war... war constantly changes

a truism of any historical drama, and especially war films, is this:

A historical drama is more about the time it is being made in than it is about the era in which it is set.

To a greater or lesser extent, this is true about any war drama you care to mention. MASH was about Vietnam, Apocalypse Now was about the psychological fallout (the horror, the horror) of Vietnam. Platoon was about the craziness of the eighties. Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List were about the debt Spielberg felt he owed the respective protagonists.

A historical piece of fiction, especially a piece of war fiction, is a big chunk of now.

So why am I writing one?

A couple of reasons. First of all, I feel a curious connection to the first world war that I don't feel to the second world war. Not to the causes, but to the sacrifice. It's always felt to me like the Great War was the last of the old gung-ho Give Johnny Foreigner What He's Got Coming To Him expeditions: the last war of a generation and a mindset that honestly believed sayings like "The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton". The last war, in other words, that didn't take full account of the range of what I like to think of as Bastard Tactics made possible by developments in weapon and transport technology. As such, I feel connected to it out of sorrow for a generation of young men on both sides who were told that climbing out of a trench and walking slowly towards a machine gun was a solid strategy. My maternal grandfather was one of those men. It's nearly a hundred years ago now, but it's as recent as a man who held my mother in his arms.

The other reason is that, in the United States at least, almost nobody remembers the first world war. It's an ingrained part of British cultural heritage (thanks, oddly enough, to Ben Elton, Richard Curtis, Mr Bean and Gregory House), but it was a war America was only in for a year, right at the end. If pushed, the moderately educated would remember the Lusitania, but the horrors of Ypres and the Somme were something that happened in another country to people from another country. As such, it does not live particularly well either in American collective memory or in American popular culture (which are, let's be quite honest here, very close to being the same thing. For those who would accuse me of cultural chauvinism, the exact same thing can be said about British collective memory and popular culture).

The pop culture Second World War is teeming with superheroes, colorful fighters, and everything that Hollywood and the House Of ideas can throw at is. Captain America punches out Hitler while the Fighting Yank storms across battlefields. Billy Zane and Eric Stoltz aboard the Memphis Belle drop bombs with deadly accuracy while Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt both make moves against "the arch-enemy of the world".

You don't hear much about super powers in the first world war because it doesn't feel entirely suitable. Honestly I feel the same about the second (which is why I agree with David Brothers in his write up of a recent DC comic where The Flash goes back and shoots nazis for various reasons best left forgotten), but especially about the first. I wouldn't have written, nor would I want to write, a book about costumed strongmen running out of the trenches and Giving The Boche What For. Such powers as are in this book are small, albeit with potentially large results, and are wielded, I hope, by men, not four color cut-outs. The morality isn't four-color either. it's easy to paint the second world war as a war against evil, because, as David Mitchell rightly said, the other side had skulls on their uniforms. The first world war was a lot less well defined when it came to saying who the baddies were, or indeed where the enemy was to the average soldier.

If this book works, and I hope it will, it will be morally ambiguous, realistic without being dark-for-the-sake-of-darkness, and ultimately gripping.

Ten years ago, I was rehearsing for Journey's End, a first world war play by R C Sheriff what everyone who cares about good drama or accurate depictions of war should see. It's been filmed a number of times, most recently in the 1980s for a TV adaptation that starred Jeremy Northam, but see it on stage if you can.

Six years ago, I was discussing ideas for a superhero series with each volume set at a different point in history, and I came up with the bare idea for this (Full credit here, the universe was a shared idea from myself and a very talented man called Zach Dotsey, and I owe him greatly for sharing his ideas and listening to mine).

More than ninety years ago, Toby Granton stood on a rooftop in London, about to make a leap in the dark that would lead to his world becoming much more dangerous and much more important.

On Sunday I will start to write.