cover art—and offered it to bookstores in person. It cost me $8,000 to print 1,000 books at a place called Image Desktop Publishing (a free plug for them but, hey, they did do a great job.
Oh, and folks, these are 1996 prices!
In any case, Contest was seen in a city bookstore by the Publisher of Mass-Market Fiction at Pan Macmillan, the kind folk publishing this tome. She called me up and asked if I was writing anything else. As it happened, only a few weeks before I had decided to commence work on a new book, a little action ditty set in Antarctica about a team of United States Marines sent to defend a spaceship found buried deep within the ice. I sent the first 50 pages to Pan Macmillan and they signed me up on the basis of those pages. That book was Ice Station.
At this point, I should add something about the stigma of publishing your own book. People look down on writers who self-publish their books. You should have seen some of the absolutely disdainful looks I got when I told people, 'Oh, it's self-published.' The look on their faces said, 'You must really suck. If your book was any good, a real publisher would have published it.'
Take the following true story: a guy I know (whom I didn't know back when I self-published Contest) told me recently that he went into a major Sydney bookstore (I won't name it) in late 1996 and picked Contest up. He showed it to the sales assistant and said, 'What's this book like?' The assistant said, 'It's self-published, what do you think?'
Ouch.
Such comments fail to appreciate just how difficult it is for an author (especially someone who doesn't know anybody who works in the publishing industry) to get picked up by a major publisher. Hell, I sent Contest to one of the biggest agencies in Sydney to try to get in the loop. They lost the manuscript. That's how hard it is if you're an unknown.
Ultimately, though, that self-published book got me a major publishing deal. 'Nothing ventured, nothing gained,' I say.
So go easy on self-published authors, because as far as I am concerned, at least they have the courage to back them selves and see their books put into print.
I understand that you've sold the film rights to Contest. Is that right?
That's correct. I optioned off the movie rights to Contest in early 1999. I've recently seen some of the ideas the movie guys have for the film, too. The special effects will be absolutely out of this world. Cannot wait to see it.
Will Contest—the novel, that is—be reissued by Pan Macmillan ?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! Pan are going to re-release Con test in late 2000. My humble apologies to anyone who tried to get it after they read Ice Station. I only printed 1,000 copies and by the time Ice Station came out, there were none left!
Where did the idea for Ice Station spring from?
For me, any novel starts with the question What would happen if… You ask yourself that question, and the answer is your novel. The idea for Ice Station came when I asked myself What would happen if someone discovered a spaceship somewhere on earth ? My answer: the country in whose territory it was found would grab it and hide it—a kind of Area 51 answer, really, and as a novel, not very satisfying.
So I extended the question to ask, What would happen if that spaceship was discovered in Antarctica, the only place on earth that isn't any country's territory? The answer to that question was much more interesting: it would be a free-for-all. An all- or-nothing race to see who could get the ship first. By making some of America's traditional allies (such as the
French countries which most Westerners don't usually see as threatswthe villains in Ice Station, I felt I made the story a little more geopolitically complex. Funnily enough, I wrote Ice Station in 1997 and only this year—1999, two whole years later—an Australian spy was caught by the FBI selling American secrets to the French! How about that!
Has Ice Station been sold overseas?
Yes, it has. Ice Station has been sold to publishers in the US, the UK, and Japan. Very cool. Can't wait to see a Japanese edition of it.
Were you surprised by the success of Ice Station?
That's a tough question to answer, principally because I think every writer thinks their book is a winner—and hence expects it to succeed! The best way to answer that question, then, is to say this: I think people like escapism, and that is exactly what Ice Station is. Pure, unadulterated, escapist entertainment. People experience so much angst and irritation in their everyday lives, that when they settle down at the end of the day to read a book, they just want to be entertained, to let the writer do the work for them. That's what I do, and that's why I think people liked the book.
Will Shane Schofield appear in another book?
I think so. In fact, in recent months, I have been dabbling with the idea of a sequel to Ice Station. Schofield is a very convenient hero for me to have because, being a Marine, I can get him into all sorts of trouble around the globe. In any case, I'd just like to bring characters like Mother and Gant back for more adventures. Mother in particular. She is one of my favourite creations, a character who really came to life off the page from the very first moment I created her. (Quick writing fact: believe it or not, I had not 'pre-imagined'
Mother when I thought up Ice Station. The day I wrote the scene in which she first appeared, I just sat back in my chair and said, 'Okay, so what's this Marine going to be like?“ In the space of thirty seconds I had a 200- pound, six-foot-tall woman with a fully-shaved head and a heart of gold. Boom.
Mother was bored. Rest assured, when she returns in Schofield, she will have a titanium leg—to replace the one she lost to a killer whale in Ice Station!
William Race is a very different hero to Shane Schofield, isn't he?
William Race is very different to Shane Schofield. While Schofield is a hero for all seasons—-a pure Indiana Jones type; a fearless-but-kind fellow who can kill ten bad guys but still tell the little girl standing beside him to cover her eyes— William Race is more of an ordinary guy who must discover his heroic nature in the most extraordinary of circumstances.
