Dark Place centers around three students who stumble on an unsettling truth that society is being manipulated, and those labelled as “dispossessed” are being erased from existence. Where did the idea for this novelette come from?

I wanted to develop a near-future story in which a worldwide authority invokes extreme emergency powers to control a burgeoning population, resulting in the loss of freedom and rights.

The idea of a hidden penal colony came to mind, and a social scoring system would be the mechanism to segregate and banish the dispossessed.

My writing of the story started as a typical dystopian trope, but as it grew, I didn’t want it to be stark black and white: ‘good’ idealistic rebels versus ‘evil’ authority. So it becomes more nuanced when the three protagonists are stranded in the Dark Place and learn that it has a greater purpose with profound consequences. The protagonists must navigate not only external dangers but also their own internal struggles, confronting differences between themselves and moral dilemmas.

Dark Place has been described as subverting dystopian tropes and I hope readers find that rewarding.

What are some things that you find interesting about the human condition that you think make for great fiction?

There is a degree of anxiety in the world today about the future. Perhaps every generation in the past has had similar misgivings.

My intention is to write about what might be possible a few steps down the road. I don’t want to write far-future settings with fantastical technologies far removed from what we have now. Grounding the story in a familiar world, echoing some of today’s challenges, has more resonance.

The science inserted in the fiction, I felt, was well-balanced. How did you manage to keep it grounded while still providing the fantastic edge science fiction stories usually provide?

A lifelong interest in the societal implications of technology began in the 1980s when I taught the new technologies of microelectronics and microcomputers in colleges and universities. This early professional life directly influenced my creative pursuits, leading to my first story Larrs’ Ghost (published in a computing magazine) which explored a “computer-generated world” long before virtual reality was a common term. More recently Close To You is a cautionary tale about the imminent dominance of big corporations developing ever more powerful artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

Dark Place is set in a time just down the road from now, so the technology is a plausible extension of today: drones are becoming more advanced; flexible microelectronic circuits (I call them membranes) already exist in rudimentary form; AI is advancing at speed.

Can we look forward to more work from you soon? What are you currently working on? 

I feel there’s a lot more to develop with the premise of Dark Place. Although the ending finished with a profound reveal, I deliberately left some aspects of the story open-ended that mirrors the uncertain future facing the characters and the broader society. The lack of a neat, conclusive resolution hopefully encourages readers to reflect on the story’s themes beyond the final page.

So now I’m working on parts two and three. Part two is how the people in the camps progress in the knowledge that the outside world is in total collapse and how they rise to the challenges they face. Part three is how they defend themselves from an external existential threat. How much will they fall back on technology to protect their new world? The three protagonists will have increasingly conflicting ideas on how they see their future world.

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