Seven Ancient Wonders

imitation of the constellation Orion's Belt.

It was from reading Secret Chamber that I discovered a Golden Capstone did indeed once sit atop the Great Pyramid at Giza. As an author, it's wonderful when you discover something so big and so cool that it can be the ultimate goal of your story, and when I read about the Golden Capstone, I just leapt up and started dancing around my living room, because I'd found exactly that.

I am often asked 'Where do you get your ideas from?' And this is the answer: I read a lot of non-fiction books, and if you read enough, you find gems like this. As a work on the darker side of ancient Egypt, with interesting sections on the Word of Thoth and the Sphinx, I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone keen on the subject of ancient Egypt.

On the home front, as always, my wife Natalie was a model of support and encouragement—reading draft after draft, letting me off doing chores around the house, and most of all, happily allowing our honeymoon in Egypt to morph into a quasi-research trip!

Honestly, in Egypt I became one of those tourists who is the first off the bus and the last one back to it, and who pesters the tour guide with all kinds of weird questions. For example, at the Valley of the Kings, I asked, 'Is there a hieroglyph that says 'Death to

grave robbers?'' (Sure enough, there is, and the image of it in this book is it!). And neither of us will ever forget exploring—on our own—the haunting chambers beneath the 'Red' Pyramid south of Giza by the light of a perilously fading flashlight!

Once again, thanks to everyone at Pan Macmillan for another stellar effort. I've been so fortunate to work with a group of people who can package my work so well (I really love the jacket of this book).

Kudos also to my agents at the William Morris Agency, Suzanne Gluck and Eugenie Furniss—they look after me so well! And they're just from the literary section. That's not even mentioning the cool people in LA (notably Alicia Gordon and Danny Greenberg) doing film things on my behalf.

I'd also like to thank Mr David Epper, who generously supported my favourite charity, the Bullant Charity Challenge, by 'buying' the name of a character in this book at Bullant's annual auction dinner. Thus, his son, Max Epper, is in the book as Professor Max Epper, aka Wizard. Thanks, Dave.

And lastly, to family and friends, once again I pledge my eternal thanks for their support and tolerance. My mum and dad; my brother, Stephen; friends like Bee Wilson, Nik and Simon Kozlina; and, of course, my first 'official' reader, my good friend John Schrooten, who still reads my stuff in the stands at the cricket after all these years. If he starts ignoring the cricket because he's absorbed in the book, then it's a good sign!

Believe me, it's all about encouragement. As I've said in my previous books: to anyone who knows a writer, never underestimate the power of your encouragement.

M.R.

Sydney, Australia

October 2005

AN INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW REILLY

THE WRITING OF SEVEN ANCIENT WONDERS

How was the writing of Seven Ancient Wonders different from the writing of your other books?

It's funny, but for some reason the writing of this book was a more solitary experience than the others—if anything, it felt a lot like the writing of Contest. Perhaps that's because the subject matter of the book, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, is so ancient, so distant, so alien to us, that I was creating most of the story from pure imagination (rather than from actual sources—some of the stuff on the Wonders is pretty flimsy). As I did when I created the aliens in Contest, I just had to create these mystical places, like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, for example, from scratch.

What did you try to do differently with this book?

For me, the key difference between Seven Ancient Wonders and my previous books is the theme of 'family' in it. The team of international soldiers guarding Lily ultimately becomes a family—complete with grandparents (Doris and Max Epper), squabbling brothers and sisters (Pooh Bear, Stretch, Big Ears, Zoe), and the father-like figure of Jack West.

This was a thematic thing that I started in Hover Car Racer and I enjoyed it immensely when I wrote that novel. In the end, when you write an action-thriller novel, you must have characters that you care about, and by creating this quasi-family environment out of a bunch of hard-ass troopers, I felt I'd created a special kind of team that readers would want to cheer for.

I particularly love how Lily renames all the soldiers, changing all

their tough-guy call-signs into goofy childish nicknames. Having utilised 'serious' call-signs in the Scarecrow books, I felt it was time to have a bit of fun, and turn this plot device on its head.

Is it true that for this book you created your own language?

I wouldn't go so far as to say that I created a language! What I did do was create an alphabet (not unlike cuneiform) to display the Word of Thoth—but my translation is just from English, not a brand-new language. That would have been way too hard and time-consuming. I'll leave that sort of thing to JRR Tolkien!

It took some time, but it was great fun. I created symbols to match those of our own alphabet, plus rules for proper nouns and special symbols for certain objects (like the Great Pyramid, Alexander the Great and the Sun, for instance). If anyone has the time and the inclination they can translate all the Thoth references in the book back to English, but be careful, as in the novel, it gets harder, as more symbols are used, and sometimes not from left-to- right!

After the book has been out a while, I'll put up the alphabet on my website, so that anyone who's interested can see how it works.

With the exception of Jason Chaser in Hover Car Racer, Seven Ancient Wonders sees the introduction of your first Australian action hero. What made you decide to make Jack Westjr an Australian?

It suited the story. Simple as that. I'm often asked why the heroes of my other books are American and the answer is really the same: it suited those stories (it especially suited Ice Station).

With Seven Ancient Wonders, I wanted the hero specifically not to be American. He had to lead this little band of small nations against the combined might of America and Europe. And so I

thought of an ex-SAS soldier from Australia. I also knew that the ending of the book required one country to be imbued with the power of Tartarus, and what could be more fun than Australia being the most powerful country on Earth and not knowing it? (I already think that, anyway!)

You mention The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown a couple of times in the novel. Have you read it? Did it influence you?

I have indeed read The Da Vinci Code and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I actually read it long before it dominated the bestseller lists—when I was touring with Scarecrow in 2003, I would recommend it to anyone who would listen!

That said, The Da Vinci Code wasn't really an influence on Seven Ancient Wonders. The Indiana Jones movies were probably more of an influence. I wanted to create an Indiana Jones-type story, with booby traps and high adventure, but set in the present day. The reason I mentioned The Da Vinci Code in the book was really because that novel is now so globally known, if you do write a story about Catholic Church conspiracy theories or one which has a scene set in the Louvre, you should probably make a Da Vinci Code joke!

Seven Ancient Wonders features some pretty dastardly American villains'. Is it an anti-American novel?

I hope it's not interpreted that way. The Americans are just the villains in this book, that's all. They want the power of Tartarus and so they go after it—they just do so a little more ruthlessly than our heroes!

The key to Seven Ancient Wonders was that the heroes had to be underdogs, underdogs battling the most powerful nation on Earth, and that at the moment is America. America has more guns, tanks and planes than the next dozen countries combined. For a bunch of