Temple

That's correct. I optioned off the movie rights to Contest in early 1999. I've recently seen some of the ideas the movie guys have for the film, too. The special effects will be absolutely out of this world. Cannot wait to see it.

Will Contest—the novel, that is—be reissued by Pan Macmillan ?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! Pan are going to re-release Con test in late 2000. My humble apologies to anyone who tried to get it after they read Ice Station. I only printed 1,000 copies and by the time Ice Station came out, there were none left!

Where did the idea for Ice Station spring from?

For me, any novel starts with the question What would happen if… You ask yourself that question, and the answer is your novel. The idea for Ice Station came when I asked myself What would happen if someone discovered a spaceship somewhere on earth ? My answer: the country in whose territory it was found would grab it and hide it—a kind of Area 51 answer, really, and as a novel, not very satisfying.

So I extended the question to ask, What would happen if that spaceship was discovered in Antarctica, the only place on earth that isn't any country's territory? The answer to that question was much more interesting: it would be a free-for-all. An all- or-nothing race to see who could get the ship first. By making some of America's traditional allies (such as the

French countries which most Westerners don't usually see as threatswthe villains in Ice Station, I felt I made the story a little more geopolitically complex. Funnily enough, I wrote Ice Station in 1997 and only this year—1999, two whole years later—an Australian spy was caught by the FBI selling American secrets to the French! How about that!

Has Ice Station been sold overseas?

Yes, it has. Ice Station has been sold to publishers in the US, the UK, and Japan. Very cool. Can't wait to see a Japanese edition of it.

Were you surprised by the success of Ice Station?

That's a tough question to answer, principally because I think every writer thinks their book is a winner—and hence expects it to succeed! The best way to answer that question, then, is to say this: I think people like escapism, and that is exactly what Ice Station is. Pure, unadulterated, escapist entertainment. People experience so much angst and irritation in their everyday lives, that when they settle down at the end of the day to read a book, they just want to be entertained, to let the writer do the work for them. That's what I do, and that's why I think people liked the book.

Will Shane Schofield appear in another book?

I think so. In fact, in recent months, I have been dabbling with the idea of a sequel to Ice Station. Schofield is a very convenient hero for me to have because, being a Marine, I can get him into all sorts of trouble around the globe. In any case, I'd just like to bring characters like Mother and Gant back for more adventures. Mother in particular. She is one of my favourite creations, a character who really came to life off the page from the very first moment I created her. (Quick writing fact: believe it or not, I had not 'pre-imagined'

Mother when I thought up Ice Station. The day I wrote the scene in which she first appeared, I just sat back in my chair and said, 'Okay, so what's this Marine going to be like?“ In the space of thirty seconds I had a 200-pound, six-foot-tall woman with a fully-shaved head and a heart of gold. Boom.

Mother was bored. Rest assured, when she returns in Schofield, she will have a titanium leg—to replace the one she lost to a killer whale in Ice Station!

William Race is a very different hero to Shane Schofield, isn't he?

William Race is very different to Shane Schofield. While Schofield is a hero for all seasons—-a pure Indiana Jones type; a fearless-but-kind fellow who can kill ten bad guys but still tell the little girl standing beside him to cover her eyes— William Race is more of an ordinary guy who must discover his heroic nature in the most extraordinary of circumstances.

As many people would guess, I like to picture my heroes in terms of the actors who might play them in movie versions of my books. Schofield was always written with Tom Cruise in mind for the role (he's even described in the book as being five-foot-ten with spiky black hair!). William Race, on the other hand, was always Brad Pitt—Brad Pitt with glasses and an unloseable New York Yankees cap.

By making Race an ordinary man, however, I found I could have a lot of fun with his fear. He is not a hero. He is just a guy. He gets frightened, even when he is doing the most death-defying stuff imaginable (lowering himself under speeding riverboats, leaping from one moving aeroplane to another…). At one point in Temple, he sees a skeleton in the temple which he thinks belongs to Renco—who most certainly is a hero—and he thinks: that's what happens to heroes.