Journal of the Plague Year: Malcolm Cross
17th June 2014
Over the next three days Team Abaddon will be picking the brains of the three authors contributing to Journal of the Plague Year with questions courtesy of Abaddon editor extraordinaire David Moore.
Taking “one small step” for author-kind and first up in the firing line we have Orbital Decay’s Malcolm Cross; over to you David and Malcolm.
DM: So, space: pretty fucking terrifying, judging by Orbital Decay. We’re guessing that must have been a sobering bit of research?
MC: Space is terrifying. It’s one of the relatively few environments in which humanity has no business being. We can climb mountains unaided, we can free-dive to incredible depths, with training we can go almost anywhere on our little world with virtually no tools whatsoever, and the penalties for failure start with discomfort, not death.
It doesn’t just start in space, either. Some of the earliest deaths in space exploration took place on the ground, fires during equipment testing. There were the shuttle disasters, Challenger and Columbia. Hell, the first attempt to dock with the first space station (Salyut 1) failed, and the second attempt, successful, killed the entire crew of Soyuz 11 through depressurization during their re-entry burn after a problem undocking from Salyut 1. All of these men and women were being supported by superpowers, assisted by hundreds (if not thousands) of engineers. None of them had a chance.
But, thankfully, there are more successes than losses, more close shaves than catastrophes. Some of them hilarious, turds floating around the Apollo 10 capsule, some of them scary, like the fire aboard Mir.
Space exploration is a potentially lethal game, even when everything goes right.
DM: Orbital Decay digs pretty deeply into the epidemiology of the Cull. Is that a particular area of interest for you? Did the series canon present you much difficulty when writing these parts?
MC: Ooof. The series canon is a topic in itself — I wound up reading the entire series (eleven books, back then) in a little over three weeks, specifically to figure out what was going on. The Afterblight Chronicles, and the Cull, have passed through a lot of hands over the years, and I have to say, there have been some dissenting viewpoints on how it all went down.
I’ve always enjoyed trying to figure out just how seemingly impossible fictional things might be real. I think my first semi-plausible crack at it was when Street Fighter 2 was brand new, and I wasn’t quite ten years old. You know how they throw fireballs around in that game? Yeah, well, when space shuttles come back to Earth they get surrounded by fire just like that because they’re moving so fast the friction burns the air and obviously that is how the Street Fighter characters can throw fire around. Obviously. (Footnote: Actually the air ahead of the spacecraft is massively compressed by the shockwave of its motion through the atmosphere, and that causes far more heating than friction does, but I had no idea about that as a kid.)
Thankfully, the real science behind viruses and the seemingly impossible horror of the Cull are far easier to meld together for a plausible explanation. One of the key mysteries behind the Cull — how it so selectively attacks almost everyone bar those with O-Negative blood — was one of the most focal.
To grossly oversimplify, if you’re AB-Positive, you have no blood-group relevant antibodies, and you have all three antigens — A, B, and Rhesus — on the cell-walls of your red blood cells, which act as a kind of flag to tell your immune system that this is one of your cells, not something invading your body. If you’re O-Negative, you have none of these antigens, and you have every single one of the antibodies that attack the antigens as if they’re an infectious substance. You’re protected. (You also can’t receive a blood transfusion from anyone else, but you can give blood to just about anyone — so do consider blood donation if you’re so fortunate!)
Now, when you learn that some viruses tear a piece out of its host-cell’s walls and wrap themselves up with it, effectively camouflaging it against the body’s immune system… well. It doesn’t take a microbiologist (and I’m not one) to see the potential mayhem if this trait had to arise in one of the viruses which alter a cell’s DNA specifically to change how it divides and what kind of tissue it produces — some of these are the oncoviruses, responsible for some types of cancer. It could be something very much like a burglar armed with a set of keys to your house, trying each one in turn until something fits!
DM: On which note, what was it like working in a shared world?
MC: I mentioned reading all eleven books in three weeks-ish? No world bible back then.
That part was exhausting. Like wandering into the minotaur’s maze, but thankfully I left a thread marking my path for others to follow, in the form of a lot of clippings and some other notes which David Moore’s now the custodian for. But it’s also a lot of fun, adding your own little branch to what is now a very large (if scabrous and plague-ridden) tree.
It’s not your usual series, either. We meet many of the characters once, or over the course of a trilogy, and then move on to some other part of the post-apocalypse. One of the reason the series title — ‘The Afterblight Chronicles’ — is so very apt. It’s like working on a collaborative history of the world’s end. Almost a communal meditation on what it is to lose everything.
Certainly, it’s unique. I spent a lot of time worrying about getting something ‘wrong’, early on. Some misplaced detail or element of timing that’d ruin it for the fans, doing something that’d tread on another of the authors’ toes, something like that. But, in the end, by stepping carefully and becoming a fan of the series myself, it became quite a lot of fun to add a bit on to what’s already there.
DM: Orbital Decay is arguably unusual among post-apocalypse stories in that it occurs right at the very outset of the apocalypse. Does that change the tone much?
MC: There are a few other stories that do it, some recent zombie books, and Mira Grant’s ‘Parasite’ is certainly set in what seems to be the early phases of a unique little apocalypse, but it is definitely unusual. Most works take the apocalypse for granted, or at the very least skip over it to get to the good parts.
As a result, I think a lot of post-apocalyptic literature counterintuitively focuses on growth. What we gain, how we fill the now empty gaps, how we survive, how we (hopefully) find a new way to thrive. The single seedling sprouting from a cratered landscape. A new equilibrium with the world around us, holistic and all that, yeah?
Orbital Decay is about being stuck in a tiny little can hundreds of miles over the ground while everything you ever knew, friends, family, and nations, die choking on their own blood and all you can do is watch.
It’s very heavy metal.
More seriously? I think it’s about mourning and redemption. Looking loss in the eye and coming to terms with it on that basis, rather than the long and gradual process of putting it behind you, finding closure, and moving on — which has been done very skilfully in the two Afterblight trilogies, Scott K. Andrews’s School’s Out books and Paul Kane’s Hooded Man series.
In Malcolm Cross’ Orbital Decay, the team in the International Space Station watch helplessly as the world is all but wiped out. Exiled from Earth by his blood-type, astronaut Alvin Burrows must solve the mystery of the “Pandora” experiment, even as someone on the station takes to murdering the crew one by one…
Orbital Decay is the first novella in the coming post-apocalyptic omnibus collection Journal of the Plague Year out 3rd July 2014 (UK) and 12th August 2014 (US).
Order: UK | US | DRM-free eBook
