Authorgraph no 275: Christopher Edge
Christopher Edge interviewed by Andrea Reece
If you are familiar with his books, compact, page-turning, character-led and science-filled adventure stories that connect very directly with young readers, then you won’t be surprised to learn that Christopher Edge is a thoughtful, generous and lively interview subject, with a wide-ranging knowledge of children’s books, past and present, and strongly held conviction that, as CS Lewis believed, any book worth reading at the age of ten will be equally worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond. I spoke to him just after publication of his twelfth children’s book, an apposite time to look back over his writing career, which fortunately shows no sign of slowing, the very opposite in fact.
It was a stint at Longman as publisher of the company’s secondary list that provided the inspiration for Christopher to start writing. A voracious reader as a child, roaming the shelves of his local library, and indeed writer of his own comics, he’d never thought about writing as a career, but assembling Longman’s list of class readers meant reading the best contemporary books for children, among them Millions by Frank Cottrell-Boyce. ‘I remember taking it home, starting to read and just falling in love with the voice of the character. When I got to the end of the book, it showed me the verve and the ambition that’s found in children’s fiction. And it sent me on a little shiver through time back to that eight- or nine-year-old me standing in my local library, choosing books.’ He started writing on the train to and from work – 500 words each way – typing it all up at the weekends. He’d written several books before he found an agent, with Twelve Minutes to Midnight published by Nosy Crow in 2012. That became a series of three, written to mimic Victoria ‘Penny Dreadfuls’, but it wasn’t until the publication of The Many Worlds of Albie Bright in 2016 that he really found his voice, and success.
Unlike his first books, this was a first person, present tense narrative, using big ideas of science to tell a human story, in this case of a boy who has lost his mother to cancer and decides to use quantum physics to try and find the parallel universe where she is still alive. He enjoyed the experience of writing it and other books followed, also wrapping character and a scientific concept together: The Jamie Drake Equation, about a boy whose dad is an astronaut and the possibility of making contact with alien intelligence; The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day, which powerfully foregrounds family, sibling relationships and the nature of reality; The Longest Night of Charlie Noon, the book he says has the most of him in it, which explores concepts of time. He finds popular science writing a rich source of inspiration, referencing Carlo Rovelli and pulling books off the packed shelves behind him – Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark, The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose – but despite a love of Arthur C. Clarke and a 1980s childhood coloured by Stephen Spielberg films, he shies away from the idea that he’s writing science fiction. ‘For me, it’s not about space and laser guns and those cliches of the genre. It’s about the way that science fiction allows you to tell very human stories. I was somebody who hated science at school. I wasn’t very good at it, and it was taught in a very dull way (apologies to all science teachers!), but I became interested in it in later life through popular science books. The things that that interest me now in science have gone into my books, whether that’s theories of quantum physics and parallel universes in The Many Worlds of Albie Bright or ideas about time and the block universe in a book like The Longest Night of Charlie Noon. Where philosophy and science can meet, that’s always been the fascination for me. You can explore the big questions of existence: what does it mean to be human? Why are we here?’
This year saw publication of the second Escape Room adventure, Escape Room Game Zero – not a sequel to Escape Room, but ‘an 
equal’ says Chris – and these are books which very much ask big questions, in particular, ‘how do we save the world?’ Both follow young characters inside virtual escape rooms, their challenge to solve the puzzles and find their way out before they are trapped for ever; both stories end with the kind of twist that is now a hallmark of his writing. Both explore ideas of artificial intelligence, but while the first, Escape Room, could be described as cli-fi (dealing with climate change), in Game Zero, the focus is on how we live now, our online existence. ‘The seed of Game Zero landed for me during lockdown. While we were not allowed to walk more than 5 minutes from our house, my daughter and I started playing The Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch and could suddenly ride across these huge landscapes, so there’s a notion within it of how the worlds that we live in can open up through technology.’
The books are bestsellers, something no-one predicted initially. ‘It was a word of mouth phenomenon’, says Chris. ‘There was no massive marketing campaign behind Escape Room, it got a lovely review in The Times, but no more than that. It was selling like my other books, and then it just started to grow. And grow. And the success of it has felt very organic, which is great, but there’s something about this book, whether it’s the themes or the approach that chimes with readers today.’ With the widely reported crisis in children’s reading for pleasure, this kind of response is increasingly important.
‘There are so many great books being published for children,’ says Chris, ‘But a lot of those books could have been published 50 years ago. That’s not a criticism because we need a huge range of books, but I think because of the moment we’re living in, there’s a need to publish stories that speak to young readers, both in terms of the type of stories that are being told, but also the way that those stories are presented, so that children see reading as something valid.’
He describes how in his author events, he puts up a slide that’s a screenshot in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and also one from an early version of Minecraft screenshot with a place called the Far Lands, which inspired the episode in Escape Room Game Zero where Eden finds herself beyond the end of the world. ‘When I put those slides up, an audible ripple of excitement goes through the theatre or hall. Those children are seeing their worlds, their entertainment forms, the stories that speak to them via screens, in books that maybe they associate with school or learning, and those stories sing with the same voice.’
In a landscape of ever-growing page extents, his are on the short side: the Escape Room stories and new Fear Files junior horror series for Walker are all under 200 pages. ‘I’m trying to make these stories as accessible to the readers as I can, but I’m not dumbing down to do that. I think there’s sometimes a belief that when books like mine are a bit shorter, they’re not as challenging or demanding. But the thing I remember from reading as a child, is that when you love a story, you go back to it. You read and reread. And I want to write stories that readers can race through on a first reading, just turning the pages. But then there are depths, things hidden in the stories, a richness that they’ll find over time, and maybe even if they go back as an adult reader.’
There are more books in the schedule for next year, in the Fear Files series and a new series for Macmillan, How to Steal the Future. Will they be asking the same kind of big questions? ‘I don’t think I’ll always be exploring ways to save the world, but I think the stories I write are always about a character searching. In The Longest Night Charlie Noon for example, Charlie meets an older version of herself and they remember her tapping out messages in a kind of Morse code, and I think what I’m doing in books is sending messages out to the readers, but I’m also sending messages back to my younger self. My readers are still looking out at the world around them; they haven’t got fixed taste in terms of the books they like; they haven’t got fixed ideas of the world; they’re still discovering it. And in my stories, I’m trying to present the wonders in the world that are hidden in the fabric of reality. I’m writing for those readers looking out at this world with wonder. I think my books always going to be looking out.’
Andrea Reece is Managing Editor of Books for Keeps.
Books mentioned, all written by Christopher Edge and published by Nosy Crow
Twelve Minutes to Midnight, 978-0857630506, £7.99 pbk
The Many Worlds of Albie Bright, 978-0857636041, £7.99 pbk
The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day, 978-1788000291, £6.99 pbk
The Jamie Drake Equation, 978-0857638403, £6.99 pbk
The Longest Night of Charlie Noon, 978-1788004947, £7.99 pbk
Escape Room, 978-1788007962, £7.99pbk
Escape Room Game Zero, 978-1805135845, £7.99 pbk
