An interview with Ben Jeapes by Molly Brown. This interview was conducted in March 2000 and appeared in the October 2000 issue of Interzone. Thanks to Interzone and to Molly for allowing it to be reprinted here.

Ben Jeapes first appeared in Interzone with the story, "Memoirs of a Publisher" (IZ 43, January, 1991), an amusing first-person discourse on the process of setting up a publishing company. The science fictional element came from the fact the narrator was an artificial intelligence named Oscar, but otherwise the story could almost be read as a how-to manual of publishing, littered with useful titbits on everything from warehousing to promotion: "It told me about the usual procedure — artwork supplied by publisher (or printer sets from copy); product is printed and bound; product is delivered to warehouse... I sent a message to the warehouse instructing them to deliver review copies to the various Times supplements and an assortment of scientific journals that I thought might be interested; I also sent notices to their bulletin boards alerting the review editors..."

And now, nine years, eighteen short stories (nine of them in Interzone), and two Young Adult novels later, Ben Jeapes, like Oscar, is taking the plunge into publishing with a new company called Big Engine... which was the first point of discussion in the following exchange of emails:

Molly Brown: Your first Interzone story was about a publisher. Coincidence or predestination?

But I suppose the thought of starting my own company has always been there. I twigged quite early on that the way to get ahead in modern publishing is either to go it alone or to work your way up in a vast corporate machine — there's no middle ground. And the latter definitely isn't me.

Anyway, I went through the public school system which teaches that boring, 9-5 Monday-Friday jobs are verboten; you have to go out there and Do Interesting Things. Even then I'd say the majority do go out into 9-5 Monday-Friday jobs and get swept up by the corporate system, but I was mug enough to take the creed seriously.

MB: You have quite a lot of publishing experience, don't you?

That was when I really began to have rekindled thoughts about going it alone, but I couldn't think what I would actually publish, and anyway I had a perfectly good, reasonably paid job to keep me happy. Despite what I just said, I wouldn't actually resign from a perfectly good job to start up my own company, good God, no. However, the job ceased abruptly in the first week of the new century. It was the obvious moment to go it alone.

But then there was that question again — publish what? And there was only one subject that I had any kind of entrees into, which was fiction. I know many people, and I'm sure you do too, who have written perfectly good novels that don't get published because, quite simply, they don't get lucky. They do the rounds and get the usual mantra of "it's good but it's not quite what we're after ..." In other words, not economical for the big publishing houses to publish. So here I am.

MB: When can we expect your first titles to appear? And what will those titles be?

First off the block are two debut horror novels by Gus Smith and Chris Amies. These are two prime example of the kind of novel I mentioned, doing the rounds of the agents and publishers; and I have the advantage of having been involved in their writing, to a certain extent, since myself and Gus and Chris are all in the same writer's group.

Gus's Feather and Bone does an amazing job of taking the Northumbrian moors — the look and feel, the light and the air — and mixing it with forces of evil and madness that hit you like a slap in the face. And the way he tells it is with the rhythm and plausibility of a folk tale — which is appropriate because he's a folk singer, among his many other talents. He's also a farmer and he actually needed to do some rewriting because, in the original draft, he made strange, way-out predictions about BSE and CJD. And then these things actually went and happened, so he's now had to write about them in the past tense.

(If that doesn't grab you, then try this: child abuse, cannibalism and skinny dipping lesbian witches. This is a novel which has everything.)

Chris Amies's Dead Ground is the novel HP Lovecraft would have written if he had ever made it as far as the South Pacific. Only Chris is a little more tight with the prose than old HP. Like Gus, Chris is excellent at invoking an atmosphere; this time it's a group of Pacific islands which are the back end of the British Empire in the 1930s. Sun, sea, palm trees, the legacy of a vanished, stoneworking civilisation and a modern feel of faded, rotting imperial decline which merges seamlessly into the much darker forces at work. When I read it I felt as if I knew every one of the characters. I wanted to thump several of them and I wouldn't want any of them to marry my daughter, but I felt like I knew them.

As well as publishing original material, I wanted to publish reprints too, for a couple of reasons: it keeps good books in the public eye and it provides illustrious company for the new authors, who can bask in the reflected glory. And the first reprint is David Langford's The Leaky Establishment. Dave has done a fairly good job of keeping up public awareness about the title by mentioning it in every other Ansible, but it's long been OOP. I read it at university and I thought it was excellent; this was actually before I had heard of Dave from other quarters, so it came as a pleasant surprise in later years to learn that he was the author.

