Collaborations with Allan J Scott

No one really chooses to collaborate; it just happens. That, at least, was how I came to write The Ice King with a man who is now one of my best and oldest friends - Michael Scott Rohan.

I met him at Oxford, at the Oxford University Science Fiction Group (OUSFG). We rapidly discovered a complete set of common interests, apart from SF and fantasy. Mythology (and the Vikings in particular). Music (and Wagner in particular). Literature (the older the better). History. And - above all - writing.

I had been writing 'novels' since I was four and a half - Mike came to it relatively late (by those standards), but quickly made up for lost time. When I became editor of the OUSFG magazine, SFinx, I was delighted to publish his very first story. It was witty. It had a slightly shabby but entirely three-dimensional central character (later stolen (?) by John Mortimer). It involved a rather neat interpretation of international law. And the problem? Who actually owns a valuable asteroid that has been shunted sideways through hyperspace...?

Mike and I were two of the regulars at SFinx's writers' meetings, where stories were given a thorough drubbing by fellow-writers before they were considered for publication. One key OUSFG meeting with the late James Blish transformed these sessions. Jim's frank and constructive criticism gave all of us a sound basis for assessing our work. As the meetings expanded - and other budding authors joined it - we became the so-called Pieria group. At various times this group included David Langford, Robert Holdstock, Andrew Stephenson, Chris Morgan, Garry Kilworth, John Jarrold, Richard Evans, and many others whose writing or editing was to have a profound effect on SF and fantasy in the UK and beyond.

Mike and I were a little guarded in discussing our ideas with each other, mainly because we tended to think along distressingly similar lines. But eight years after leaving college I went freelance. I was looking for things to do and projects to start. And the British Museum were mounting a Viking exhibition. I discussed with Mike the idea of writing a book about one particular aspect of Viking history - their conversion to Christianity. Time was short, and I couldn't do the book on my own. Mike stepped in to help, another friend - Philip Gardner - offered to publish it, and a few months later The Hammer and the Cross was completed. We went on to form a partnership - Asgard Publishing Services - that is still alive and kicking today.

Meanwhile Mike and I had been mutually fascinated by one particular piece of Viking folklore - the draugar. Draugar are the undead, and they make frequent appearances in the Icelandic sagas. They are disturbingly similar to the Central European vampires - their victims will also become draugar, and the only way to destroy them seems to be by fire. But how could we bring a draug into the twentieth century?

The answer came to us both while I was visiting Mike in Oxford. It came in the same words, and at the same time. 'A Viking ship burial...!' And after that we had no choice. We simply had to write the book together...

When asked how we work together, we have a standard answer: 'We argue a lot!' It's partly true, but only because we're both passionate about 'getting it right'. Mike and I share an enormous interest in, and respect for, our sources. We prefer to draw our ideas from the writings, and the thoughts, of our distant ancestors - which is pretty much what Tolkien did when he wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. For The Ice King we were drawing both on experience (of archaeological digs) and knowledge (of the Viking period, and of the myth of the draugar).

After a lot of discussion - and a lot of toing and froing with draft outlines - we settled on the plot and characters for the novel. Once that was done, we effectively wrote alternate chapters (with Mike taking a lot of the strain towards the end, as my freelance career began to lift off). Finally we revised and edited each other's chapters, 'adopting' key characters and writing or rewriting their dialogue. So Hal Hansen, the Danish archaeologist, had my voice (complete with such Danish swearwords as I could winkle out of my mother's family in Denmark); his sinister American sidekick, Jay, was scripted by Mike. The 'Hel-ride' towards the end of the novel was very much a joint effort, with Hal making a visionary journey through the nine worlds of Norse mythology in search of a weapon to destroy the draugar. And the climax? Mostly Mike - and very well he did it.

Once we'd finished Ice King, we both promised not to do it again. Which is how we came to write A Spell of Empire a few years later, with much the same mixture of argument, cussing out, rewriting and revising. In this instance two of the characters were our own caricatures of each other. Guy de Guillac, the ballistic Burgundian whose magic can only reach full power when fuelled by alcohol, bears a passing resemblance to Mike. Thorgrim Alfvinnson, the sarcastic Scandinavian with two left feet, bears a slightly more distant resemblance to me (at least Thorgrim has 20-20 vision...) As a result, a new element entered the plotting - how could we get our writing partner into a really embarrassing situation, and leave him to sort it out in the next chapter...?

Don't ask. My career has moved into speechwriting, copywriting, and scripting for business video. Spare time is mostly something other people have. Even so, we've discussed sequels both to Ice King and to Spell - and with enough provocation we might even write one of them. I'm hankering to write fiction again - my only solo novel, The Dragon in the Stone, was finished eight years ago in the week I got married - and we've had some encouraging noises from our readers.

Erm... Watch this space?

Allan Scott