Recently, while reading Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Stamping Butterflies, I wondered why no-one has ever written a cyberpunk-esque novel set in Athens. On a hill sits the building which modernity took as it's symbol of choice, while below, stretching away as far as the eye can see is the city that modernity built from concrete and ethnic cleansing.
That city is an interzone, where tourists from Europe and Asia with digital cameras and audio guides mingle with cheap immigrant labour from Africa and Albania, selling CDs on the beach and reviving crumbling Ottoman mosques. Small boats with a variety of cargoes make their way across the Aegean, and getting beaten and fitted up by the police isn't unknown.
A month or so ago, I ran into a guy called Phil. Phil used to work as an 18-30 holiday rep in Spain. These day's he's an office worker, but he missed the old lifestyle. Apparently that lifestyle consisted of a maximum of one hour's sleep a night, knowing the moves to every Steps dance routine, vodka-redbull for breakfast, and regularly vomiting blood.
So I think I've got my main character.
2 comments:
Do it for NaNoWriMo!
I'm still deciding whether or not to do it this year. If I do, it'll be a Cold War thriller with David Bowie and Iggy Pop as the main characters.
Sadly I think all my writing efforts in November should be aimed at the thesis. Also, I don't really know enough about Athens to write something set there.
I would like to write it, though.
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