Like Vurt, the initial idea for Pollen first started out as a play. This would be in the 1980s, when news of the Aids epidemic was just coming through, so that was probably on my mind. However, the play was never performed. In fact, I actually destroyed the manuscript. But years later, as I was finishing Vurt and thinking about the next novel in the sequence, suddenly the old Pollen play popped into my head. I realised it would be perfect to set the same story in the Vurt universe. I couldn’t remember the play in any great detail, so I just started again from the same basic premise of a hay fever epidemic, reconfiguring the story as a novel. Also, the novel form allowed me to explore the mythological aspects of the story a lot more; basically, mixing Greek myth with the pagan English green man tradition.
To my mind, Pollen is when I really started to explore the left-field possibilities of science fiction. Vurt was constructed out of many different inspirations, but Pollen is a more personal book, in the sense that it came from the centre of what I was, at the time. I had the sense of wrestling with the content; it was a fight between me and the story, and I think that feeling of struggle informs the narrative. I was still learning. Because of this, it’s a much “madder” book than Vurt. I can remember being tremendously excited as I wrote certain scenes, just with the possibilities that lay before me. That’s when I really started writing.
There was actually a club night in Manchester at the time called Pollen. The book was launched in partnership with them, in a basement room of the Hacienda complete with DJ in attendance. Ah, heady days! And looking back the novel really does seem to grow from that period; that whole multicoloured, tie-dyed, ecstatic, baggy, psychedelic era, when people were talking about Terence McKenna and magic plants and smart drugs and alternative consciousnesses, etc. Pollen is one flower on a branch of one tree in that crazy forest.
To my mind, Pollen is when I really started to explore the left-field possibilities of science fiction. Vurt was constructed out of many different inspirations, but Pollen is a more personal book, in the sense that it came from the centre of what I was, at the time. I had the sense of wrestling with the content; it was a fight between me and the story, and I think that feeling of struggle informs the narrative. I was still learning. Because of this, it’s a much “madder” book than Vurt. I can remember being tremendously excited as I wrote certain scenes, just with the possibilities that lay before me. That’s when I really started writing.
There was actually a club night in Manchester at the time called Pollen. The book was launched in partnership with them, in a basement room of the Hacienda complete with DJ in attendance. Ah, heady days! And looking back the novel really does seem to grow from that period; that whole multicoloured, tie-dyed, ecstatic, baggy, psychedelic era, when people were talking about Terence McKenna and magic plants and smart drugs and alternative consciousnesses, etc. Pollen is one flower on a branch of one tree in that crazy forest.
