White Devils is published by Simon & Schuster (UK) and Tor (US). Easton Press has published a leatherbound limited edition in the US. Follow this link for extracts.

A Brief Q&A

What is it?

"It's structured as a thriller, a little like the old Eric Ambler novels. After I wrote Fairyland, my buddy Kim Newman said, 'You ought to read Ambler, 'cause you're writing stuff like him.' Ambler wrote about fairly insignificant people being dropped suddenly into events of world history they can't really comprehend, and that's sort of what's happened to my two characters. White Devils is related to Whole Wide World in that it's a kind of thriller, and it is related to The Secret of Life in that it's about biotechnology . . . There's going to be something about theories of mind as well, a current hot topic; I'm going with just one of the various competing theories, and seeing where I can push it. And I want to address a very serious question -- if we're so smart, why do we keep doing such awful things?"

(From a 2001Locus interview.)

Where is it set?

In post-plague Africa. Specifically, the Congo (or rather, in the two countries that lie on either side of the Congo river. The plague isn't genetically engineered, but in many places the landscape has been transformed by genetic engineering. It isn't a dystopia, though: it's what might be just around the corner; it's what we have now, with the weirdness ramped up to eleven.

What's the story about?

It's about lost children. Three people affected by savagery are trying to seek out its root; a fourth is trying to stop them [in the Locus interview I talk about 'my two characters' because I hadn't yet realized how big the book was going to be]. All four have damaged childhoods. As usual, this came to me only towards the end of writing the thing, but that's half the fun - discovering the territory you're trying to understand and inhabit.

What are the White Devils?

They're a band of murderously fierce and fearless genetically engineered creatures that have escaped into the swamp-forest along the Congo river. They are named by an African government observer when the headless body of one of them is found at the site of a massacre; it's what some Africans call white colonialists and neocolonialists who exploit them and their land, and several examples of that kind of white devil appear in the novel too.

Why is it published as science fiction in the USA, and as a mainstream thriller in Britain?

Partly, that reflects the decisions of two different publishers, based on the state of two very different markets. It also reflects the nature of the book itself: a thriller plot that moves through a transformed but recognisable landscape. I find it exciting that it can inhabit two genres at once; these days, boundaries, intersections and interfaces are where all the interesting stuff happens. What merit it has is in the exploration of ideas about consciousness, human evolution, and biotechnology within the framework of a big, fast-moving story told from the viewpoints of a variety of desperate characters making their way through a variety of post-apocalyptic landscapes.

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