Springing forward, with Thomas Legendre

A multimedia journey through the author's digital, philosophical, ice-hockey-adjacent world

Our last submissions window was held two years ago, in summer 2021, and though I read several dozen novels as part of it, only one of them could be described as a “literary, quantum, romantic techno-thriller”. In fact, it may be the only book I ever get the chance to read in that genre, and the sense of absolute uniqueness was a significant factor in Valley Press accepting the novel in question – Thomas Legendre’s Spring Fever – for publication in 2023. Other publishers may be larger and more powerful, but do they have a novel about an ice hockey player who fills his post-match interviews with philosophical theories…? Didn’t think so! The phrase “only at Valley Press” has never applied so directly.

“How did it feel to score that game-winning goal?”

“Phenomenal. That’s how it feels, Jack. Like everything else, it arises from the dual grounding of experience in both subjectivity and objectivity.”

“Sorry?”

I recently spoke to Thomas about how the book came into being, and also what the future might hold for both social media and humanity; you’ll find our interview below. (For a change of pace, the answers are interspersed with some illustrated extracts from Spring Fever, read by voice actor Tiffany Clare.)

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How would you introduce the subject matter of your novel concisely – perhaps in a lift with a complete stranger?

I’d say Spring Fever is a quantum romantic techno-thriller with a literary sensibility. Set in London and Nottingham, it involves a character called Amanda Nigh who works for a digital media company, an ice hockey player called Craig Merleau who talks like a Continental philosopher, and a global virus affecting computers and humans in disturbing ways.

Think of it as a diagonal step into the near future, with public health sensors and a few other technological developments, such as the IS or Intelligence System, which Amanda is beta testing.

Who is the ideal reader – i.e. the book’s perfect match – that you could have encountered in that lift? Would an existing interest in philosophy or quantum physics be helpful?

My ideal reader is someone who buys the book. I thought that sentence would be longer when I started typing it. But sure, I reckon someone with an interest in quantum physics or philosophy will appreciate certain aspects of the story, although I don’t think that sort of knowledge is necessary at all. My wife, Allyson, who was my first reader, is a literature teacher and writer, but she’s allergic to science and was just interested in [the developing relationship between] Amanda and Craig. She thought it was a page-turner, so that was the litmus test for me.

Given you submitted Spring Fever in our summer 2021 window, and it's essentially about a virus, is this a “lockdown book”? Perhaps a fever dream...?

Strangely enough, I started writing Spring Fever before COVID-19, mainly as a way of addressing the rift or gap between our everyday experience and the imperceptible world described by quantum physics, which in some ways corresponds to the gap between appearance and reality that underlies so much of social media. This really was a vexation of mine. I’m not normal. But then of course the pandemic had a huge effect. Suddenly my research on viruses and related issues was in the mainstream and I could draw from the daily news instead of articles on JSTOR. And social media went absolutely bonkers with everyone trapped at home. It was eerie in many ways, a bit like writing about a naval disaster a few months before the Titanic.

In that case, what provided the initial inspiration? 

Well, I had this preoccupation with quantum physics and digital media, which I just mentioned, but to be honest the whole thing was sparked by an ice hockey game. I was watching a post-game interview in which a player was asked what he was thinking when he scored a goal with just a few seconds remaining on the clock. The player uttered a few platitudes, trying to be nice about it, when of course the real answer is that he wasn’t thinking anything at all. I wondered what would happen if the player started speaking in grandiose philosophical terms, particularly with reference to phenomenology – that is, the study of the structures of experience and consciousness, or how we, as embodied subjects, perceive things. This whole scenario would be especially intriguing here in Britain, I thought, where ice hockey receives comparably little attention, and therefore has the potential to suddenly gain notice.

Then I began to wonder, what if this player’s philosophical pronouncements began to have an effect on his team’s performance, putting them on a winning streak? And what if we began to perceive subatomic phenomena such as gravitational quakes and dark energy? And what if these two issues were somehow related through digital technology? These questions all simmered away until I started writing about not Craig, but Amanda, who finds herself in the eye of the storm, surrounded by a strange new virus called Spring Fever and yet separate from it at the same time. 

Where did Amanda come from? Was she created as the perfect foil for Craig? Their interactions are, for me, the best part of the book – I was always looking forward to the next meeting.

