Dickimaw Books Blog

Points of Departure 🔗

Aside from short stories that I’ve worked on with the Ex-Cathedra writing group over the past couple of years (some of which are available as ebooks), I have two novels in progress. The most recent, Muirgealia (see Muirgealia: A Tale of Temporal Enchantment) is awaiting feedback from various friends and family members. Judging from feedback so far, it needs a few edits.

The other novel is The Fourth Protectorate, which is an alternative history, based on the premise of what if the Brighton bomb in 1984 had actually killed the Prime Minister and Cabinet members. I thought it was pretty much ready in 2016, having picked it up and rewritten it (again!) after the publication of The Private Enemy in 2014. The story spans just over a decade from 1984 to 1995 in an alternate timeline, that starts out close to the real life 1980s in the United Kingdom but deviates as a change of leadership leads to the rise of a Cromwell-style protectorate. (The title is the name of the new Parliament. In real life, Oliver Cromwell headed the First and Second Protectorate Parliaments and his son Richard, on succeeding him, led the short-lived Third Protectorate Parliament before the Restoration.) The change is effected by an ambiguously-worded referendum, whereby people who believed they were voting for an elected head of state were actually voting for a totalitarian system.

Development on The Fourth Protectorate came to a halt due to a number of circumstances. For those of you who are unfamiliar with UK politics, 2016 was the year of the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum (Brexit). Having such a divisive referendum in real life was quite jarring. That was also around the time I sent the manuscript off to a professional literary agency for critiquing and the feedback wasn’t exactly bounding in positivity. There were some useful comments, which prompted me to add a second thread in the first part of the book, to switch back and forth between two different sets of people to help vary the pace. I’m pleased with those changes, so it just goes to show that, even if the feedback is somewhat deflating, it’s well worth taking a step back and a deep breath and try to sift through it as objectively as possible.

The Fourth Protectorate falls under two speculative fiction sub-categories: alternative history and supernatural. Unfortunately that seems to be a bit of a niche grouping. I had a similar problem with The Private Enemy, which is a crime thriller set in a regressed future. (“That’s a shame”, someone once said to me. “I like a good crime story, but I’m not into spaceships and aliens.” Just for the record, it doesn’t feature spaceships or aliens, not that I’m averse to them, but that wasn’t the story I wanted to write at the time.)

I know I’m supposed to do market research, follow the trends, engage with followers on social media, and all the rest of it, but I don’t write stories for a career, just as I don’t write open source software for gain. In both cases, I do it simply because it interests me. The same applies to the Dickimaw Books site as a whole. From time-to-time people have kindly recommended their professional website developer to turn my clunky site into a modern, sleek, jazzy experience, but I’m not interested in hosting an advertising brochure. I’m interested in how things work. How to programme in objected-oriented PHP, what’s the best method for password hashing, how to implement time-based one time passcodes, how to mitigate against time-based attacks, which encryption algorithms to use, and so on.

However, there’s no getting away from the fact that bills need to be paid, including the cost of hosting a site without ads, and with only a small pool of readers willing to buy my books (many thanks to every one of you!), I do need to produce more. Which brings me back to The Fourth Protectorate.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that there might actually be more than one point of departure in the world of The Fourth Protectorate, but the differences between that timeline and real life are only minor until the more noticeable change in 1984. So when the story starts on Saturday the 15th of September 1984 somewhere in the East End of London, life is much as it was in real life.

(As an aside, when I published The Private Enemy I was told it’s not fashionable for a novel to be set in Norfolk and that I should’ve set it in London instead. Now I’m told it’s not fashionable for a novel to be set in London, and I should set it somewhere up North. Given how long it takes me to write a novel, it’s pointless running after trends.)

The main character is Mark Barton who is twelve years old in 1984, and the story starts with a tragedy. His parents are killed by a bomb attack at a local cinema. The Troubles were still on-going in that decade, but this particular bomb was planted by local gangsters as part of their protection racket in retaliation for the cinema owner attempting to stand up to them. Mark’s parents, and various other by-standers, were collateral damage. Mark is concussed and confused, but due to an unfortunate lack of recognition of this on the part of a police constable, he’s sent away. Without a support network of family and friends, Mark is alone and vulnerable. By good fortune, he meets seventeen year old Pete Telford, who is also a victim of the local protection racket. Pete takes Mark under his wing, warns him of corruption within the police and offers to help him. Unfortunately, the next day Pete is murdered in front of Mark for talking too much, and Mark finds himself facing the local crime lord but, mistaking Mark’s PTSD for fearlessness, the boss decides to recruit him, first as just a delivery boy, then as an apprentice, and then as a surrogate son.

