Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [161]
Here’s how Anno Dracula evolved. At Sussex University in 1978, I took a course entitled Late Victorian Revolt, taught by the poet Laurence Lerner and Norman Mackenzie (Wells’s biographer), for which I wrote a thesis (‘The Secular Apocalypse: The End of the World in Turn of the Century Fictions’) which later cropped up as the work of the main character of my third novel, Jago. For this, I read up on invasion narratives (George Chesney’s ‘The Battle of Dorking’, Wells’s The War in the Air, Saki’s When William Came), which imagine England overwhelmed by its enemies (usually the Germans). I was already interested in alternate history science fiction and recognised in this mostly-forgotten genre the precursors of many twentieth-century stories which imagine an alternative outcome to the Second World War featuring a Nazi occupation of Britain (Len Deighton’s SS/GB, Kevin Brownlow’s film It Happened Here). Other variants are the Communist Britains of Constantine FitzGibbon’s When the Kissing Had to Stop and Kingsley Amis’s Russian Hide and Seek, the fascist future of Robert Muller’s After All, This is England (an underrated novel from a writer whose TV series Supernatural was also an influence on the Anno Dracula world) and the American-occupied England of my friend Paul McAuley’s story ‘The King Under the Hill’. In a footnote to my section on these stories, I described Dracula’s campaign of conquest in Stoker’s 1897 novel as ‘a one-man invasion’.
I’m not sure when all the connections were made, but at some point in the early ’80s it occurred to me that there might be story potential in an alternative outcome to the novel in which Dracula defeats his enemies and fulfils his stated intention to conquer Britain. It still seems to me something of a disappointment that Stoker’s villain, after all his meticulous planning and with five hundred years of scheming monstrousness under his cloak, has no sooner arrived in Britain than he trips up and sows the seeds of his eventual undoing by an unlikely pursuit of the wife of a provincial solicitor. Van Helsing describes Dracula’s project in Britain as to become ‘the father or furthurer of a new order of beings, whose road must lead through Death, not Life’. Yet Stoker allegorises Dracula’s assault on Britain entirely as an attack on the Victorian family, an emblem of all the things he prized and saw as fragile. It struck me as an interesting avenue to explore the kind of England, the kind of world, which would result if Van Helsing and his family of fearless vampire killers were defeated and Dracula was allowed to ‘father and further’ his new order. I remember discussing this idea with Neil Gaiman and Faith Brooker (then an editor at Arrow) around 1984, when Neil and I were compiling a book called Ghastly Beyond Belief for Faith and trying to come up with novel ideas we could sell her (I also remember gruesome horror novel pitches called The Creeps and The Set). Among many projects we talked about but never did much with was the idea of a trilogy on my ‘Dracula Wins’ theme, which would have concentrated on the workings of a vampire government from the 1880s to the First World War (Neil was keen on writing the trenches scenes). Nothing was ever written down, but the vision then was of a story that concentrated on high places: it was to have been set in the corridors of power, with Dracula as a major character, and the plot would be what eventually became the backstory of the novels, the workings of vampire politics, following