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Copies often change hands there, although it's also true they don't change hands cheaply. In recent years, since the DreamCraft editions have been published, the price of an original GMP Death's Head is around US$80 - $100 ... which is an improvement on the price years ago, then it wa 4-5 times that high! Incidentally, when you buy a Mel Keegan title second hand, via an eBay trader, from a link on this site — Mel Keegan will earn a royalty, which is extremely appropriate. A new window will open; search on 'Mel Keegan,' and you'll see what's available at this time. NOTE: few people auction their MK titles, so the first result in your search results window is almost certainly going to be be '0 results for Mel Keegan.' Don't be deterred: scroll down to the Ebay Stores. At the time of this upload, for example, you could buy four MK titles, including both the GMP editions of Death's Head and Equinox , at very reasonable prices! Happy shopping ... and good luck! (Tell us how you go.)
Q: Where did the characters of Jarrat and Stone come from?
A: Out of the depths of my imagination. As I think I've said
somewhere else on-site here, part of my job is incredibly tedious
and the only way to stay sane is to let the mind wander. Most of
my story ideas arrive that way: while I'm literally staring at a
featureless wall for an hour.
Q: How long does it take to write one of these books?
A: That depends on so many things! 'Real Life' can intrude to the
point where, for weeks on end, you can be fighting to get the free
time to write, and then you can be so exhausted from working that,
when you do sit down to write, you fall asleep instead. At optimum,
it should take about 40 working days to write the book; then I put
it aside for a couple of weeks so I can be objective about it;
stage two is 5 - 10 days of exhaustive editing at every stage up to
and including story editing. Then I hand the book to a couple of
very good copy editors who proofread intensively ... they hand it
back to me a few weeks later ... I go through it again on paper and
tweak anything that still needs tweaking, and we're done.
Expressed in hours, I'd say I put about 200 hours into any book
at the *writing* stage. However, a lot of work goes into the project
before writing begins! Those 200 hours can be spread out over 3 - 6
months, as RL and work permit. Sorry guys: novel writing doesn't pay
enough for a writer to give up the day job until/unless you get into
the best-seller bracket ... and that'd take some special magic!
Q: Is it all science-fantasy, or do you get into research?
A: I like to get the science somewhere close to right (ahem!) in a novel
that pivots on technology. Obviously, one makes allowances for the
'F' half of the term 'SF.' Faster-than-light engines, for instance.
There's some very interesting work being done at think-tank level
right now ... it all seems to suggest that Mr. Einstein's work was
brilliant but incomplete! There may yet be an Extra-Special Theory
of Relativity, adding all the sub-paragraphs and exceptions to the
rules which pooh-poohed hyperlight travel for so many decades. The
research may come to nothing; it could also take another three decades
to bear fruit! In the meantime, SF writers mostly ignore the rules
and go ahead with the story. So yes, I do quite a bit of research to
get the science right — also, aeronautics, airplane handling, the
mechanics of flight. Then I turn it all around and use 'repulsion'
to neutralise some or all of whatever gravity field, which gives me
a free-hand to sometimes do the seemingly impossible. It's fiction,
and at times it borders on fantasy.
Q: Someone recently said NARC seems reminiscent of "Starship Troopers."
Was Robert Heinlein's work part of your inspiration?
A: The book or the movie? DEATH'S HEAD was first written in 1985,
a very long time indeed before the movie came out! The novel of
STARSHIP TROOPERS was done decades before, and of course I've read it;
unlike a lot of SF readers today, I actually liked it! But anyone who's
read the book wouldn't ask this question, because in a few chapters
of Heinlein's work it's easy to see, STARSHIP TROOPERS is actually
an investigation, and a brilliant one, of the morals and ethics of
warfare ... and in fact, it's about the Korean War, fairly thinly
veiled as a future war! It's a great book, but it has nothing whatsoever
to do with a paramilitary security force fighting the drug war on the
streets of super-cities. The only point apropos of STARSHIP TROOPERS
where I can see any similarity is in the space armor designed by
Heinlein. In the NARC books I use riot armour. At the time I did DEATH'S
DEAD, first draft, 1985, I wasn't thinking of Heinlein ... I hate to
admit it, but I was thinking more about George Lucas's suits of armor ...
how CLUNKY they are — and how ineffective!! Here's an Imperial
Stormtrooper in shiny-side, squeaky-clean armor, and one shot from
a hand-held weapon knocks him flat. I remember taking the concept of
armour out to what I thought was its logical conclusions. The result
is right there in the NARC books. I added repulsion, let the NARC armor,
which weighs about five hundred kilos, waft upward like a feather. You
can knock down a character in NARC armor, literally sweep him along
the ground with your gunfire, but punching a hole in the armor is next
to impossible. It takes something special to get through it, but it
CAN be done! So, no — Heinlein's book would never have occurred to
me when I was writing DEATH'S HEAD, and of course, my book pre-dates the
movie of STARSHIP TROOPERS by so long, if anyone provided inspiration
for someone else, it could only have happened the other way around!
