Furniture Sliders follows a former intelligence officer who is pulled back in to discover what has happened to a classified project and the people working on it, which controls time, memory, and identity, and is now missing. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I have always been a fan of both film noir and espionage novels plus I have a tech background and a fascination with quantum mechanics.  I wanted to write a story that felt like a 1940s Cold War spy thriller written in noir style—then break it wide open with the addition of speculative science fiction. I had a question: what if you take the characteristics of quantum mechanics such as superposition and entanglement and instead of applying them to atomic particles, you applied them to human beings? To spies? Can you be in two places at once or two timelines at the same time? Firstly, apply the ability to manipulate space and time and then take it even further by playing in panpsychism – the concept that every inanimate object can be sentient.  Of course, you would have to have some form of technology to do all of this – the Mirror is exactly that inspired by the one in my hall at home.  The title literally came from a box of plastic furniture sliders that were on the table at home with the box looking like a paperback book – Furniture Sliders on the spine!  Sliders was a perfect description for agents moving through space and time and their organization is called the Bureau, along with the Mirror, giving the initial tongue-in-cheek furniture connection.

I found Max Calder to be an intriguing character. What was your inspiration for this character?

Max Calder is the kind of character I love; deeply broken but still pushing forward through the fog. It isn’t about a single character or character flaw but about weaving influences together.  I guess Max carries echoes of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Graham Greene’s morally ambiguous operatives. He isn’t polished like Bond, but weary, suspicious, and prone to moral compromise – a man affected by the machine he serves. I tried to deliberately write against cliché by grounding him in history and psychology. His gaps, duplications, and doubts reflect not only the dangers of espionage but the fragility of identity itself. Unlike many spy archetypes, Calder isn’t defined by conquest or success, but by survival, mistrust, and fear of irrelevance — hopefully making him come across as human, flawed, and complex. In many espionage novels, agents and spies are unaffected by what they do and are amazing at executing their role. In the case of Max, I wanted him to be very affected.  Remorse, regret, and inner demons.     

What themes were particularly important for you to explore in this book?

Primarily the consequences of messing with time and how doing so can also mess with you physically, potentially drive you insane and affect your memory while creating echoes or even doppelgangers as time threads overlap. All caused by, or underpinned by, the human-applied characteristics of quantum mechanics. It was important to explore relationships especially between protagonists and antagonists and between espionage agents and technology pitching various spy agencies against each other – even if they are supposed to have great relationships. I also wanted to introduce fictionalized real-life characters to the storyline which in this book includes Alan Turing, Hugh Sinclair and William Stephenson.         

Where does the story go in the next book, and where do you see it going in the future?

There are two more books coming in the series.  Angus Sliders and Cuban Sliders. Angus Sliders is planned to publish on the 15^th December.  One of the challenges with quantum-based technology like the Mirror is that many want to get their hands on it in many cases for various nefarious reasons.  In Furniture Sliders it was the Russians and ex Nazis. In Angus Sliders, Max Calder discovers that some major occurrences in Furniture Sliders didn’t really happen and that MI6 is very involved. Even a fictionalized Kim Philby is involved as is Charles Fraser-Smith who was the inspiration for James Bond’s Q. Max Calder is more and more affected by what the Mirror can do to you. In Cuban Sliders the Russians are back in the game and so is the CIA. Through all of this the Mirror becomes even more difficult to control or destroy. The big question is – can it be destroyed at all or even stopped and who gets to control it? Are there more storylines past the initial trilogy?  Yes indeed!   

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