{"id":61855,"date":"2014-06-26T12:46:01","date_gmt":"2014-06-26T11:46:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/?p=61855"},"modified":"2014-06-26T12:46:01","modified_gmt":"2014-06-26T11:46:01","slug":"sarah-lotz-on-the-three-evil-kids-and-south-african-sf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/interviews\/sarah-lotz-on-the-three-evil-kids-and-south-african-sf\/","title":{"rendered":"Sarah Lotz on The Three, evil kids and South African SF"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sarah<\/a>Sarah Lotz’s The Three<\/em><\/strong> could very well be the SF thriller of the year. When four planes crash at the same time, three survivors are found; each of them children. As the media circus swarms around them, different groups find different agendas. Are they the horsemen of the apocalypse, alien invaders, or are they simply three children who have been through a terrible ordeal?<\/p>\n

We spoke to Lotz about her novel, why she’s drawn to horror and if we are seeing a boom in South African genre fiction.<\/p>\n

What was the initial seed of the idea for The Three<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I always wanted to write about an air crash and plane crashes, a) because I’m flight-phobic and b) because I’m completely fascinated by it. My husband and I for years have been completely obsessed with air crash investigation, and also the way, immediately when there’s a crash, how it’s all over the news. Continually. And I wanted to look at why that was, why are we all so, particularly with air crashes and also to a certain extent I noticed the same thing with cruise ships as well, as soon as there’s that kind of disaster, it does dominate the news. Almost to a bigger extent than a natural disaster. So that was really the seed of the book.<\/p>\n

There are several different narrators in the book and they’ve all got their own agendas, and it’s also a book within a book. Were you drawn to the idea of unreliable narrators?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, I love that concept because obviously if you’ve read World War Z<\/em> <\/strong>you can see I was pretty heavily influenced by that book, it really made a massive impression on me, and I loved that idea. I loved the idea that you don’t quite know if these stories are actually true. And we all put our own spin on the truth and we all see things in different ways, so the fact is that these people in effect could all be lying. Especially how [the book’s author] Elspeth manipulates the interviews as well, and puts them together, that’s also for sensationalist purposes.<\/p>\n

Also the other thing was, I think this was one of the hardest things to do, was the fact, for example, the Japanese sections, they all had to be written as if they were written in translation, so I had to be very aware of how they would be in the original Japanese and then, if it’s an American translator, how he would translate the idioms etc, so there was a double double layer which really did my head in actually for quite a while!<\/p>\n

Was there a lot of that kind of research? It’s set in several different countries, there are the chatroom segments…<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh gosh, absolutely, I really did delve quite deeply. The conspiracy theory stuff as well, I really did spend quite a lot of time in the murky depths of the internet, which was quite…it was fascinating.<\/p>\n

I went to Japan because I’d been there years ago but every city has its own vibe and I really needed to kind of re-experience that. And then I also went to the suicide forest [Aokigahara], I actually took my mum there! We looked around there and picked up the atmosphere and it was absolutely incredible. We were the only people there, it was snowing and there were signs that people had been there and the feeling that maybe 50 metres deeper inside that forest there was somebody who had ended there life was incredibly powerful and disturbing.<\/p>\n

And the Christianity aspect of it, I actually only came up with that idea after I’d thought of having more than one plane crash, and then I think it jumped to what is always fascinating about these terrible tragedies is the survivors of them. What if there were three or four survivors, and then the immediate jump was ‘Well what if they were the four horsemen of the apocalypse?’ Which sounded like completely crazy and then I started looking into prophecy theory and the rapture and it really all seemed to just fit. And I started looking deeper deeper into it and how Christian fundamentalism feeds into American politics, especially in 2012. So it all kind of led on, and I read Revelation again, I read all those [Rapture] novels,  they’re some of the best selling books in the entire world, all about the rapture, a fictionalised series. So I read all of that and a lot of non-fiction about prophecy theory as well, which is incredibly complex but fascinating.<\/p>\n

The different voices are all totally convincing; from the English luvvie to the American bible-basher. Was that difficult, to really get those voices down?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I’d spent quite a lot of time in Texas before so I had that kind of voice, and that was a real difficulty because there’s such a fine line between falling into caricature, but the American voices were by far the hardest for me to do. I mean, I was really, really lucky that Anne Perry, my editor, is American and she’s brilliant. So she had no problem pulling me back on that. For the African sections at well, I’ve got a lot of friends who live down the road from me, hundreds of people read the manuscript just to make sure that the idioms were correct, that I wasn’t stepping on any toes, same with the American section, so I did have a lot of backup for that as well! I was really scared that I was going to, and I’m sure I got things wrong as well, but I really didn’t want to offend people more than I knew I was already going to, especially with the religious element.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>There’s a strong horror element too; did you always know that you wanted it to be creepy and were you quite cautious about seeding that in?<\/strong><\/p>\n