When I set out to write thrillers set in a fantasy world, I had a pretty straightforward idea of what I was getting into. I hoped to create a fictional world that reflects and reimagines the early years of the Soviet Union – that has the same relationship to 20th-century history as, say, A Game of Thrones has to the Wars of the Roses – and to combine it with tight thriller plots to keep the reader hooked. But as I worked on the idea, I found that the ground I’d opened up was much more challenging, intriguing and complex than I’d first imagined.

Bringing two different genres – fantasy and thriller – together in a single work turned out to be more like colliding them, with the different story elements crashing into each other, pushing back at each other and travelling in opposite directions. On the one hand were totalitarianism, surveillance, political police, dissidents, informers, deception and a government that routinely murders citizens; and on the other were giants, sentient rain, walking wind and shapeshifting wolves – glimpses of strange otherness.

Radiant State by Peter Higgins review – an exceptional fantasy Read more

I soon realised it wasn’t just the diverse story elements that were in constant creative tension, it was the genres themselves. Fantasy and thriller are two distinctly different ways of thinking and imagining. They stretch and tear and illuminate each other, and I was constantly working to keep them in balance. Thriller wants to press on and keep the tension high, fantasy wants to linger and explore; thriller wants to end decisively, fantasy wants to go on expanding forever. But there was more to it than that, and I found myself reflecting a lot on the implications of the two ways of writing I was bringing together: how they were connected to the subject matter and how they were shaping it in deeper and more interesting ways than I had ever thought they would.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peter Higgins: ‘As a writer of thrillers, you have to follow the rules or it just doesn’t work. A fantasy story, though, can do anything it wants’ Photograph: PR

Free imagination versus rules and control: that’s one way of conceiving the collision between thriller and fantasy. Thriller is about the logic of conventions: plot, believability, recognisable character types, mysteries that have hidden solutions, resolutions waiting to be uncovered. As a writer of thrillers, you have to follow the rules or it just doesn’t work. Fantasy is otherwise. A fantasy story, once it announces itself as such, can do anything it wants. It can say anything and go anywhere. Bring back the dead. Cure any sickness. Animate any inanimate thing and give it a voice. In fantasy, you can take any pleasure you like from anything you can think of. I found that fantasy wants to break thriller apart: it wants to split the carapace, disrupt the predetermined plot machine and crack open an inexhaustible well of narrative possibility. Refreshing and repurposing, fantasy unlocks the strangeness, plenitude and imaginative wealth inside the thriller world.

I discovered in this cracking-open an apparently endless capacity to absorb and transform fragments of Russianness. Not only the facts of Russian history – though the books are haunted by the ghosts and full of trails of the rise and fall of Joseph Stalin – but also traces of Russian folklore, landscape, propaganda, painting, writing and film all seeped into what I was writing and appeared there, changed, refracted and reimagined. I think this is partly because writing and art have long had a deeper, more intense relationship to fantasy in Russia than in the Anglophone world. Writers such as Pushkin, Gogol and Bulgakov have seen fantasy as a way of getting closer to the truth about their country than realism could (or dared).

But for me, above all, fantasy came to mean openness. Possibility. Permission. The freedom of inwardness and differentness, of thinking what you want and judging by your own internal yardstick. Becoming whatever you feel you are. And so, as I wrote the books, the thriller-versus-fantasy collision came to be more and more wrapped up with the theme of the book: the conflict between the oppressive, totalising state and the whole, fully living person. The surveillance state wants to crush its populace, to make them all frightened and all the same, to make their lives entirely public and not private at all. But the richness and fullness and inconsistency of individual human beings, in all the primal, illimitable and indefinable extent of our imaginations and desires and perceptions, just keeps on breaking through.

Extract from Radiant State by Peter Higgins

She came at last to the Stolypin Embankment: a row of globe lamps along the parapet, held up by bronze porpoises. Glistening cobbles under lamplight. Beyond the parapet, she felt more than saw the slow-moving Mir, sliding out into the Reach, barges and late water taxis still pushing against the black river … And then it happened, as it sometimes did. A tremble of movement crossed the black underside of the clouds, like wind across a pool, and the buildings of the night city prickled; the nap of the city rising, uneasy, anxious. Maroussia waited, listening. Nothing more came. Nothing changed. The rain-freighted clouds settled into a new shape. And then, suddenly, the solidity of Mirgorod stone and iron broke open and slid away, vertiginously. The blackness and ripple of the water detached itself from the river and slipped upwards, filling the air, and everything changed. The night was thick with leaking possibilities. Soft evaporations. Fragments and intimations of other possible lives, drifting off the river and across the dirty pavements. Hopes, like moon-ghosts, leaking out of the streets.

More about the book

The imaginative grip upon his materials is delicate, subtle and unpredictable; and his remixes have a kind of metamorphic historical wit. The trilogy carries us through, more or less, the bohemian Soviet 1920s, the great patriotic war and the siege of Leningrad, and the cosmonaut-obsessed 50s and 60s. Except that they are compressed into a few years of story time, and the ordering of the phases given a deft kaleidoscope-shake, so that here Stalin’s terrorist youth (or a reflection of it) is happening at the same time as the purges, and the space programme is simultaneous with the collectivisation famine. Francis Spufford

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