What if 1950s England would conquer the whole continental Europe? What if a pan-european railway line and an appartment block would be independent states? Giuseppe Porcaro speaks with Dave Hutchinson, from UK. Dave is the author of the four books of the Fractured Europe Series and one of the other few authors that has put an imaginative European background so prominent in science fiction worldbuilding.
The Fractured Europe series is inspired by Cold War spy fiction: bleak, powerful stories which often rely on national borders for political and narrative tension. Once the Iron Curtain fell, Dave says, the spy genre lost its way. He realised that writing the thriller that he really wanted would mean reintroducing borders. But where would the barriers lie? For some time, he had been thinking about a family of uncanny map-makers. Eventually he had them create different versions of England to overlay our own. The Fractured Europe novels follow a spy, Rudi, as he crosses the boundaries of reality, while Europe itself breaks into ever smaller nation states, some no larger than a city.
Dave Hutchinson was born in Sheffield. After reading American Studies at the University of Nottingham, he became a journalist. He’s the author of five collections of short stories and one novel, and his novella The Push was shortlisted for the 2010 BSFA award for short fiction. He has also edited two anthologies and co-edited a third. His short story 'The Incredible Exploding Man' featured in the first Solaris Rising anthology, and appeared in Year’s Best Science Fiction collection. He lives in north London with his wife and several cats.
Giuseppe Porcaro is the author of DISCO SOUR, a novel about Europe and democracy in the age of algorithms, among the winners of the Altiero Spinelli Prize for Outrech of the European Union in 2018. Giuseppe is interested in how the intersection between technology and politics is moving towards uncharted territories in the future. He also focuses on narrative-building and political representations in the European Union. He works as the head of communications for Bruegel.
Europarama is a podcast series about science fiction and the future of Europe by Giuseppe Porcaro, brought to you by the Are We Europe podcasting family. Europarama is a follow-up project to DISCO SOUR, a novel about Europe and democracy in the age of algorithms.