Nimble, Restless Intellects
Posted by Literary-Titan
World of Worlds follows young travelers, reporters, climbers, drifters, and idealists across continents and political upheaval as adventure becomes a reckoning with danger, history, and the self. What drew you to the period between 1968 and 1981 as the backdrop for these stories?
WORLD OF WORLDS is a collection of action and adventure stories during a time of transition, upheaval, exploration, and self-discovery. These tales are the product of culture shock. Or more precisely, reverse culture shock. Whatever it was by the mid-1970s, my life on the road at an end but not quite willing to give it up, I decided to try my hand at literature by recreating in fictional form the characters, complexities, landscapes, situations, tastes, smells, psychologies, dramas, insights, pleasures, and terrors I had seen in the worlds I had traveled. The main time focus is from 1968, that hinge year, to 1974. That was the moment of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Vietnam War, when Apartheid firmly gripped South Africa and wars of national liberation swirled around it, and African dictatorships sprouted like poisonous weeds, and political killing became the norm.
Many of the characters are young, restless, and morally tested. What interested you about writing people at that stage of life?
Only young people should contemplate making the journeys described in the stories. The characters – overwhelmingly young – are Americans, mostly, but there also are Australians, Brits, and Africans. An alienated, energetic, and rebellious bunch, they have been on the move for months on end. They often are challenged by the situations they encounter. That is due partly to their limited experience and judgment. Also, they are alone in foreign spaces, where everything is new and strange. To overcome their problems and to succeed, they need courage, quick thinking, energy, curiosity, and empathy in much higher doses than if they had simply stayed at home. The characters create their own predicaments and manage their own escapes. Or sometimes not.
The stories balance adventure with reflection and consequence. How did you approach that balance?
The characters in WORLD OF WORLDS have nimble, restless intellects. They think a lot. But they face fearful stress often of their own making: an engagement going up in smoke; an illusory friendship unmasked; ideals nearly betrayed; a journalist chasing a perilous story; a conniving financial fugitive near broke in central Africa; an Englishman begging in India; a hitchhiker surrounded by violent hatred in South Africa; an overworked reporter about to burn his bridges; a mountain climber escaping from himself; two travelers in a leaky canoe on the Congo River. Consequence and responsibility come from personal choice; they can be frighteningly unpredictable.
What do you hope readers take away from the collection’s encounters with political unrest, culture shock, and personal ambition?
It’s usually a good idea to be aware of what the locals are thinking when one is abroad. It can save you a lot of trouble. The triad of political unrest, culture shock, and personal ambition were constants among travelers in underdeveloped parts of the world in the 1960s and 1970s, though. They were particularly prominent in Africa amid the instability and aftershocks that followed the end of colonialism. Is that moment behind us? The characters make unlikely role models. As one reviewer of WORLD OF WORLDS remarked, “What lingers most powerfully is the remarkable fortitude of these central characters. Seen from a contemporary perspective, they feel almost otherworldly—resilient figures thrust into remote corners of the globe, often facing misfortune or profound uncertainty. One cannot help but wonder if, placed in similar predicaments today, would modern travelers possess the same grit and resourcefulness?”
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
This is political fiction from the front lines. An unusually evocative and immersive work based on lived experience, the authentic international narratives in WORLD OF WORLDS wrestle with the tumultuous years 1968-1981, but they are painfully, ironically current.
The characters, Americans mostly-tough, rebellious youth, far from home, on bad roads, usually broke-test cultural and racial limits in strange, alluring, but pitiless surroundings, exposed to relentless existential and physical pressures that threaten their moral underpinnings and their very survival.
WORLD OF WORLDS readers prize Vietnam-era historical fiction, post-colonial Africa travel stories, character-driven 1970s political thrillers, coming-of-age adventure. They want moral seriousness alongside the action. Anyone who has traveled the world’s back roads-foreigners abroad, children of expats, tourists, students of post-independence Africa, Africans, Europeans, Americans, Australians-will recognize the authenticity immediately.
The author is an accomplished novelist, journalist, and diplomat. But above all, he was there.