Six novels: The bullet-catcher's daughter (2014); Unseemly science (2015); The custodian of marvels (2016); The queen of all crows (2018); The outlaw and the upstart king (2019); The fugitive and the vanishing man (2020)
- Submitting institution
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De Montfort University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 27034
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
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- Brief description of type
- A creative writing collection: 6 novels published by Angry Robot Books
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- These alternate history novels represent a sustained feat of research, speculation and creativity. Encompassing over half a million words and six distinct literary genres, they investigate themes of gender identity and globalization.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- In these two trilogies I am using fiction to explore Leo Tolstoy's anarcho-pacifist observation that all systems of authority must ultimately depend on violence. The novel form is uniquely disposed to interrogate social structures and scrutinise different ways of organising societies and the lived experiences these differences generate. My novels investigate the suffering that may emerge in the absence of law. I explore this by having my protagonist venture into the remote and chaotic regions beyond the Empire, where she finds chaotic innovation (as opposed to the technological quiescence of the Empire). My female protagonist is also a vehicle for exploring the lived experience of social change. She is raised in a straightjacket of narrowly-defined gender conformity, and then encounters a rapid flux of social norms in the 'wilds' where individuals define themselves by their freedom from law. Crucial to the research questions these books explore are different understandings of gender and identity, power structures and the New Right obsession with small government. The 'hard alternate history' novel is a speculative form posits a specific deviation point from real historical events and plausibly explores the consequences. My events centre on a Luddite-inspired British Revolutionary War in 1816 that leads to the establishment of the Anglo-Scottish Republic. The novels investigate processes of social change, and the role of marginalised peoples in this. Within this 'alternate history', I innovate further by adopting specific genre tropes for each novel to aid my fictional investigations. Commentators have observed that the novels parallel recent and contemporary politics, from the fall of the Soviet Union to the views of Francis Fukuyama's 'The End of History and the Last Man' and the processes that would lead to Brexit.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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