It’s all there in classical myth, in Gilgamesh, in Homer Dickens’s Hard Times, considering what happens when a country’s people become fodder to the latest industrial technology and the people who control it Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, all about the fallout from fake news, and his Pericles, the fallout from bad governance. And one of the things that has been most interesting about writing books pressed so consciously against the contemporaneous is that nothing is really new in what’s happening to us now. Is blatant political roguery new? Don’t be daft, and neither is the handshake between propagandist persuasion and whatever the latest technologies happen to be. Brexit has just made them properly visible to us all. Is blatant political roguery new? Don’t be daft, and neither is the handshake between propaganda and new technologyīrexit’s divisions? They aren’t new. I looked at what I’d written so far: a piece about a woman in a village hit by coastal erosion, social division, gentrification and austerity she walks along the edge of a massive security fence that has suddenly appeared across a piece of common land, then tries to have a dialogue with a security man who tells her repeatedly only that she’s not allowed. Then 2016 gave us the new word: “Brexit”. I started writing the first of the four, Autumn, in 2015. Writing these novels, then watching them take book form at what feels like the speed of light, has been a real revelation of the communality it takes to publish, and of the breathtaking expertise of the people working to the clock valiantly and with such goodwill at every stage of the process.īut I shake my head as I remember what I thought, back then – in the pre-referendum days: that these books would probably be pastoral evocations, rather traditional stories about the richness of the seasons, the workings of time in our lives etc.

Autumn ali smith sparknotes