A point of interest is this: Heinlein's armor, as described in the book
— and it was the one big thing from the novel that everyone, myself
included, was waiting to see in the movie — was deleted from the
film production!! So, to draw a comparison here you have to go back to
the novel of STARSHIP TROOPERS ... and as some (most??) SF fans will
know, Heinlein himself 'borrowed' the concept of space armor which was
self-powered, virtually indestructible and capable of re-entry from
space, from E.E. 'Doc' Smith, who can be said to have pioneered the
idea as long ago as his world-renowned SKYLARK OF SPACE novels, the
first of which was written in or around (gasp) the 1920s! And I can tell you,
positively, absolutely, the SKYLARK novels were the last thing on my
mind when I wrote DEATH'S HEAD!!
Q: Did you have any inspirational sources?
A: Yes, though it's only 'bits and pieces.' As I said, the
armor in the Lucasfilm movies struck me as not working very
well, and the fixing of it created the blueprint for the NARC
riot armor. The inspiration for Tactical comes from real life:
if you take GSG-9 (the German anti-terrorist squad), plus the
SWAT unit of the US police force, plus something of the
electronic backup from Air-Sea Rescue, you get close to
Tactical. I don't cite something like the SAS as being
inspirational for Tac, because it's so rigidly military ...
Tactical in these books, is a provincial militia. They're
civilians who've had the training, been given the weapons and
armor, and are out there doing an impossible job. The SAS is
too military, but some of the cutting-edge police departments
are coming close. But there is nothing like NARC in either
reality or fiction, that I know of. Incidentally, I always see
the NARC shuttles, space-to-surface fighter planes, as USAF
F-14 Tomcats. I learned to love F-14s in that movie where
Kirk Douglas takes an aircfraft carrier through a wormhole
to 1941, just in time for Pearl Harbor. So yes, the inspirations
are many and various: a piece from here, a piece from there.
Q: Where would you like to take Jarrat and Stone in future?
A: Eventually I'd like to have someone somewhere find a cure
for Angel, which means NARC as a department can be halfway stood
down ... you'd never dismantle NARC, because if someone invented
one designer drug like Angel, it can be done again. So you'd keep
NARC active as a unit, though not in the field. Before that
happens, I'd like to take the carrier back to Earth. Why? Because
I'm fascinated to take a look at Earth in their day and age ...
is it busted up, or have we fixed up? I would also like to
backstory the characters a good deal. A LOT of the character
backstory material was sacrificed out of DEATH'S HEAD, when I
had to cut the story to GMP's maximum text-length. It just had
to go. So you were able to get only snippets about who Jarrat and
Stone are, where they're from, and so on. Actually, if there is
enough reader interest in a 'Compleat and Unabridged' special
edition of DEATH'S HEAD, I can put that material right back
where it belongs!
Q: Which of the two books currently out is your favorite?
A: EQUINOX, for a couple of reasons, both of them personal (so
I know a lot of readers will probably disagree). A novel which has
to set up a relationship spends a lot of time doing just that ...
getting the two characters into a plausible and compelling
relationship. Once the relationship is set up, however, you can
launch into a new plotline without having to put in the ground-work
all over again. Now, there's two opinions here, 180 degrees apart,
and each is as valid as the other! I don't know how the gay-books
demograph divides up, but the readers in one camp enjoy the set-up
of a new relationship more, and the readers in the other camp
enjoy the off-and-flying relationship where the novel launches
right into the new story, as from Chapter One. I pitched my tent
in Camp Two,so I prefer EQUINOX, but no one should read this remark
as a criticism against 'first time stories.' I've written a couple
of DOZEN 'first timers,' and lots of readers (maybe even most
readers!) have a preference for the 'first time' story.
Q: How's SCORPIO coming along?
A: Slowly but surely. I'm working on three novels at the same time,
as of this writing (August '03). HELLGATE: PROBE is virtually
finished and into 'the edit from hell' phase. (Which means an
edit so rigorous, the end result is a whole new draft). At the
same time, we have THE LORDS OF HARBINDANE practically in pre-press
as THE DECEIVERS is going through bookbinding ... and SCORPIO
is being worked on in whatever spare time I can get. DreamCraft
have yet to set a date on publication; a lot depends on me! If
I can get it done in time, I'd like to see it out in April '04.
Some guardian angel will have to get the RLGs (real life gremlins) off
my case before I can work any faster than this! [This interview
was obvously recorded when MK was working on SCORPIO! The book shipped
a long time ago ... the current tite is APHELION. -ED. ]
Are you looking desperately for the old GMP editions
to complete a collection? In our experience, here is your best shot:
