It’s time to meet another author and
learn from their successful publishing journey. Today we meet Alan Porter,
author of GM.
Geneticist
Rachel Whitelock escaped the war in Zaire with a secret that could change the
lives of millions. Now, eighteen years later, she is going back to oversee
covert trials of the genetically modified crop that resulted.
But
someone’s waiting for her, and he’s
been waiting a long time for her to return what she stole from Africa.
Hunted
across the jungles of Bengara, Whitelock must pull off a daring plan that could
make or break her career... and change the course of a nation.
D.O: Thank you for joining us
today on Authors' Curtilage book talk Alan Porter, and welcome.
AP: Thank you, Darmie, it’s great to be here.
D.O: What obstacles did you
face in trying to tell the GM story?
AP: For me, any work of fiction
works best where there is enough ‘telling detail’
to make it convincing. For GM I needed to
do huge amounts of research - everything from the possibilities of genetic
engineering to how to fly a Schweizer 330 helicopter; from west African street
cuisine to the weather in Goma at the end of August 1996. Most of that research
only gets a fleeing mention - it acts as the spice of the novel rather than its
main ingredient - but it is vital to get it right. So, getting those details
sorted out was quite an obstacle to getting the book into a form that it could
go to my editor.
Of course, research can have
its up-side. Flying a helicopter fifty feet above the rainforest is a whole lot
of fun!
D.O: Mm. I'm impressed by the efforts you put into this. Quickly let us meet Dr.
Whitelock in GM?
AP: Rachel Whitelock is an
entomologist and geneticist. That is, she works with insects and tries to
modify their behavior through genetic engineering. In GM she has developed a
strain of rice that causes pest locusts to destroy each other rather than
surrounding rice crops.
Rachel is one tough cookie! She
lived and worked in Africa in the 1990s and got caught up in the horror that
was the Rwandan civil war. There she met someone who put her on the path that
ultimately leads to the events of GM.
There are surprisingly few
genuinely strong female leads in books and films right now. I did not create
the character of Dr Whitelock as a deliberate attempt to redress this balance, but
she does her bit anyway. She does not rely on the help of a man, she is
probably the most unromantic woman you could meet and she can hold her own with
some of the most dangerous characters in west Africa!
D.O: What is her mission in the
GM story?
AP: She wants - needs - to use
her talents to empower indigenous African farmers and make the kind of
difference to the lives of people in the third world that financial-based aid
rarely does. But creating the GM crop is only the beginning. She has much bigger
plans, and she has to dodge a lot of bullets to bring that plan to fruition!
Whether she goes about it in the right way is for the reader to decide.
D.O: How rounded is this story
& how many years did it take you to tackle it?
AP: The story is rounded in the
sense that we see Rachel following a path that she has been driven to follow
for nearly eighteen years. She has one goal in mind, and nothing is going to
stand in the way of achieving it. I think the reader is taken along that path
very effectively - especially as her back-story is revealed gradually and we
see that she almost has no choice but to act as she does.
The end, however, is not
rounded at all! Originally I took Rachel to the point she had been aiming at
all those years, then showed some of the aftermath of the decisions she had
made. But that insulted the intelligence of my readers. So I cut the end. Now
we follow her as far as her goal - that is up the point Rachel herself has
calculated - but no further. She did not give a great deal of thought to the
aftermath, and I wanted to leave the reader to make up their own mind whether
what she does is right or not.
The book took a year to write
from its initial conception to agreeing the final draft with my editor.
D.O: A year? That wasn't long compare to some story which will just refuse to get up for many years. Anyway, what changes has this
story formed in your life as its writer?
PA: I used to write
psychological horror novels. GM does have some horrific moments, but it is a
much more ‘conventional’ thriller. This is a genre I will continue with now.
"They are meant to turn
cannibal to defend their food supply, but they are not feeding anymore. Their
sole driving force is to destroy. This is way beyond anything we
predicted."
D.O: Who said this in GM? What
is she referring to?
AP: This is Rachel Whitelock
observing the first large-scale test of the GM rice crop in a hangar in Surrey.
In small-scale tests the locusts that ate the baited rice turned cannibalistic,
but only when Whitelock sees the experiment scaled up to tens of thousands of
insects does the true effect become apparent. She knows for sure now that the
crop she helped to develop will be able to make a significant difference in
Africa.
This scene also hints at things
to come once Whitelock arrives in Africa to run field tests, but to say any
more would give too much away!
D.O: [Smiles] Okay then, hold it right there. Briefly tell us what the
underlying theme of this story is about?
AP: Let me start by saying this
book is not really about genetically modified crops at all! They feature, and
they kick the action off, but the underlying theme is more about the clash of
Western power with third world need. For decades the developed world has poured
financial aid into Africa. And yet war and famine are still rife, partly
because millions of dollars of that aid is siphoned off by corrupt governments
to buy weapons and displace ‘inconvenient’ populations. Rachel Whitelock is convinced there is
another way. It is left up to the reader to decide whether she is right!
D.O: Is this story based on
someone experiences or a pure work of fiction?
AP: It is pure fiction,
although I have spent time with aid workers in Africa and some of the events in
the book are derived from stories they have told me. The genetically modified
rice is pure fiction…
probably!
Already cotton plants have been modified with Bacillus toxins to make
them lethal to bollworms; cabbages have been genetically laced with scorpion
venom to kill caterpillars; and tests have been run to develop hep-b and
cholera vaccines administered through modified bananas. So a rice strain that
can alter the behavior of locusts? Not yet, but it is only a step or two
away...
D.O: What genre is this story?
AP: Broadly it is a thriller.
That is a very wide genre, but it fits alongside writers like Michael Crichton
and Frederick Forsyth.
D.O: Okay. What draws you to this
genre?
AP: It’s what I like to read; I like to see and explore
strong characters in tough situations. I am also committed to giving readers
something a bit ‘different’. The first decade of the new millennium has seen commercial books and
films become very bland and uniform. I enjoy tackling controversial subjects.
D.O: Okay. What do you hope people
will take away from GM?
AP: First, they should enjoy
it! If it makes the readers think in a different way about the third world, and the
developed world’s attitude to it, that’s good. If it shows that there’s a whole lot more to a female lead character than her
need for a man, perfect. But above all, enjoy it: it is a fast-paced adventure
novel, not a political polemic!
D.O: All right then, Alan
Porter, thanks for choosing Authors' Curtilage for your book promotion. I hope
you'll stop by again for future promotion.
AP: I would be delighted to.
Thank you.
GM is available worldwide in paperback and ebook:
