Endgame
(2000)

Endgame is about the countdown to nuclear war, and its effect on a group of ordinary friends. Seven days in which they are forced to decide who or what is really precious to them. Seven days in the shadow of the bomb, and the clock is ticking…

This book is bleak. That's very much a product of its subject matter, however, as conversely I remember being particularly happy while I was writing it. It deals with two things that have always been pet dreads of mine: nuclear war, and the threat of conscription. The research involved in writing this novel taught me more than I cared to know about the effects of a nuclear bomb, most of which I've kindly shared with the reader just to ram the point home that we should not have them. But hey, I'm just an author, who listens to me? It's also about humanity's boundless capacity for stupidity, but then that goes hand-in-hand with any book about war I suppose.

Concurrent with my mildly obvious hatred for human conflict (and the politics that go with it) is the question that obsesses one of the protagonists in the book: what would you do if you were conscripted to fight and kill people in a war you didn't believe in? I wanted to represent the war on a small scale, to show how it might affect a few teenagers at home rather than soldiers on a battlefield. The conflicts of the superpowers are mirrored in the actions of the characters in the book. The little folk are just as cruel, petty and brutal as the governments that are squabbling over the Earth.

I don't have a great deal of faith in humankind as a species at the best of times, and a lot of it came out in this book. Humankind paid me back by not reading it. Whereas most of my other stories had spread to a good deal of foreign territories, Endgame didn't. I can't say I'm surprised. Nuclear bombs are so sixties.