Cwej: Springs Eternal - Gerard Power Interview

We had the pleasure to speak with Cwej: Springs Eternal writer and editor Gerard Power about the new book, his thoughts on Cwej, and the future!

art by Jonne Bartelds

Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I’m interested in the interference patterns produced when high and low culture meet. The Cwej series is a tie-in bobbing on the outermost fringes of a TV franchise; tie-in relates to genre fiction as genre relates to literary fiction, another rung down in how seriously it’s taken. What I keep wondering is, can you do for tie-in what Delany or Ballard did for genre? How would a Banville or an Updike approach this universe? Even a Ligotti, a Flann O’Brien? What happens when a book is equally in dialogue with Dante Alighieri and Terrance Dicks? There’s my mental corkboard of red threads; you judge.

What was your introduction to the Doctor Who universe?
A dim 2005 memory: a newspaper with Eccleston in a leather jacket, and me wondering what I was looking at—“some English thing”. A slightly clearer one: turning on the television, I glimpsed Ardal O’Hanlon as a cat and reflexively changed the channel. Not till I one day watched Time Crash on YouTube did I begin to “get it”. The first real episodes I saw were The Girl in the Fireplace and The Snowmen, but I’m glad I pushed through to discover the classics. I see the essential Doctor Who story (“essential” in the metaphysical sense) as Meglos.

What is your take on the character of Chris Cwej?
Like Stephen from Penda’s Fen, he is a warred-over vehicle and conduit for things greater than himself. In gaining obliquity to the corporate core of things (i.e. the Doctor), he’s paradoxically become someone to whom far wilder things can happen. A bit like an asteroid that's veered off into lawless interplanetary waters, making it a perfect place for questionable science experiments—which brings me to my story in Springs Eternal.

What makes your Cwej story unique?
Roz Forrester, Cwej's old police partner and closest friend, is dead. In fact, that’s one of the main things readers remember about her; she was killed off in a very affecting novel, So Vile a Sin, written by the great Ben Aaronovitch and Kate Orman. Since then Cwej has endured unimaginable transformations, but that loss was what kicked off his trajectory. The question has loomed over the Cwej series: what would Forrester say if she could see the man he’s become? My story tackles that, in a manner I would be very surprised if anyone guessed. I won’t give the details away, but I will say that there’s no time-travel here, no parallel universes. This isn’t a young Forrester from the past, or an alternative timeline. She is alive, in the present of the narrative, and her death in So Vile a Sin remains the heart of it all.

Would you like to mention any influences or inspirations?
The setting was inspired by the novel Jack Glass by the illustrious Adam Roberts. When I delivered my story half a decade ago (!), I had no idea I’d end up co-editing the whole four-volume Seasons project, much less that I’d have the neck to ask him for a story. Adam’s earlier novella The Imperial Army—a darkly humorous tale of boyish innocence and galactic-imperial military cloning, which I read in his collection Adam Robots—always struck me as a kind of ur-Cwej story, and was a touchstone for my work on the series from The Ursine Brood onwards, so this was a great full-circle moment. My story in Springs Eternal was also influenced by a particular Jean-Pierre Jeunet film, but naming it might reveal too much.

Did you face any interesting challenges in the course of writing?
I’ll put this cagily, but in early drafts, a certain group of beings who play a major offstage role in the plot were stated to have a different identity. That had to change when a licensing agreement fell through. It took me a while to rejig things, but in the process, we alighted on a new mystery, which became a key subplot rippling throughout these four volumes. Seasons grew more self-contained, more stand-alone, and it’s stronger for it.

What’s your next creative project, and is there anywhere readers can follow you?
I’ve written my final Cwej story, which will be out after Seasons, and I’m satisfied that I’ve scraped the outermost limits of what I can do within this sort of setting. Time to get a move on. I’ve also completed another novel, a kind of experimental Hibernian response to a certain H.G. Wells text, which has neared publication at a couple of presses but remains the bridesmaid. My tiny anchorite Twitter account is @this_regard.

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Cwej: Springs Eternal is available now:

ebook

UK Print Book

US Print Book

Barnes and Noble Ebook