It's a very funny and frighteningly plausible story of bureaucracy and the nuclear industry, and right at the end there's a whammy that leaves you open-mouthed. The clues are all there throughout the book, but they only get pulled together at the end and they leave you thinking, "wow!" And then, "... and why not?"

When I asked Dave if I could publish the book, it turned out he had just finished getting it scanned onto disk, for a completely different reason. Dave also told me that, a while back, Terry Pratchett kindly offered to write an introduction if it would help get the book back in print. Terry has confirmed that the offer still stands. You see? Serendipity!

The other reprint is to be called Swan Songs and it's the first ever, as far as I know, omnibus edition of Brian Stableford's Hooded Swan series. [Ed.: incorrect. The Germans got there first with Die Saga vom Raumpiloten Grainger. This is the first such English collection ...] This was six novels published from 1972-1975 — Halcyon Drift, Rhapsody in Black, Promised Land, The Paradise Game, The Fenris Device and Swan Song — and they were really quite unlike anything else Brian has ever written. You could completely miss the point and think of them as good ol' space opera, like the guys who plugged the original editions as "The Adventures of Star-Pilot Grainger", but the series is more insidious than that. It subverts the genre.

The background is that Grainger, a starship pilot, is rescued from a shipwreck on a far flung planet, and then finds himself charged for the rescue. And he can't pay. But the payment is made for him, on the condition that he becomes the pilot of the Hooded Swan, an experimental and generally flash starship, and each of the six novels shows him working off his debt, bit by bit, as well as facing a variety of problems to overcome along the way.

Grainger himself is a cynical pacifist with an amazing capacity for self-loathing and hating that which he loves. He's actually a free man at the end of the fifth novel, The Fenris Device, but for reasons which make perfect sense he and the Swan have one last fling in novel no. 6.

And finally there's a new Interzone anthology, The Ant Men of Tibet and Other Stories: yet more serendipity, because I called David Pringle to get Brian's contact details, and David told me about the collection. It was originally going to be published by Pulp before they went under last year.

It has stories by Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Chris Beckett, Keith Brooke, Eugene Byrne, Nicola Caines, Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Peter T. Garratt, Eric Brown and, um, another Brown by the name of Molly and it's a great cross-section of That Which Is Interzone.

At the risk of sounding, well, nauseous it really is a pleasure to be able to publish an Interzone collection, since Interzone has done so much for me.

Funny, thinking how ten years ago I was so desperate to be published by David. The circle is now complete, as I believe old Darth once said.

MB: Regarding your own writing: did you always want to be a writer?

MB: Prior to the publication of your first novel, you had 17 short stories appear in various magazines and anthologies. Which form do you prefer? Do you think of yourself as a short story writer who also writes novels, or a novelist who figured the best way to break into publication was by writing short stories?

Of course, if you follow that route then you soon learn that they are two very different forms, but the basic writing discipline is the same: write early, write often, write lots. HMSS arose from two or three different ideas — the inverted alien invaders scenario, the navy — that were all intended for different stories. They gelled into one novel while I wasn't looking.

MB: You're referring to your first novel, His Majesty's Starship. HMSS is space opera, but it's a very specific type of space opera isn't it?

BJ: Hornblower in space was the idea ... Though maybe that's simplistic. I had a strange urge to write about the Royal Space Force, or equivalent; and CS Forester's Mr H. has the interesting character trait of never believing he's any good. However successful his latest mission, however closely he snatches victory from the jaws of defeat, he's convinced that it's all fluke and his next mission will reveal him to be the fake that he is. (And in those days they shot incompetent naval officers, to encourage the others, which is never far from his mind.) So that was the template for Michael Gilmore, the main viewpoint character of HMSS.

The problem with Hornblower is that the same attitude emerges in every single novel, and by the third or fourth, or to be quite honest the second, you feel you couldn't get tired of punching him for being such a drip. So, I made sure Gilmore snaps out of it by the end of HMSS.

I also did a different take on the Peter Principle; the principle that everyone gets promoted to their level of incompetence. Gilmore's level is fairly low; he can handle small numbers of people, but not large. And for reasons he only understands at the end, that's his strength.

MB: Weren't you worried there were already too many Hornblower-in-space stories?

Even if I had then it probably wouldn't have been a problem, though, because both those others are set well after the start of their respective "Hornblower in space" era. I wanted to cover the beginning. For example, why exactly would anyone want to arm a spaceship? I've yet to see a convincing answer to that; it just sort of happens. Another question: given that space is so big, what exactly is there to fight over? And why would there ever be a Royal Space Force?

