one? Have another one,’ and they said, ‘Yes.’ That was Europe at Midnight – although it wasn’t Europe at Midnight. I was going to call it Community. This is how utterly chaotic I am: I was going to call it Community because of the Community in the book. A friend of mine told me that Community was actually an American sitcom at the time, so I couldn’t do that. Then I was going to call it A Song For Europe, which was the proper name of the Eurovision Song Contest, and the publishers weren’t too keen on that. “There’s a phrase used to describe Alan Furst’s novels, that they’re all set around the beginning of the Second World War – well, most of them – and I’ve seen that described as ‘the midnight of the century.’ So, I thought I’d call it Europe at Midnight. It’s got that ring to it. And just before Midnight came out, Alan Furst published a book called Midnight In Europe, which I thought was a splendid piece of synchronicity. But then, it became Europe as a series, rather than a set of books; it was Europe in Autumn, Europe at Midnight, Europe in Winter, Europe at Dawn. The titles became easier then, although the books got harder. “I’m a pantser, really. I started Europe in Winter with absolutely no idea how I was going to end. I started it with an explosion. Somebody said to me, ‘Dave, Winter’s all right, but you’ve got to make it more exciting. Start it with a bang,’ so I did. Then you kind of fit around what is the bang about, who is involved, why has it happened, and so forth. By then, Europe in Autumn had been translated into Estonian, and my Estonian translator had noticed that I had Rudi, the central character, who is Estonian, born in two different places. I hurriedly fixed that for the second edition, but it became a plot point in Europe in Winter, and that spilled over into Europe at Dawn, and became part of the overarching conspiracy theory of the whole set of books. So, I made a terrible mistake, but it actually turned out all right, which is very rare for me. Usually, when I make a terrible mistake, it’s something really awful. “I started to make the books more and more complicated. Autumn is already quite complicated. By the time you get to Dawn, things are really, really tough. As a reader, I enjoy doing a lot of the heavy lifting. I don’t like to be told stuff, I like to figure things out. I do that to my readers, as well. I like to leave loose ends, because that’s what life is like. “I like to think that most of the characters are decent people. Rudi is a thoroughly decent chap, even if he is angry all the time. He has a lot to be angry about. Rupert, who poisons somebody with polonium, is actually a decent chap, but he’s been driven beyond all reason. I liked Carey while I was writing her in Winter, and I thought, ‘Yeah, this is somebody I would like very much.’ She would hate me, but I would get on with her. She would think I was a complete plotz. Then, I figured she deserved better than just being a fall guy to one of Rudi’s plots. 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