The first draft was dreadful, it took its lumps in the first critiquing, and I went away and instead of tweaking it I more or less took it apart and rewrote it completely over the course of a few days, and it was better-received the second time round.
Some time later, the sainted Ian Whates was putting together his first Solaris Rising anthology, and asked me if I had anything I could submit, so I sent him what was, at the time, called “The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man.” Ian liked the story, which made it into the book, but Peter Hamilton already had a piece in there with “The Return of…” in the title, so that had to go.
Some time after that, there was a signing of the book at Forbidden Planet, which I kind of gate-crashed — I love signing books; I’d sign other people’s if I was asked — and at that I met mighty Solaris editor Ben Smith, who asked me if I was working on anything else, and I mentioned I’d been working on a novel for some time.
About a year later, Ben got back in touch. ‘Just wondering if you’d finished that novel you told me about…’
And, long story short, that’s how Europe In Autumn came to be published. Just goes to show, you never can tell.
About the Author
Dave Hutchinson was born in Sheffield in 1960. After reading American Studies at the University of Nottingham, he moved into journalism. He is the author of five collections of short stories, most recently As the Crow Flies (Bewrite, 2004), the novels The Villages (Cosmos Books, 2001) and Europe in Autumn (Solaris, 2014), and the novella The Push (NewCon Press, 2009). Both The Push and Europe in Autumn have been shortlisted for BSFA awards. His next novel, Community, which is a spin-off from Europe in Autumn though not a direct sequel, is due from Solaris in 2016. Dave currently lives in London.