The Time of the Seventh Angel follows journalists, political operators, military figures, and shadowy power brokers as Cold War paranoia, biblical prophecy, media manipulation, and nuclear brinkmanship drive the world toward a terrifying decision. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

A simple question, difficult to answer so many years after I began it, in 1982. The overriding risk of Nuclear War had literally been brought home to me at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a Royal Canadian Naval officer, I was studying at university when I received a phone call ordering me back to active service. I had a young family (my wife, a son of 2, another baby boy). I could not tell them what I was told, and with one more phone call I would have to leave them. Victoria, British Columbia, had Canada’s West Coast naval base. It was Soviet North American Target 35. Only 30 miles south of our main windows, hidden by the Olympic range, was Target 1: The US Navy’s Nuclear Submarine dock in the Hood Canal.

What were you most interested in exploring about the relationship between news, spectacle, and political control?

I wanted to show how intertwined and reinforcing these factors had become by the early 1980s, and how swiftly they now affected each other; frequently becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hence my decision to use the Book of Revelation as a prophetic “frame” for the novel. The Internet has put that cycle on steroids.

Many characters are caught between personal conviction and large systems of power. Which character was the most challenging to write, and why?

Some of my characters, like the TV reporter Pete Mathias and his research assistant, Eleanor,  have personal names. Others are known only by a signifying title, like the Coordinator, or the Civilian Director. I found it far more difficult to describe them because, although they seem deliberately anonymous, almost cardboard cliches, in their interactions and reactions, they have to be shown as all too human.

What do you hope readers take away from the book’s treatment of nuclear fear, democracy, faith, and public belief?

The most that any author can hope for a book is that an always hugely valued reader finds it lingering for a while in their mind. If this book makes us think that perhaps, against all odds, as individuals we can still  speak up to the political and economic forces and algorithms trying to remove our humanity from their platforms and equations … that would be “something to write home about.”

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