Nicolas Binge is an author of four science fiction novels; his latest is Dissolution.
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Nicolas Binge is an author of four science fiction novels; his latest is Dissolution.
Nicolas Binge’s latest novel is Dissolution, described as “A woman dives into her husband’s memories to uncover a decades-old feud threatening reality itself.” It is about memory and aging, and tells the story of a couple that has been married for decades as the man slips into dementia. Nicolas explained that he has experience with this. “One of the things that primed me to write this book has been watching multiple people, namely my grandparents on both sides of the family, experience some forms of this. It was sad to watch. It felt like watching someone’s identity being slowly scooped out of them.”
The premise of the novel is that “Maggie believes her husband has Alzheimer’s, and she’s trying to take care of him, even as he forgets her. A mysterious stranger shows up at her door, and tells her that he does not, in fact, have Alzheimer’s, that actually his memories are being removed by a third party to bury some deep secret in his past that should never come to light. If they want to save him, they’re going to have to go into his memories and kind of and dig it out.”
The words memory and remember come up very often in the novel, but also the finality of someone’s self being erased. Nicolas describes this book as “a love story written across many decades.” In the novel, the main character, Maggie says, “at some point you pick up your child for the very last time, and you don’t know at the time, you don’t know that it’s the last time you’ll ever do it.”
Not all is dark, however. Nicolas says, “When I write, one of the central points where my inspirations come from, is exploring some of the things that scare me most about the world, the fears and the dreads, and finding fictional ways to put them on the page and interrogate them. It was finding a way through that fear and dread to find a path back to joy.”
Stanley, Maggie’s husband and the other main character of the novel, was an outcast. He came from a coal miner’s family, and he got a scholarship into an elite boarding school. A professor took him under his wing and introduced him to other students, who were doing research into memory, playing memory games “pushing the extent of memories as far as they can go.”
I asked Nicolas about the title, Dissolution, because there was a novel by C.J. Samson with the same name. “It was a complete accident,” he said, “I think we got away with it because the genres are entirely different.” And that’s the second of his novels with titles similar to other books. His previous novel, Ascension, “was in production the same year that another book was coming out by another Scottish writer who wanted to call his book Ascension as well.” He heard that there was a bit of wrangling about this, about the problems of two science fiction books with the same title coming out in the same year, so the title of the other novel, by Martin MacInnes, was changed to In Ascension.
Nicolas contacted me saying that Scrivener, “changed the way I draft and edit and has genuinely had a huge impact on my process.” He particularly likes Scrivener because, “there’s a lot of kind of structural tomfoolery that goes on, jumping around with timelines,” as is the case with Dissolution.
There are two timelines in Dissolution, one of them is going forward and the other one’s going forward in the past. “And as the book goes on, they start to merge and bleed into each other and change in a variety of fun ways.”
Because of these dual timelines, Scrivener is especially useful to ensure continuity. “If I’m changing a sentence or something that happens in one chapter, I want to jump to another chapter and make sure that that change is also happening at the same time. Jumping from chapter to chapter in Word is painful, whereas if everything’s broken down scene by scene in the sidebar in Scrivener, I can just click, click, click.”
We talked about his use of multiple timelines, and I said that Dissolution feels almost like a TV series, in the sense that one episode gives you some information, and then the next one gives you a little more, and the next one gives you a little more, in the same way that a crime novel does. Nicolas said, “I think of all my novels fundamentally as mystery novels. That there’s a central mystery that we are uncovering and exploring slowly and the same way as if it was a crime novel, where the central mystery is usually that somebody has died.”
Nicolas gave some interesting advice about writing with two timelines. “With two timelines, I always think that a chapter should be doing two things. It should be continuously revealing new information about what’s going on in its timeline, but it should also be revealing new information about what’s going on in the other timeline as well. And both chapters should be doing that across both timelines, and if they’re not, then they’re not quite doing enough to pull the reader forward.”
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener.