My first inspiration for THE COMING DARKNESS came from memories of being an interpreter and translator in the 1980s, a distant era before the cult of economic growth had properly begun mincing the natural world to a fine grey powder of disappointment. I was working on a vast user’s manual for an oil and gas refinery in Algeria, translating labyrinthine French into (I hoped) competent English. I had the brilliant Ernst technical dictionary to help me – probably my most valuable possession, gifted by a friend who gave up his successful career in languages to become a silent puppeteer. There was, perhaps, a moral in that, but it escaped me at the time.
Anyway, I had been gifted something else, too – an opportunity for corporate blackmail that I never really considered employing, but which made me nervous. How easy it would have been to insert a catastrophic error into the user’s manual for the refinery in such a way that no one would know unto it was too late.
Soon after, I was given two hundred pages of pre-inquest notes for a job as fourth reserve at an inquest (just in case the first three interpreters called in sick or lost the will to live). The context was an oil spoil from an ocean-going tanker. There was no moral debate – just the degree to which blame could be translated into cold hard cash.
The topic of the next conference was Cyprinidae, the carp family, and it felt safe – comfortable even. But, of course, it wasn’t. The carp were overfished and, simultaneously it seemed, both overfed and undernourished. They were victims of habitat loss and non-native predation. I remember reflecting that, had humans not been indigenous to Earth, we would be the destructive, parasitic intruders.
My experience with international institutions – NGOs, Unesco, the United Nations and so on – fed my imagination when I started writing THE COMING DARKNESS in lockdown. It’s a future-thriller set in 2037 and my characters are people who try, on the whole, to mitigate the damage done by irresponsible capitalism.
Researching scientific and social predictions for 15 years from now, becalmed by quarantine, I imagined a further step into chaos, a terrorist group for whom the entire paraphernalia of progress was the problem: computers and their networks; surveillance technologies; the mechanisation of labour; hyperconnection, satellites and AI. How, I thought to myself, might someone manage to bring all of that tumbling down?
And then, once I’d worked out a sure-fire way, I had to devise a plausible method for my characters – my puppets? – to stop them.
In the world of THE COMING DARKNESS, environmental degradation and trans-species pandemics have become facts of life, yet the story has a happy ending. Writing it – satisfyingly, I hope – I asked myself: ‘What next?’
Because a happy ending isn’t the end of everything. It’s just an element of punctuation in a tale of progress and exploitation that continues, remorselessly, even after the finally page is turned.
A theatre director, playwright and actor Greg Mosse is the founder and director of the Criterion New Writing programme at the Criterion Theatre in London, running workshops in script development to a diverse community of writers, actors and directors. In addition, since 2015, Greg has written, produced and stage 25 plays and musicals.
Greg set up both the Southbank Centre Creative Writing School – an open access program of evening classes delivering MA level workshops – and the University of Sussex MA in Creative Writing at West Dean College which he taught for 4 years.
The husband of the bestselling novelist Kate Mosse, Kate’s hit novel Labyrinth was inspired by a house that Greg and his mother bought together in the French medieval city of Carcassonne, where the couple and their children spent many happy summers. Following the success of Labyrinth, Greg created the innovative readers-and-writers website mosselabyrinth.co.uk MosseLabyrinth. The first of its kind MosseLabrynth was the world’s first online accessible 3D world, and the inspiration for Pottermore – the popular Harry Potter website.
A multilinguist, Greg has lived and worked in Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Madrid and has worked as both an interpreter at a variety of international institutions and a teacher in the UK.
Greg and Kate live in Chichester, where Kate’s parents founded the Chichester Festival Theatre, they have two grown up children.
The Coming Darkness was written during lockdown and is Greg’s debut novel.
