A novel for barcode readers

In the future, novels will be written for machines to read.

When they have merged with machines, some hybrids will have barcode scanners.

For their benefit here are the first few pages of Hybrids in barcode language.

This means Hybrids is the first novel to be published in barcodes. Awesome, eh?

(Now, presumably, novels will begin to be written by machines... Maybe some already are!)

Sold out again in less than 24 hours!

A few weeks ago Doodled Books sold out in one week of 20 copies of signed and drawn-in copies of Hybrids at £19.99 and ordered 15 more. They went on sale yesterday and sold out again in less than 24 hours! More are on order for me to draw in. I wonder who is buying them?

> See the galleries here
> Read their interview with me

I'm looking forward to Womad and a break.

Doodling fun

There's a remarkable web business dedicated to selling first editions of books. Their gimmick is they get authors to sign the books and doodle in them.

Needless to say, it's called Doodled Books.

Its manager, Claire Main, asked me to doodle in 20 copies of Hybrids, which she put on the web site. They sold out in a week at £19.99 each.

Now Claire wants more of them. Very nicely, she says "I think you have huge potential" and all the ones I do in the future will go "on the Harry Potter pages as we are getting loads of hits due to the next book coming out and it would be a shame for you to miss out on the hype."

She's going to send me batches of 20, and each book will have a different doodle and slogan. I've promised her that as long as she keeps sending them, I'll keep defacing them!

You can view the sold out doodles here.

An immense number of ideas

Isn't it nice when a book reviewer gets exactly what you're up to?

So it is with Anthony Brown, reviewing Hybrids in Starburst 351. He says:

"Hybrids may have the length and style of a Young Adult book, and two teenage heroes to go with them, but Thorpe doesn't pull punches with the satirical ideas he packs in.

"From detention without trial and three-layer registering of Creep victims that smack of control orders, through a Centre for Genetic Rehabilitation that reflects Guantanamo, to HIV-echoing conspiracy theory accusations against pharmaceutical companies.

"Thorpe approaches distinctly adult ideas in an approachable hero-led way, as Johnny and rich-kid fellow Creep victim Kestrella become the gurus of the Hybrid Resistance Army whose existence allows the hardline Deputy Prime Minister to call for harsh measures for dangerous times.

"Over the mere 296 large print pages, Thorpe packs in an immense number of ideas, shaking up the situations in surprising ways time and time again."

"An immense number of ideas" in only 296 easy-to-read pages for only £5.99. Who says you can't get a bargain these days?!

The Changes

I've just come across a tv series and novel trilogy from the '70s which I didn't know of before, with some similarities of theme to Hybrids. Does anyone remember it?

The Changes was a British children's science fiction television serial filmed in 1973 and first broadcast in 1975 by the BBC. In the first episode, ordinary people smashed ordinary objects in fits of seeming madness and this apparently made a great impact on its young audience.

The Changes posits a Britain in which the population have mysteriously rebelled against modern technology, destroyed all modern machinery and reverted back to a pre-industrial age.

The madness is triggered by a sound emitted from electricity pylons.

Even the words for modern inventions became taboo - 'car', 'tractor', 'electricity', 'toaster', 'pylon', etc. Just to mention them brings on the noise and the uncontrollable anger against machines again. These items of modern technology are described by people, including the central character Nicky, as cursed.

At one point the main character in the series, Nicky Gore, is asked whether it will induce the noise to start a blacksmith's forge. She asks, "where will you get the iron from?" On hearing there is plenty of scrap lying around the farm (obviously a sensible bit of recycling) she announces that the forge will probably not invoke the noise. So the forge goes ahead. But bicycles are sadly trashed.

Its theme echoes the adult drama series Survivors (1975) in which a small group of British people attempt to survive the decimation of the world's population by disease. This itself is reminiscent of 'The Memoirs of a Survivor' by Doris Lessing (1974), made into a film with Julie Christie. The preoccupation with this theme at the time may have been due to the oil shortage and other environmental and nuclear scares going on, with parallels to our own time.

The Changes was directed by John Prowse.

The TV series was freely adapted by Anne Home from a trilogy of novels by Peter Dickinson. The series took most of its material from The Weathermonger which, together with Heartsease and The Devil's Children has recently been reissued in a single volume in the UK.

You can read more and buy The Changes on Tony Gosling's web site - this is a private site. The BBC have not re-issued it for contractual reasons.

The second review of Hybrids

The Bookbag, a website about new books gives a very good summary of the plot and a positive review, with one irritating nitpick of the type "well if only I'd thought of this, I would have done it better". But you didn't, Jill.

However, it's the reviewer's children who give it the best response, especially when Jill says "my sons and I - even my younger son, the notorious reluctant reader - fairly galloped through it in our rush to find out what happened at the end".

It's the kids' reactions that matter, after all.

The older son noted, "perceptive as ever, that he had thought Hybrids was going to be 'just another' book all about how we should be nice to someone that's different, but it wasn't really about that at all".

She likes the double narrative strategy: "while I don't usually like a book to have multiple narrators, I enjoyed it here. It gave a double perspective on the disease and it also made the love affair between the two much more accessible to pre-adolescent readers."

"We also liked the way the book ended on more questions, not neat solutions."

The summary is: "A sharp, strong and tense debut novel."

The official launch date is 1 May, but copies are trickling into bookshops now.

"Essential reading for the cyberspace generation"

Hybrids has effectively been published. I have the first copy sent to me today, and it looks great.

The official publication date has been moved forward to 1st May - a lovely day to be published. It used to be Labour Day and all the unions would be marching with their banners celebrating socialism and workers' solidarity.

Copies will start appearing in shops during April though and I'd be interested to hear when anyone receives their Amazon order. You can pre-order it from there now via the link on my profile, but I'd rather you supported your local bookshop if you have one at all.

It's good to see the paper is FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified to prove it didn't harm any virgin rainforests!

I would say "Currently reading Hybrids" but MySpace doesn't yet list it. I suppose that's because it's American and it won't appear there till later.