Anthony Camber

Unstable Orbits is contemporary fiction. It’s set in today’s world, with ubiquitous smartphones in every pocket or bag and a pointed reference to ChatGPT. Contemporary fiction naturally ages, morphing over the years and decades into modern and then not-so-modern historical fiction. My previous book, A Room Full of Elephants, was published in March 2016. That’s before Brexit, before Trump, before Boris Johnson, before Covid, before the rise of generative AI. There’s no mention of Elon Musk, and Twitter was still called Twitter. Nine years, containing about ninety years of news. The past is a foreign country indeed.

Even though ARFOE doesn’t pin down its time period explicitly, it’s implied by the text, by those presences and absences in the prose. Close reading by future historians might identify Cambridge locations like cafes and wine bars and restaurants and chronographically triangulate using historical records. For example, here’s a couple of lines from Chapter 10:

Another of Cambridge’s odder statues — the god Talos, legendary man of bronze — stared at me in an abstract polyhedral daze. I wasn’t sure why two dozen bikes and a branch of YO! Sushi needed a god to watch over them, but then Minoan Crete didn’t have much use for him any more.

I’m sorry to break the news to you that YO! Sushi is no longer YO! Sushi. It recently regenerated into Shake Shack. The statue of Talos is still there, though. I took this photo a couple of hours ago.

Without knowing ARFOE’s publication date, those future historians in their glittery leotards and moon boots could still narrow down the time period by finding the lifespan of that sushi emporium. I think it used to be a branch of River Island a couple of decades ago.

I’m sure it’ll be top of their todo list.

ARFOE is set in a slightly fictionalised version of the real Cambridge, where this kind of correlation is possible. By contrast, Unstable Orbits takes place in the entirely fictional small town of Ebeham, an hour by bus west of Swindon. (I placed it near somewhere called New Zealand, bizarrely — close to the RAF base at Lyneham.)

That’s the geography: what about the chronography?

The text contains hints. References to “Boris Johnson’s half-price autobiographical face” and “Liz Truss unmemorabilia” in the bookshop place us beyond 2022, though that stock could’ve been sitting around for a while.

We can get closer. In part 2 of the book there’s some dialogue where a character references “the pope thing” and “the election in Canada,” close to “I ordered a canadiano, now we weren’t calling it an americano.” That pins things down pretty precisely to a certain time period in 2025, around Mark Carney’s win in Canada and the papal conclave that gave us Pope Leo XIV.

Which means Unstable Orbits takes place in the school year 2024-25, which at time of writing is still ongoing. Part 1 of the book is early September 2024; part 2 starts in April 2025. Those characters talk about “the pope thing” on Wednesday April 30, 2025. I know, because I wrote a note alongside that scene, as with most scenes in part 2.

That scene’s first draft was written well before April 2025 — I can’t be sure, but likely in early 2022. When I decided to fit the book to 2024-25 I spent time during revisions researching school terms in Wiltshire (they can vary slightly across the country), and the exam timetables for a particular exam board, and I adjusted the manuscript as necessary. For example, an early draft that said “Back up a few weeks” became “Back up a few days” as I discovered how close Easter 2025 was to the start of the exam period.

As I revised, many dates that had been months into the future ticked ever nearer. Part of my revision routine included paying attention to the news and weather and dropping in references like “the pope thing” as the calendar caught up.

And as I write, some dates are still in the future. Today is Wednesday June 18, and A-level exams haven’t yet finished.

Good luck to Nate for his final Maths paper tomorrow afternoon. I’ll be thinking about him, even though I already know his grade. It’s weird being an author.

Now the book’s out, I’m not going to revise the text to drop in additional current events as they happen. I like the idea that Unstable Orbits turns from contemporary-past to contemporary-future around the start of June, when I uploaded the final version of the manuscript. It feels more… hopeful? We could do with some of that.

(Now for sale on Google Play, if that’s your bag, along with A Room Full of Elephants, The Pauline Conversion and Disunited. Both The Pink and the Grey and Till Undeath Do Us Part are still exclusive to Kindle Unlimited.)