Also, I wanted to bring the limitations of nineteenth century naval warfare to space. I think the principles will be pretty similar if it ever happens. Ships were big and slow and couldn't hide. In Hornblower's day (unlike the laughable TV series: I think they misunderstood the term "warp" as applied to sailing ships), if you were doing five knots and your enemy came over the horizon doing five and a half, then sooner or later there would be a battle, but you could spend all day just looking at your enemy creep closer and closer without being able to do a thing about it. And there was nowhere to run to: when the fighting started, you just sat there and took it.

MB: When the fighting starts in His Majesty's Starship, it's quite a collection of combatants, isn't it? One of the things I especially enjoyed about HMSS was your projection of what the political map of Earth might look like in 2148, including such nations as: The Confederation of South-East Asia, The Pacific Consortium, The Holy Arab Union, The South American Combine, and The United Slavic Federation, among others.

MB: And you made a rather interesting choice of villains.

Several of the Confederation characters are perfectly decent guys who just happen to have been born into this situation. I think that there but for the grace of God go many of us. That was why I gave the Confederation the NVN, an equivalent of the Waffen SS, who unquestionably are bad and not necessarily well liked by their compatriots. As I don't speak a word of Hindi, NVN stands for "Not very nice". Sir will have his little joke.

MB: And meanwhile, the United Kingdom has been reduced to a single mining ship in the asteroid belt.

The UK's location, too, changed with the writing; it was originally going to be a crater city on Mars, ruled by the pretender to the throne — Richard Windsor, the man who would be king if Britain was still a monarchy. Which it isn't. The UK became a spaceship because I wanted the king to appear later on in the book, and the only way to do that would be to give him a starship of his own; and in that case the glory of Gilmore's eponymous starship, Ark Royal, would somehow be diminished. Somehow, making the entire UK into a ship didn't seem to be too much of a cheat. And as a review in SFX said, the thought should appeal to the more treasonous minded of us.

MB: The reason all these nations have been brought together in an armada of space ships is an invitation from an alien race called The First Breed, giving each nation the chance to "tender for the joint development" of The First Breed's home planet, The Roving. The idea is that each nation will send a delegation of unarmed diplomats, but the people of Earth being what they are, that's not the way things turn out, is it?

Starfleet ... well, Starfleet probably would take the aliens at face value because they all know that every alien race is basically Californian at heart, and so they would send unarmed ships, but actually sane people would arm their ships to the gills.

The twist is that, subject to a little variation and wordplay, the invitation is actually quite straight. It's that little variation that's important.

MB: Regarding the First Breed, or "Rusties", I love the little details such as: when conversing face to face with a Rustie, humans have to fight the urge to pick the flakes off the alien's skin, and often mistake the nostrils on the top of the Rustie's head for eyes, so they end up concentrating on making eye contact with the equivalent of the alien's nose (if they had one). And you describe them as smelling like cheap aftershave. I can't think of a more hackneyed question than, "Where do you get your ideas from?" But in the case of The First Breed, I have to ask you: where did the idea for these guys come from?

And that helped me right a grievous wrong that was perpetrated upon science fiction in the early nineties. There was an especially irritating story in Asimov's — and I'm talking scream out loud, throw the book across the room irritating — called "The Nutcracker Coup". Quite apart from being nauseously cute and upholding the right of all decent Americans to interfere in the affairs of less developed planets on a whim or if they get bored, it featured a four legged intelligent race. And this race — get this — still carried things about in its front legs, so that if one of them was holding a gun on you, say, it hobbled along on three legs while it kept you covered. An interesting take on evolutionary theory, I thought.

I understand the story won some awards.

But anyway, once I had a quadruped race of aliens in my mind, I also had a whole list of things to do right about them. And bit by bit, the First Breed emerged.

MB: Your second novel, Winged Chariot, is quite different in that it is definitely earth-bound, in a far future where enforced time travel has become an effective means of ridding the current day's society of malcontents.

BJ: The novel itself just sort of happened. I originally wrote a story called "Correspondents" (Aboriginal SF, Summer 1998); a reporter arrives in sixteenth century Oxford to witness the execution of Thomas Cranmer. We learn that there are many of these guys, wandering the globe; they file their reports telepathically with an automated station on the moon, and they have bodies that can repair themselves almost indefinitely as well as one or two other useful skills. They have very little memory of the Home Time, whence they came, except that they volunteered for their assignment and that they have to wait until the twenty first century to make the journey home.

Except that by the end of the story, it's fairly obvious that their recollections are a crock. And there I left it.

Then I wrote the short story "Winged Chariot" in Interzone, which mentioned the Home Time but had no correspondents. And when I wanted a subject for my second novel, I realised I had a reasonably thought out background as a result of both the stories.

