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?
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.