MB Reed

Author and mathematician

 

Why this novel?

I started the novel “The Hammond Conjecture” as a change from the alternate-history novels such as “SS-GB”, “Fatherland”, “Dominion” et al, which all depict Britain after Germany had won the War as an unremittingly bleak and hellish, ‘1984’-style dystopia. It is also a reaction to the hagiography of Winston Churchill in those novels.

I set it in the late 1960’s, not the immediate aftermath of the Conflict. What would such a Britain be like? And what would a person from that world think of our one of that time, with its Iron Curtain, on the brink of nuclear Armageddon?

If the alternate events of May 1941 seem far-fetched, see ‘Double Standards: the Rudolf Hess Cover-up’, by L Picknett, C Prince and S Prior (Sphere 2002)

If the development of ‘National Socialism with a Human Face’ seems unlikely, consider the evolution of the USSR after Stalin, Spain after Franco, China after Mao.