I’m really glad to hear you say that. Amanda rose up quite naturally as the protagonist for reasons that remain unknown to me. She was just there. One advantage I discovered was that she allowed me to write about ice hockey from the perspective of someone unfamiliar with the game, which I thought would be helpful – in fact, much more helpful to most readers than any knowledge of quantum physics or phenomenology. She also had a depth and oddity that I found engaging. Hopefully, readers will feel the same way.

One of the larger issues addressed by the book is the convenience of digital technology vs. concern about its power in our daily lives. Big question now: do you think technology shifts in the twenty-first century, particularly the rise of smartphones, have been positive or harmful for society overall?

My glib answer, apart from the entire text of Spring Fever itself, is that these technological shifts are equivalent to the jet engine’s arrival in the twentieth century. Make of that what you will.

Another theme is how we have too much information and too little, at the same time. The rise of AI is expected to be as or more impactful than that of smartphones; how do you see AI affecting this issue?

What I find bizarre about AI is that it’s called AI and not, for example, SI, or Simulated Intelligence. I see no evidence of cognition in these programs. As far as I can tell, they produce text or other results by running algorithms at high speed in response to whatever inputs they are fed. Sometimes those inputs are the results or ‘corrections’ of previous iterations, but it’s still the same process. It’s easy to mistake computation and calculation for intelligence because sometimes it looks that way. Nevertheless, it’s quite a leap.

Strictly from a writer’s perspective, I think it will have a massive impact on intellectual property, especially in areas such as journalism, where multiple staff writers will be replaced by a single editor the way supermarkets have replaced cashiers with a clerk running around to six different tills to sort out scanning glitches with your onions and muesli.  

Valley Press is no longer active on (the smouldering ruins of?) Twitter, and I must admit the sword is dangling over our accounts on other platforms, especially now I've rounded up everyone with a passing interest onto Substack. What’s your prediction for the future of social media?

The X-tinction of Twitter is revealing in that it’s all about Elon. This is the downside of social media writ large. It encourages everyone to act like an asinine billionaire. My guess is that social media will continue to fragment into specialised niches or microcommunities, which are not only more rewarding but also less hazardous, while the megaplatforms will become more homogenised with proclamations and outrage across broader topics.

Finally, if you could share just one page of Spring Fever with that stranger in a lift, which would you choose?

It would have to be the first page, with the hope they would be intrigued enough to read the rest.

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That’s two authors now (following Emma Brankin) who have chosen their first page – I may need to think of a more provocative final question! Nonetheless, I shall end by honouring that request, and extending a big thank you to Thomas for taking part in the interview. More will be coming soon; and in the meantime, Spring Fever is available in the VP bookshop.

Amanda Nigh was standing on the Tube, scrolling and lensing through a new contact, when something snapped hard through the carriages and she tasted her own life like brimstone in her throat. She gripped a pole, tensing herself. Just a bump, apparently. But then it all lurched and knocked her into someone’s chest, a corduroy spicy musk she associated with clubbing even as she pulled herself up sharp. Had she screamed? She tugged her handbag back over her shoulder. Well, she hadn’t dropped her phone at least. And she hadn’t fallen, exactly, though others were dominoed and tangled around her.

She saw a tablet glowing on the floor, a bottle rolling at her feet, an elderly woman stretched like a cabaret singer across several laps. And was that a scraping sound as they rattled forward? The wheels, something? She felt it rising through her with a seismic rhythm, a convulsive power, the backbeat familiar and unsettling at once. She put a hand to her chest. It was within her. No, outside her. She glanced out at the stone blurring dimly beyond the windows with a momentum she sensed but couldn’t measure.

“You all right?”

She caught the Midlands accent as she glanced at him, the bloke who had served as her airbag, maybe a few years older with cropped hair and headphones collared around his neck and an array of buckles on his leather jacket which was unzipped, fortunately, otherwise it would have been like hitting a cheese grater. He showed her a chancer’s smile, like she owed him now, but this wasn’t a meet-cute so forget it. She gave him an apologetic nod and turned away.

Besides, with all that panic in her glands she could probably melt his personal hardware with her breath. She knew herself. Her IS had taught her these things. Enzymes, hormones. Blood pressure and skin resistance. They were the state of herself if she knew how to read them. She stuffed her phone into her handbag. She was intact.