Around 1990 I read a book called Bad Voltage. It was a cyberpunk novel set in a dystopian future Paris. I loved it. It was weird, hip (I thought), and violent; it was all about music, skating (some kind of antigrav skates, if I remember right), losing your lover, losing yourself, being young, etc.; the characters and the world got to me, I read it at least three times, and kept an eye out for anything else by the author, Jonathan Littell. Nothing appeared. There were rumours that Littell was a pseudonym.

Then, yesterday, as I was searching for info on the Paris catacombs, I came across Littell’s Wikipedia entry. Blow me down, he’s recently written another book, Les Bienveillants (The Kindly Ones), written in French, and published in France this year. It’s about WWII through the fictional memoirs of an SS officer, and it has won the Prix Goncourt and the grand prix du roman of the Académie Française. Needless to say, I’m going to tell this to anyone mumbling darkly about me either taking a long time between books or planning books in non-spec fic genres.

But…in this article, Littell apparently says of Bad Voltage that ‘it was so bad and he was so young (22 when it was published) that it doesn’t count’. Yes, it was a young person’s book. I wouldn’t dig it so much if I tried to read it again now. But it was perfect for me when I was 18, and I’m glad Littell wrote it. It gave me a lot of pleasure and actually broadened my suburban horizons a little bit. I understand the impulse to want to hide your juvenilia under the bed, but I think it’s a mistake to say it doesn’t count. First of all, everything you do shapes you. Second, well, I learned this lesson a couple of years ago. I’d gone back to my old school to do a naginata demonstration. A few of my former teachers were still there, including Mrs A. I’d never been close to her; in fact, I don’t think I was ever in her class. But we got talking, and almost immediately she started telling me about her husband, who was suffering from premature senility, and who had recently gone into a care home. I didn’t know what to say apart from “I’m sorry”. You stand there squirming with vicarious despair and hope it doesn’t happen to you or yours, just as you hope to avoid cancer and horrific accidents. Then she asked me about my art. Did I still draw dragons, she asked. I used to draw a lot of dragons in my teen years, but by then I was out of my ‘wings and teeth’ period, and had chucked out a lot of my art from school in early post-adolescent fits of, well, post-adolescence. There was one particular image Mrs A. remembered - an engraving of a dragon inside a circle. I remembered it, but could hardly believe she had. But no, she said she’d always liked it, and hadn’t forgotten it. If she’d asked me at the time, I could easily have run her off a print. I suddenly wanted to find the image, so next time I was at my parents’ place I went hunting in all the places it might be. Nada. I must have thrown out all the prints, and the metal plate. What I’m trying to say here is that for a long time it didn’t count. And then it did, when I was looking, as you occasionally do, for discarded bits of yourself that the older you could find room for, and wouldn’t mind having back for whatever reason. And even if it doesn’t count for you, it may count for someone else. I’ve written a couple of stories that really didn’t mean much to me, but strangers sent me appreciative notes about them - so it would be arrogant to say those stories didn’t count at all. Even if it only counts to 1, or 2, or 2 1/2, it counts, and you’re stuck with it counting, you poor demiurge, you.