I’d spent a good number of years trying to make some money by writing plays, with no real success. So I took a job at Waterstone’s bookshop in Manchester. Someone else working there was a fringe theatre director and was always asking me to write him a play. The only project I had in mind was an adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s “The Torture Garden”. This was an anti-authoritarian novel written in 1899, and one that I always felt could have a modern relevance. At this time also, news of the first developments in Virtual Reality technology was just coming over from the States, specifically in the magazine Mondo2000. I came up with the idea that the Torture Garden in the novel could be represented by a virtual world. The only trouble being that the book doesn’t really have a narrative as such, more a series of images. So I added this story to it, about a man losing his sister to this virtual Torture Garden, and going into the world to rescue her. I wrote about half of this play, when the director got a chance to work in Hong Kong, which he took. So I was left with half a play.
A few weeks later, another person at the shop decided to set up a small publishing house called Ringpull Press. He liked my plays, and asked me to have a go at writing a novel. I said I would, and started writing Vurt. And quite naturally, I took the basic plot I’d added to the Torture Garden as my starting point. It grew organically from that seed. I can remember writing the bit where the heroes are down below the house of dogs, running through the lake of dogshit, and thinking, “Why the hell am I doing this to them?” It reminded me of the scene in the first “Star Wars” film, where they’re trapped in the Deathstar’s sewer, and that got me thinking about other connections to “Stars Wars”. There seemed so many of them, it made me think about Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which George Lucas used as his starting point for the film. The book examines myths from all around the world, in order to chart the ultimate narrative. I’d read this book a few years before, and it became obvious that I’d used the same structure in Vurt. I won’t go into it further, because readers may want to discover the parallels for themselves.
A few weeks later, another person at the shop decided to set up a small publishing house called Ringpull Press. He liked my plays, and asked me to have a go at writing a novel. I said I would, and started writing Vurt. And quite naturally, I took the basic plot I’d added to the Torture Garden as my starting point. It grew organically from that seed. I can remember writing the bit where the heroes are down below the house of dogs, running through the lake of dogshit, and thinking, “Why the hell am I doing this to them?” It reminded me of the scene in the first “Star Wars” film, where they’re trapped in the Deathstar’s sewer, and that got me thinking about other connections to “Stars Wars”. There seemed so many of them, it made me think about Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which George Lucas used as his starting point for the film. The book examines myths from all around the world, in order to chart the ultimate narrative. I’d read this book a few years before, and it became obvious that I’d used the same structure in Vurt. I won’t go into it further, because readers may want to discover the parallels for themselves.