This takes place in the hybrid age of the eighties where the gang engages in old style crimes, such as bank heists, and the newly emerging realm of cybercrime, for blackmail, extortion and theft of intellectual property. Mark turns out to be adapt with hardware and software, but he’s driven by a quiet revenge, using the methods he’s being taught to find a way to bring down not just the immediate gang members but all the corrupt police and politicians who are supporting them.

Meanwhile, the Brighton Bomb has caused a power vacuum that’s being rapidly filled by less than scrupulous politicians with extreme agendas in an atmosphere of riots and growing lawlessness. However, the new Prime Minister is at odds with his more scrupulous brother-in-law, Neil Nickson, who works for an obscure security department under the Home Office run by Mr Smith. Both Smith and Nickson are not in favour of the draconian policies and, seeking more peaceful ways of avoiding conflict, look to the developing area of machine learning for image recognition.

(As another aside, I’m told writers should write what they know. My PhD, in the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering at the University of Essex during the early 1990s, was in artificial neural networks, although it’s been a long time since I’ve done any research in the area of machine learning or, to use the modern buzzword, AI.)

A confluence of events happen in 1990 with the referendum switching the country to a Protectorate at the same time that Mark finally brings down the gangsters and vast swathes of corrupt police and politicians. Meanwhile, Smith’s deputy takes over control and turns the department into the new Protectorate’s secret police, who turn what was supposed to be a benign system into state surveillance. Any dissenting police, politicians or civil servants are swept into the mass corruption charges, and Mark is turned into a poster boy for the New Model Police. Mark finds himself in the same position as before, but with a different set of overlords, and has to find a way to fix his mistake.

One of the problems flagged up by both the professional critiquer and some of my friends is that the novel, which is currently around 150,000 words and in multiple parts, each following a different set of characters, is too long. Most people don’t want to spend that much time before all the threads tie up. I could chop off the first part and start when the Protectorate is actually in full swing, which is how I wrote the early drafts, but the backstory was too complicated to drop in here and there. However, if a friend is honest enough to tell me there’s a problem, then I really do have to think long and hard about it.

Another problem the critiquer had was that he found it hard to believe in the premise that the assassination of a leader would cause such a profound change in events, citing various real life assassinations such as that of JFK. I could also add Spencer Perceval to the list, who is the only British prime minister to have been assassinated (in 1812), and you’d be hard pressed to find someone who’s not interested in history who might have heard of him. The critiquer also didn’t like the supernatural elements of the story, but did admit that they were too integral to the story to remove. He recommended that I read The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (which happened to be on my reading list as I’d already read some of PKD’s other works, so that was a good choice) and V for Vendetta (which is a graphic novel, but a lot of story elements are shared across the various mediums).

So I did a bit of editing, but real life became more turbulent with Brexit and the Conservative-DUP agreement stirring up memories of The Troubles, as well as strikes and riots that were all becoming rather uncomfortably close to the first part of The Fourth Protectorate to the point where I couldn’t work on it any more. So I switched over to another story on my backburner that evolved into Muirgealia which involved a plague in its backstory, and then Covid-19 happened. At which point I stopped writing and wondered if perhaps I ought to become a journalist instead. I picked Muirgealia up again in 2021 and posted about it in 2022.

Whilst working on datatool v3.0, The Fourth Protectorate started buzzing around in my head again, spinning off another point of departure that involved Mark coming into contact with Smith and Nickson before the point of no return. What if he actually manages to prevent the Fourth Protectorate from being established? The other members of the gang who are only in the background in the original novel began to take form. This would mean chopping off the part that was actually the original story and just leave the original backstory as the actual story. However, the supernatural threads that are integral to the story can now show echoes of the original alternative timeline.

Is this going to make it more confusing or less? I don’t know, but it does make it shorter and the threads meet up sooner. It will, however, require a new title and naming things is not my strong point.