The future of the world begins here

Nov 14 2007 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

Award-winning author Stephen Baxter’s latest novel puts a young Liverpool girl at the turning point of nuclear holocaust. Laura Davis reports

IT’S October, 1962, and two men are facing a stand-off. There’s the fresh faced Bostonian with the glamorous wife and photogenic children versus the balding Russian with canny military tactics.

Soviet cargo ships laden with warheads have already docked in Cuba, while US Vulcan bomber fleets are on stand-by.

When an American spy plane is shot down on Saturday, October 27, nuclear war is only a bad decision away.

By a near miracle, the following day, the Russians agree to a secret deal. Khrushchev orders the dismantling of his country’s bases in Cuba and Kennedy removes his weapons from Turkey.

The Cuban Missile Crisis becomes a war that never happened, a blip in the path of history. Yet, had messages between the two sides not got through – and communication lines were very unreliable – we would be living in a very different world today.

It is this scenario that best-selling science fiction writer Stephen Baxter has placed at the centre of his first book for teenagers, The H-Bomb Girl.

Set in Liverpool, it tells of a 14-year-old girl, Laura, who finds herself caught up in events leading up to that fateful Saturday in 1962. She quickly becomes aware that her own actions may decide the future of the planet.

“I was thinking about climate change and the end of the world predictions we have now, and if you were 14 or so you’ve grown up with this apocalyptic stuff about the doom and gloom that’s going to evolve this century, but for my generation it was atomic war that was going to come slamming down on us at some time in the future,” explains Baxter, who grew up in Liverpool.

“If you look back in history, each generation has a horror story. For the generation before mine, it was the Second World War and gas attacks. I think it might be a personal thing. As you grow older, you start thinking about mortality and you project it on to the world. There’s a deep tradition going back to the Bible that the end of the world is coming soon.”

Thanks to the power of time travel, in the novel Laura is shown multiple futures stretching out ahead of her, including a post-apocalyptic world where she and her friends have to deal with a nuclear holocaust. Readers familiar with Liverpool, where the book is set, will find the scenes of a mushroom cloud hanging above rooftops (a nuclear bomb having hit Burtonwood air base) very disturbing.

In another chapter, Laura and her classmates at St Edward’s College, West Derby, which Roby-born Baxter also attended, are being vainly drilled on the routine of ducking under their desks during a nuclear attack.

“They say we would have had four minutes’ warning if the Russians had fired their missiles. It’s a terrible thought, that within four minutes at any time your life could be over,” says the writer.

“We used to get these leaflets from the Government pushed through the door with advice on them – whitewash the windows. I don’t remember being made to hide under the desk when I was a kid but it certainly happened in America. I don’t see what difference it would have made.”

Baxter decided to set the book in Liverpool, because of the advice “write about what you know”, but also because of the lack of science fiction set in the city.

“It’s my past as well. I was only five when the Cuban Missile Crisis went up, but 10 years later I was running around the concert halls and things. They say you should write about what you know and I knew Liverpool from that period.

“And also there’s not much science fiction that’s been set in Liverpool, very little actually. So I thought it would be good to set a science fiction book there as opposed to the usual suspects, London or New York.

“I didn’t particularly plan it this way, but the paperback of H-Bomb Girl will be out next year, which is the Capital of Culture year, so that’s my little contribution to that.”

Growing up in the 1960s also meant following the race to the Moon. Watching Neil Armstrong set foot on this desolate place, along with the discovery of books by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke in the school library, sparked Baxter’s lifelong interest in sci-fi.

“It made where I lived and the time I was living seem much more interesting because it was a special time. I realised the future will be different and people will live in different ways.”

With more than 40 books to his name, Baxter has been published all over the world and has won numerous science fiction awards including the prestigious Philip K Dick Award, the John W Campbell Memorial Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, the Kurd Lasswitz Award (Germany) and the Seiun Award (Japan).

As his first novel aimed at teenagers, writing The H-Bomb Girl was a departure from his usual technique.