Ask the Author: Clive Birnie
Answered Questions (2)
Clive Birnie
A big mixture of ideas and fragments, books, films, throw away conversations, things I love. I wanted to write a book that riffs like a tribute band but has its own numbers. I wanted to write a book for geeks and nerds. A canny reader of Time Travel Hotel will find nods, winks, and references to Herodotus, Catch 22, Kurt Vonnegut, Waiting for Godot, The Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch, Star Wars, the 15th Century Hungarian king Mattias Corvinus, The Wasteland by TS Eliot, The Simpsons, Liutprand of Cremona, historian of Otto the Great, the great Dada poet Tristan Tzara, the Adventures of Tintin and Hong Kong Phooey
Also I wanted to write a book that is an intelligent experiment and yet a delinquent easy read at the same time. Experimental shouldn't mean difficult by default. It can be fun - should be fun. Cinema can be kooky and surreal and bonkers and we don't blink but if that is in a book it is either filed under genre or considered difficult, so I guess I am trying to mess with that a little as well by writing a book that wears its literary badge but is also a genre book. Which genre? Someone said it was the funniest Time Travel Detective Sex Comedy they have ever read - if that helps.
Also I wanted to write a book that is an intelligent experiment and yet a delinquent easy read at the same time. Experimental shouldn't mean difficult by default. It can be fun - should be fun. Cinema can be kooky and surreal and bonkers and we don't blink but if that is in a book it is either filed under genre or considered difficult, so I guess I am trying to mess with that a little as well by writing a book that wears its literary badge but is also a genre book. Which genre? Someone said it was the funniest Time Travel Detective Sex Comedy they have ever read - if that helps.
Clive Birnie
I have a montage poetry sequence called The Palimpsest Girl in progress. There are 14 of them on the wall at the moment. Some are made using the app process I used for part of Cutting up the Economist but will more colour. I have first steps of two novels started. One is tentatively titled The Poet, the other is the first step in the direction of a sequel to Time Travel Hotel and has the working title Time Travel Corporation LLC SA Gmbh.
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