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Till Noever

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Till Noever

Till Noever Till Noever lives in New Zealand.

I was born in Germany into a family of visual artists; surrounded by books and no serious TV for years to come. I read like it was going out of fashion by the time I was six, grew up on Grimm’s and Anderson’s fairy tales, Karl May’s adventures, American crime fiction, and German pulp sci-fi-especially the perennial ‘Perry Rhodan’ series, which, in Germany, is still going strong. I also developed a very early preoccupation with the notion of mortality. Personal extinction, decided the pre-teen, is a very bad thing indeed. I still believe this to be true.

     I ended up studying astronomy and physics, but one day said ‘enough’ and walked out in the middle of a lecture, to apply for an immigration visa to Australia-just about as antipodean to my former life as I could go. I spent some years traveling around Australia and some of South and Central America, before, years later, resuming my studies in Australia, and later New Zealand-but this time with a strong leaning toward the life-sciences. Since then I’ve earned my living mostly with programming and system design in a biomedical context, in places ranging from Australia to Japan, to the UK and to the US; dragging a young family with me all the way here and there.

     Writing ‘came’ to me in my very-late teens, but it was unformed and embryonic at best. The change of languages from German to English held things up as well, and so writing didn’t manage to get a decent foothold until some years later. There was also an incipient family, and things got...delayed...yet a bit more. Now, about 25 years on, more than a dozen novels, stories and screenplays later, with my two daughters just about grown up, I’m still writing; comfortable finally with the language and the initially very daunting notion of what it means to conjure up and sustain a story.

     I don’t think I’m an ‘inspired’ writer. But I’ve found that I don’t have to be. I basically write what I would like to read; stories populated with characters I’d like to love or hate; dealing with the basic parameters of the human equation: love, hate, generosity, greed, loyalty, betrayal, hope, fear, life, death, sex, peace, war, violence, forgiveness, retribution, curiosity, misunderstanding, reconciliation, ambition, surrender, cowardice, courage, and whatever else happens to come along. Among all that, good people who are trying to find their way through the minefields of their existence, attempting to eke a meaning from it; while not-so-good people, for reasons perfectly valid to themselves, do their best to put obstacles in the good-folks’ way.

     My main ‘literary’ influence is Jack Vance. His ‘Lyonesse’ trilogy is, to me at least, the most enchanting fantasy ever written; and ‘Night Lamp’, a recent novel, is just pure magic. Past influences also include Heinlein, Clarke, Saberhagen, and Asimov. I think that the craft of ‘story’ is also exemplified by the, now rather unfashionable, tales of Edgar Wallace, and especially his Africa stories. I admire the contemporary fantasies of Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock; enjoy well-crafted psychological crime fiction by the likes of Jeffery Deaver; the ascerbic and gritty South-Florida capers of Carl Hiassen and James Hall; as well as the giddy escapist sci-fi of Stephen Gould.

     I think good fiction-be it written or cinematographic-conveys the truth about the human condition and its complexities better than any learned, ‘popular’, or ‘spiritual’ non-fiction treatise could ever do. It does this by the simple expedient of ‘entertain’ and ‘show-don’t-tell’. And it works best, the less pretentious it is. The less the ‘message’ shows, the more readily folks will listen to it, though they may not even be aware that they are listening.

     This is why the focus of my fiction is on people, though underneath there¹s usually a serious framework of ethical and everyday-life issues, questions, suggestions. In Keaen-and its sequels-these include my views on history and human destiny, and its manipulation by those who would aspire to do so; social versus personal obligations; weighing society’s taboos against personal feelings; coming of age, whether it be in one’s youth or later life; finding one’s destiny; finding meaning; struggling against ethical turpitude; having hope; staying alive - for only then can there be hope.

     It would be nice if I were able to put down my programmer’s hat one day soon and make a living writing: novels and screenplays alike. Running out of material is not an issue. Right now I have enough projects in the pipeline to keep me going full time for several years.

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Books by Till Noever:

1. KEAEN / Till Noever
       -Calgary : EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, 2004.

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