by Rob Boffard
The place would be a mess. It’d be broken down, rusting, falling apart. Social order would be tenuous at best. Public transport would, in all probability, be non-existent, so couriers would emerge to ferry packages and messages from place to place.
The more I thought about the couriers, the more I couldn’t get them out of my head. They’d have to be fast and quick-witted, and they’d need to be good fighters – especially since they probably carry sensitive packages from time to time. What would they be like? What was their story? From there, it was a short leap to writing some of it down.
The name “tracer” came a lot later. A traceur, in real life, is a practitioner of parkour – something Riley and her crew are very good at. I just mangled the word for my own purposes.
What was the most challenging thing about writing this novel?
Tracer has a really intricate plot. Keeping all the parts in my head at once, and making sure that there were no logical inconsistencies or plot holes, was an enormous task.
I also had absolutely no idea how to write a novel – seriously, up until Tracer, the longest thing I’d written was a long-form magazine story. I knew nothing about plot structure, character development or any of the techniques that would-be novelists are supposed to know. I just went in cold, with nothing but a very loose plot outline to guide me.
How much research went into the novel?
Huge amounts. I’m a journalist, and as pompous as it sounds, I believe in accuracy. Tracer was always going to be set in the real world, so getting the science right was important to me. I love gravity guns and portals and aliens and lasers, but they didn’t have a place in the world of Tracer.
My best source was a genuine rocket scientist, Dr Barnaby Osborne, who let me come down to his lab at Kingston University and ask him lots of questions. He’s the architect of Outer Earth – thanks to him, it works properly. I get a big rush from solving problems, always have, and figuring out a cool solution to a complex science problem gets me buzzing.
I spoke to plenty of other scientists too: fusion experts and entomologists and orbital physics specialists. They helped set me straight on a few things.
Which was your favourite character to write?
You know that cliché, about bad guys being more fun? Totally true. Oren Darnell was a blast to write. He terrifies me, because in his mind, human beings are absolutely worthless, and so he sees them as entirely expendable, whether they’re friendly to him or not. Figuring out why he thinks the way he does took me to some deliciously dark places.
And while we’re on bad guys, the only one who terrifies me more than Darnell is Janice Okwembu. Darnell’s a nuclear weapon who will leave nothing standing, but Okwembu is a very precise surgical strike. She’s going to be very important in the next few books …
What we can expect from the next Outer Earth novel Zero-G?
I don’t want to say too much. I will say that it takes place six months after the events of Tracer, and that Riley is going to face off against an enemy who makes Oren Darnell look like a kitten. This guy’s got a vendetta, and Riley is going to have to push herself further than ever to survive. Everybody’s back: Royo, Carver, Prakesh, Kev, Okwembu, plus some new faces. I refuse to say who’ll make it out alive …
What do you get up to when you’re not writing novels?
Being a writer is a fairly sedentary activity, so the one thing I try to be as obsessed as possible with is snowboarding. As of yet, I’ve injured nobody but myself.
Despite being South African, I’m a diehard fan of the Chicago Bulls basketball team, which is unfortunate as they’ve spent the past few years not being very good. I’m also a massive hip-hop fan, and spend a lot of time hunting down obscure music from around the world, then playing it on my podcast, 20/20.
