Following on from the longlist announcement of the 2016/17 GBP Short Story Prize, we asked each of the thirteen writers three questions about themselves, their story, and their inspirations. Here's Henrietta Rose-Innes, whose longlisted short story The Second Law will soon be available to read as a digital single. You'll also find a short biography of Henrietta after her answers.

 

 

I’m from Cape Town, South Africa, where I’ve lived most of my life, but I’m currently studying in Norwich, using the opportunity to finish my fifth novel. I’ve been writing with intent for about fifteen years. For most of my twenties, I dodged the call. I wanted to be in the natural sciences – in a parallel universe, I’m digging up dinosaur bones – but could never commit to any one path. Now I tell myself that writing is a way to inhabit alternate lives, and never have to choose between them. I remain very interested in the natural sciences, and I’m increasingly concerned with environmental ideas.  

 

My first proper publication came at the age of 30, with a short novel called Shark’s Egg. This was followed by a three more novels and a short-story collection, all initially published in South Africa. I’m very happy to say my novels Nineveh and Green Lion and my short-story collection Homing have now found homes in the wider world – my publisher in the UK is the excellent Aardvark Bureau. 

 

 

This story actually has a precise origin. I was finishing Green Lion, and I’d been searching out pictures of artificial and animatronic lions. I visited an exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci drawings, which featured a reconstruction of his mechanical lion. This led me to his speculative design for a perpetual-motion machine. Clever people have actually built little models of this too – obviously non-functional, but beautiful objects. I was struck by the poignancy of the desire for inexhaustible energy. 

 

The resonance was very personal. This was shortly after I moved to the UK from Cape Town, in the wake of my mother’s death, and the story is probably the most self-consciously therapeutic piece of writing I’ve done: I knew I was using it to manage my own sense of dislocation and entropy. In this distracted state of mind, I absentmindedly destroyed, broke or lost a succession of phones, and I think the character of Ryan is based on sales assistants I encountered over the months in various London and Norwich mobile-phone shops. The cold mechanistic universe takes everything from you in the end, including the apps, but a helpful young man can be a great consolation.

 

The other images came quickly – winter streets; airports; memories of my father’s carpentry workshop – but they took a long time to fit together. Unusually for me, I showed the story in draft form to a number of friendly readers, who helped me to comb out its tangles.

   

 

I’ll name a few who feel particularly pertinent, given the kind of writing – at one remove from the real – that I’m trying to do at the moment. I’m a fan of Ben Marcus, whose collection Leaving the Sea is electrifyingly inventive; and I love Deborah Levy’s sensibility in collections like Black Vodka. JG Ballard has always been important to me, from when I was an adolescent and his singular voice spoke to me from the pages of the sci-fi anthologies I devoured in the Cape Town public library. Also (to sneak a fourth), I was recently galvanised by China Miéville’s collection Three Moments of an Explosion. Each of these writers has an uncompromising idiosyncrasy, moments of beautiful weirdness, in their long fiction as in their short. If I could smuggle some of that into my own stories, I’d be a happy writer.