The whole world was heading for war when Manny Weaver and I went through a ‘grey hole’ to another world.
Till then, I didn’t believe in magic. Fairies, witches, magic spells, strange lands with talking animals, monsters with three heads and potions to turn you into a giant?
Even when I was very little, I knew all that stuff wasn’t real. Then I encountered Manny, and the strange animal we called a ‘cog’, and the brother who I’d never met because he died before I was born. I rode through a lightning storm on a flying jet ski, and lived in a World Without War.
And so now, if you ask me if I believe in magic? Let’s just say I’m not so sure.
Just what would a perfect world look like?
It’s the question I kept asking myself again and again during the creation of Into The Sideways World. There are a few things that I think we could mostly agree on and so it was in that spirit that I embarked on a story that became an amazing and optimistic adventure.
I actually love a good dystopian story but I felt, during the dull days of the Covid lockdowns, that the time was right for something a little more, well…uplifting. I’m a big fan of James Hilton’s 1933 novella Lost Horizon – which introduced us all to the mythical land of Shangri-La – and early drafts of Into The Sideways World included elements inspired by that story. As the book developed, however, they fell away and I realised I was writing an ‘alternative history’. Hence the title: the ‘sideways world’ is a bit like time travel – except instead of going backwards in time, or forwards to the future, you go sideways to an alternative version of right now.
And so, in pursuit of a mysterious animal, our heroes Willa and Manny are swept into another reality – where the world is preparing to celebrate fifty years without any sort of armed conflict. Back in their own reality, they embark on a quest to prove that the ‘perfect world’ they have found is real.
It’s a big idea, for sure, and could easily have been three times as long! It was both fun and frustrating deciding which bits of Manny and Willa’s sideways world would be the same as our world and which would be different.
For example, I knew straight away that it would be very colourful! Clothes, houses, everything is a riot of different hues. But what about transport? I rejected flying cars and bicycles as ‘done before’, and settled on ‘flykes’ – a kind of airborne jet-ski. (In the end, I liked the flykes so much that a ‘vintage’ flyke from the 1990s became a central feature of the story’s climactic ending.)
The notion of a ‘world without war’ might seem, to adult eyes, rather naïve. But I don’t think children see it like that. I rather detest books that preach to children; Into The Sideways World, by contrast, presents an optimistic vision of a world that night have been and – who knows? – still could be!
And anyway – they have flying jet-skis…