MB: Winged Chariot has an unusual approach to time travel; though there are parallel or alternate timestreams in the book, they don't exist independently, do they?

Now, in Star Trek or something similar, history would be put right again with a few special effects and everything would be back to normal by the end of the episode; no one would shed a tear for the millions wiped out, the billions who would never exist, because their names aren't in the credits so who cares what happens to them? Naturally, the needs of the ten or so lead characters take absolute precedence over the fate of an entire world.

However, Morbern wasn't a Trek watcher and he thought quite differently; so, one of the functions of the College that he set up to manage time travel is to infiltrate and manipulate the timestreams instead. By the time each alternate timestream reaches its own version of the twenty sixth century, the College is in charge; then, when the Home Time is created in "this" timestream, the others can be spliced in and the surplus population redistributed rather than wiped out.

This is by no means the main plot, but it is there in the background. If you raise an issue in a story then I feel you should think it through and work out what happens.

The whole setup of the Home Time was for dramatic reasons rather than trying to show plausibly how time travel might be. Dramatically, there have to be limitations that the characters must work with. Star Trek (again) has almost godlike technology, and to make their stories remotely interesting that technology has to break down with monotonous regularity so that they can't just put the warp drive on and get the hell out of there, or beam out of danger. Far better to have perfectly functioning technology, but to make it hard to get at. Like, the Doctor's Tardis will take him anywhere and when, but he is easily separated from it. Likewise with Home Time technology: if you don't have access to a transfer chamber, or you miss out on the recall field to bring you home, you're stuck.

Then there's the associated issues of time travel that you just can't ignore. The good ol' grandfather paradox; what is to stop you shooting your granddad? The tourist problem: if time travel is possible, where are all the time travelling tourists? Again, these are just background details, but suggested answers are there in Winged Chariot. Like I say, if the issues are there, they have to be dealt with.

MB: Yet despite their apparent complexity, both His Majesty's Starship and your second novel, Winged Chariot, were published as "Young Adult" novels.

The biggest disadvantage is that bookshops just put your book straight into the kids section. If someone visits the SF section on spec, there's more chance that they'll walk away with a Dr Who novel than one of my own. Though given the proportions of titles in a typical SF section nowadays, even the best author's chances of beating the spinoffery are probably no more than 50-50.

MB: Which brings us back full circle to your own publishing venture. What are your plans for the future?

But, they'll have to share the vision. Eventually, and sooner rather than later, I want to be able to afford decent advances and royalties. For the time being, I can afford no advances and not very high royalties (the plus side is that the authors will actually get royalties, since there'll be no advance to pay off!). All the authors I have now are on board with this. It's a sad fact of life that until I discover the next Harry Potter, Big Engine authors will have to keep the day job.

I also want to retain as many rights as possible; not to rip the authors off but to make nice little earners for both of us. I see publishing as a partnership; publishers need authors, authors need publishers; both sides commit to the relationship, both sides take risks to make it work. Anyone who doesn't like this philosophy is perfectly at liberty to pay my mortgage, pension and bills for me. Or to start their own firm.

But getting back to the point, the best way to make contact would be a friendly e-mail or letter with a couple of chapters and a synopsis. Entire manuscripts sent out of the blue, unsolicited and unforewarned, will be heavily frowned upon, and if they don't have the return postage then I'm unlikely even to look at them. Entire manuscripts sent by e-mail won't even get a look-in. I may even decide to name and shame offenders on the company web site, if I think it's getting out of hand.

For the time being, the genre should be SF or fantasy, or something closely related (for instance, The Leaky Establishment isn't exactly SF but it's close enough). I can't dilute the marketing effort by taking on other material. Eventually I do want to broaden out into other genres — too many SF small presses have come and gone, and I think lack of diversity is one of the reasons — but I'll announce that in due course. And it goes without saying that I can't take media tie-ins — Dr Who, X Files, Buffy, Star Trek et al — because that's all copyright to someone else.

MB: What makes good writing? Or rather, what makes writing that you would want to publish?

In terms of style, I suppose that means no experimental writing, please. I'll happily take on experiments that have been proven to succeed in other areas, but I don't want to be anyone's guinea pig.

I've even been asked if I wanted any autobiographical erotica; my honest answer had to be, "depends whose"! You can see from the titles I've listed so far that Big Engine will have a pretty eclectic list. Put the story first and let all else follow.

Other than that ... well, the sky's the limit.

MB: That's Ben Jeapes the publisher, but what's next for Ben Jeapes, the writer?

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