The Voss Papers

    “ If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever. ” Gosh. What a ghastly way to imagine the future. Surely... surely you should imagine a woman grinding on a human face forever ?  When I set out to write ' On Chestnut Tree Lane, ' it was mostly by mistake. Orwell is an absolute giant, and I love him, but 1984 has always depressed me so utterly, not because of what happens to Winston (though that is monstrous) but because of the vision of NewSpeak, the idea of language weaponised and designed to make disobedience linguistically impossible. It is, more than anything else, the most miserable moment in fiction I can think of when Syme disappears. The Death of Little Nell has nothing on that moment when you realise that Syme, a man who truly believed in Ingsoc, has been vanished  by  Ingsoc because he understood far too well what they were doing.   So, like Syme, I chose to see how the language coul...

There are stories I can’t tell in fiction. Not because they’re too explicit. But because they’re too quiet . Too precise. Too prone to lingering and pulling the mind away from where it should be (hopefully, right in the action, and thrumming with excitement...). Take my first book  On Chestnut Tree Lane   - it started out more or less as the question "What if 1984 had been a femdom dystopia instead of a totalitarian one?", and once I had that thought it just wouldn't go away.  But - although writing the femdom scenes was delightful - I kept finding myself slipping in tiny references to Orwell. Some of them are obvious (Mrs Whitmore's establishment is on Chestnut Tree Lane because of the Chestnut Tree Cafe in 1984, for example), but others aren't.  And I can't, in the middle of a delicious scene where poor Scott is being tormented by Katie Whitmore or Mary Mason, suddenly break off from his helpless pleading to say "Of course, you've probably spotted ...