Where did the inspiration for Proximity come from?
From my dread that the world of Proximity is really close to happening.
We already have companies in Sweden and the USA whose employees have embedded RFID chips, ‘smart’ motorways causing congestion, and every bit of weather being given a name. We have an overbearing nanny state looking to change behaviour by rules and not education. The litigation culture is growing and we are heading towards constant surveillance.
With our technology, we rush for the new versions and buy the promise of convenience and ease, but we don’t bother to…
In writing Proximity, I started with a simple question. If the police always know where I am...how do I kill you?
From a killers perspective, constant, accurate knowledge of where I am, or more importantly where I was at the time of the crime, may not stop me killing you, but it would almost certainly guarantee getting caught very easily. This would make for a very short and disappointing crime novel, but it does have an appeal in real life.
The killer in Proximity needed to circumvent the total surveillance of the book. It may be fiction, but some of the surveillance described is already…
Exclusive extract of Proximity for first stop on the blog tour
I found this to be an extraordinary book considering it is a debut novel. It functions on a couple of levels: as a crime thriller with a deeply delicious twist and as a chilling indictment of how far our dependence on technology can intrude in an all-encompassing manner upon our lives. But what is so clever is how the book offers the pros and the cons, making it hard in some respects to come down firmly on one side or the other. How could you object to the eradication of crime?
In many dystopian/futuristic novels the landscape is stylised and, in a sense, one step removed from our immediate…
Hannah interviews Jem about Proximity and the implications and motivations for the world it describes.