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Jogar às escondidas pode ser muito divertido, mas imagina fazê-lo com um buraco negro invisível que nunca está onde se espera! É isso que os astrónomos fazem quando procuram buracos negros em pequenas galáxias anãs. Estas são mais pequenas do que as ga…

SFFWorld: You paint a pretty grim picture of the future although some would probably say that’s where we’re heading if we don’t take the environmentally issues seriously. Is this something you’ve wanted to set the focus on?

Christopher Priest: You can paint a grim picture of the present day. Or of Victorian England. Or of La Belle Epoque. Or of the Old West. Or you can instead celebrate it, relish it, enjoy it.

Just because a novel is set in an environmentally challenged future doesn’t mean it automatically acquires “seriousness”. As global warming really gets going, people will still make love, eat dinner, laugh at jokes. There’s nothing much that’s inherently “grim” in The Adjacent, although the background is a bit of a problem.

Here we are in the world of the present: with madmen fracturing the bedrock for a few extra years of “cheap” energy, of Russia rattling sabres at its neighbours, of extremists attacking children because they want to go to school, of big corporations polluting the world for the sake of a quick buck. Life goes on, seriously or unseriously. You make of it what you can.

SFFW: Have you ever struggled between what you would like to happen to a character and what you considered more sensible to occur? Can you tell us when and what did you do at last?

CP: When things are going well, books often feel as if they are writing themselves. Certainly that is true of characters. Once you have got a grip on what they are like, what their past is, what their present concerns or ambitions might be, then many scenes will develop naturally. You just turn them loose and see what happens.

The opposite is also true: if you try to force a character to do or say something that the story demands, quite often the scene will feel later as if it has gone wrong.