Rejuvenation, worm holes, augments, and others in Mole Hunt are basically tropes of science fiction. Generally speaking, technology is restricted only to the imagination. Who would have imagined submarines and planes, for example, could actually work back the 1400/1500s? Yet that’s when Leonardo de Vinci drew diagrams for both. There are stacks of similar examples of the imagination coming to reality. Remember Maxwell Smart using his shoe phone? Pure, unadulterated fiction in the 60s (how could a phone work without wires?! we thought), and yet here we are with mobile phones. So really, I’ve just let my imagination run wild with Mole Hunt. I suspect there’s nothing impossible in the technology I use.

You’ll have noted that poor Anneke is set upon by multiple opponents, aliens and superior fire power. Logically speaking, I doubt a “normal” person would survive such opposition. You see, every character must suspend disbelief. Even Superman has flaws: Kryptonite, can’t see through lead, magic, and something less tangible, his matchless morals are used against him — shall he save a population of 20 million, or shall he save Lois Lane. Which one?! is the proposal put to him by the villain. Of course, he manages to save both at the same time …

I guess I could have come out with all guns blazing in the first book, but remember, The Maximus Black Files is a trilogy. And this series is more about two characters, Maximus Black and Anneke Longshadow. When you look at Mole Hunt, you’ll see there are enough aliens to balance out the “humans”: the Sentinels and of course the Envoy. I don’t believe in having tokenistic aliens — such as the bar scene in Star Wars that seemed to be there just to add colour.

There has to be some suspension of disbelief. One might well ask how come Artemis Fowl can travel anywhere he likes when surely most countries wouldn’t allow him visas because of his criminal history (come to that, we never see main characters applying for visas — they just pop up all over the world). It’s implied that Maximus gets himself relocated; at other times, he could either be on leave or is using jump-gates to circumnavigate time. Other characters within RIM also have a certain flexibility, too.

In Mole Hunt they use jump-gates. Anneke actually uses her craft’s cryogenic facility to put her to sleep. This can often explain why people’s looks change (or not!) over periods of time. “She programmed the course computer then warmed up her suspension tube. Might as well sleep through the next fourteen days. It would be less painful, and the ship’s medkit could do a few repairs. Fact is, she realised, looking at herself in a mirror, I need a renovator. What a mess”.

Dog-eat-dog, I’d say. We glimpse Max and Deema’s lives as slaves. Human commodity has been a flourishing business throughout time. As recent as colonial United States and penal transportation from England to Australia in the 1700/1800s, we’ll see humans used as work fodder. Imagine colonising mineral-rich worlds. Developers will stop at nothing to get their labour, and I can easily see slavery being part of their strategy, much as press-ganging innocent people from the streets of London to man ships bound for the horizon.

I somehow doubt a wish-machine will ever be invented. But that would be it. Why have one gadget wish when a particular gadget will get you countless more gadget?!

Not at all. I’m a bit of a Luddite, really. A typical digital immigrant. I suspect if I had time on my hands, I’d get more into stuff like games — I like the look of virtual reality games, for example. Maybe when I “retire”, but I can’t see that happening till I can no longer operate a keyboard, in which case ….