Gerard Power, author of the Master Switches story 'Master Brightside' talks to Altrix Books about the roots behind his killer idea...
Can you tell us a little bit
about yourself?
My tendency is to write macabrely
surreal sci-fi, from what I must grudgingly describe as an Irish Catholic
perspective. Someone I briefly spoke to at a house party circa 2012 recommended
I watch something called ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’, unwittingly derailing my
life from whatever God intended it to be. Since then I've been trapped in Doctor
Who's gravity-well, and more recently gotten sucked into the redoubtable fan-to-writer
pipeline: my first professionally published short story can be found in last
year's Cwej: Down the Middle, and I've since written a novella for
the hopefully forthcoming Cwej: Hidden Truths. Both involve
cannibalism, strange skies, and the vexations of waking up in a human body on a
planet you don't quite understand.
What made you want to write
for Master Switches?
What clinched it for me was the
guideline that the Doctor must somehow contribute, through action or inaction,
to the Master's evil. This seemed like the kind of sweeping, overarching
context that would give the collection a heft and scope which you might not get
when, say, publishing a story as a stand-alone fanfic. A great deal of Doctor
Who's appeal for me lies in those lucky half-accidents where different
stories synchronise and resonate as they touch upon similar concepts, so I'm
very much looking forward to seeing what the other writers have done with the
same brief.
How did you decide which
Master/Doctor combo to run with?
The kernel of the idea, which I'd
had at the back of my mind for some years, came from watching the video of ‘Mr
Brightside’ (The Killers), in which Eric Roberts plays a fabulously oleaginous
arch-villain draped in Edenic imagery, a manipulative master of his own little
self-contained universe, and thinking ‘hang on, this is a Doctor Who minisode’.
It was only after I read the Master Switches guidelines that
this tongue-in-cheek counter-reading began to crystallise into something
resembling a plot. The guidelines encouraged mixing eras, so the Eighth Doctor
was out, and the War Doctor seemed the most rational way into the Master's
harmonious predicament. It also struck me that Roberts's life-lusting
performance would make for an interesting contrast with Hurt's dutiful
weariness.
Can you describe your story in
a nutshell?
It's a take on an implied but
untold event: just how did the Time Lords retrieve the Master
from the Eye of Harmony? How might he have entertained himself during the long
years he spent trapped in there? And might it, perhaps, have looked a bit like
a music video from 2004?
How did you find the writing
process?
My main memory is of poring
endlessly over the ‘Mr Brightside’ video for research, squinting at
freeze-frames as I attempted to catalogue the somewhat abstract geography and
populace of its Moulin Rouge purgatory. I like that song, but it will be a very
long time before I can listen to it again. Because of my slightly amorphous
grasp on deadlines, however, I ended up doing most of the actual writing over
one caffeinated weekend. As someone who's more comfortable writing glacially
and revising forever, I hope this has given the story a chaotic, freewheeling
energy appropriate to the subject-matter.
Which aspect(s) of your story
are you most proud of?
I'd have to say the tone. The
stories I enjoy best are often those that anchor outlandish, even baffling
scenarios with solid, down-to-earth character work: stories that initially seem
like pranks, that make you think “how does this even exist?”, but which somehow
have you riveted by the second page. The more ridiculous the concept, the
bigger the reward when it makes you care. This kind of earnest absurdism is a
delicate balance, but hopefully I've managed to pull it off.
What is your favourite line
from the story?
‘Paramedic, treat thyself.’
0 comments:
Post a Comment