Interview with Scott Innes on Galactic Keegan
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‘The near future. Earth has been invaded by the L’zuhl, an aggressive, imperialistic alien race who have laid waste to the galaxy for centuries. The few human survivors have been evacuated to the farthest reaches of space to rebuild and fight back against the L’zuhl onslaught. There, on the distant planet of Palangonia, in a large, walled compound that houses the new human colony, lives the former Newcastle United and England boss Kevin Keegan, now manager of Palangonia FC. As the war rages, Keegan would love it if he could focus on the most important thing – picking up three points on Saturday against the neighbouring nebula – but with whispers of a L’zuhl spy on the loose in the compound, it falls to Keegan himself to find the culprit before it’s too late.’
When I was invited to review ‘Galactic Keegan’, a fantasy novel that unites sci-fi and football, my first thought was that although I enjoy both genres in small portions, I wasn’t qualified to comment on either. Having read the book, I’m delighted by the humour and wisdom within it. Although the action takes place in a distant galaxy, the lifestyle of the earthlings evacuated there is much the same as the one they enjoyed on Earth.
As for the football content, most of the action takes place off the field, and no-one pays any attention to the offside rule, or any other rule for that matter. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good laugh at human nature, and likes to see the good guys win in the end. I was so impressed by the originality of ‘Galactic Keegan’ that I asked author Scott Innes for an interview, and I’m pleased to say he agreed. Thank you, Scott!
INTERVIEW WITH SCOTT INNES
LOARN: What first sparked your interest in football, and which team or teams do you support?
SCOTT: Oddly, for someone as obsessed with football as I am, I actively hated the sport until 1996 when I was 12. I was never very athletic, I was a bookworm, and despite my dad being a big football fan, I had zero interest. To this day I have no idea why or how it changed. I’d caught little snippets from Euro ’96, including poor Gareth Southgate’s infamous miss, and had found myself unexpectedly drawn in. Then it was three or four months later, in October 1996, that we went out for a family pub lunch.
After, my dad stayed behind to watch the big match that afternoon, Keegan’s Newcastle vs Manchester Utd. For some reason I asked him if I could stay too - perhaps I just wanted to feel like one of the grow-ups. Newcastle ran rampant, winning 5-0, and the pub of mostly anti-Man Utd spectators were delighted. I found myself swept up in it and at the end I knew something had changed. The next week I found myself listening to the results on the radio and then the week after that I asked my dad to record Match Of The Day for me. By Christmas two months later, I was a fanatic - my Christmas list was wall-to-wall football stuff, Subbuteo, kit, balls, everything. And I’ve never looked back.
As for who I support, a lot of people try to guess - in the first year or two I supported Man Utd purely because they were the only team for whom I knew a lot of players beforehand - big names like Giggs, Schmeichel, Cantona and Beckham. But once that initial fizz passed, I found I didn’t feel drawn to support anyone and just preferred being a neutral. There are teams I have a bit of a soft spot for - Liverpool, the two Sheffield clubs and of course my hometown side Doncaster Rovers, but overall I just love the game without being especially partisan.
LOARN: Why did you choose game old boys like Kevin Keegan and Gerry Francis to be the heroes of your sci-fi novel, when so many younger footballers are available?
SCOTT: I think I was drawn to Keegan not just because he’s from the same town as me, but because he feels in some ways like one of the last pure good guys, someone who wears his heart on his sleeve, wants his teams to entertain, but also was beset with bad luck and perhaps a bit of naivete in his approach. He’s a sort of flawed character in the best way - the novel focuses very predominantly on his management career which was in full flow during my football formative years so there’s definitely a lot of nostalgia in there too. I often sit and daydream about football in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s so it felt natural to take a lot of figures from that era and have some fun with it. As for Gerry Francis, he’s another decent, honest pro who I’ve always liked - and his steadfast dedication to his mullet haircut is genuinely astonishing.
LOARN: While planning ‘Galactic Keegan’, who was your target audience?
SCOTT: I was very, very keen that the book should be accessible for people who don’t follow football and also for those who aren’t massive sci-fi fans. Which might have been a case of me trying to have my cake and eat it, but I really just wanted the story to be a comedic whodunnit adventure which just happened to be set in space and with a protagonist who so happened to be a football manager. While I enjoy a lot of sci-fi on screen, I must confess I’ve never been an extensive reader of the genre - the odd thing here and there but nothing exhaustive. So I didn’t have a huge interest in writing ‘plausible’ sci-fi, but then again the comedic angle meant that I didn’t have to worry too much - the rickety vagueness of the science and technology in the novel actually worked to my advantage: Keegan doesn’t care what the L’zuhl rifles are made from so it wasn’t important. And in terms of the football side of things, I was anxious to ensure that the majority of the jokes and references would work just as well regardless of whether you knew who the specific footballer being mentioned actually was.
LOARN: Your style of humour has been described as surrealist parody. Do you accept this?
SCOTT: I think that’s probably fair - though I suppose it’s surreal only up to a point, as there is an internal logic to the world Keegan inhabits: it’s ours but a few years into the future and after a massive, earth-shattering event. In many ways the Palangonian Compound is like a town today, retail centres, cafes, a council; it just features other elements like a military presence and alien creatures prowling beyond the walls. Parody is fair in that, of course, the book is based on a real person’s career, though I do sometimes worry that people might hear ‘parody’ and think the book is a spoof of some kind, whereas I wanted it to stand on its own two feet as a novel in its own right, despite the daftness of the premise.
LOARN: How important to your style of humour is misunderstanding, and the resulting tendency to say the wrong thing?
SCOTT: This is very much a feature of the Keegan character and I do get a lot of mileage out of him mixing things up or misunderstanding a situation - I guess I just find that sort of thing funny, the idea of him hearing someone ask for a dry white wine and hurrying after the waiter to say ‘Sorry about that, he means wet’ etc. I think it’s humour with a sort of innocence to it, you almost feel bad for him for missing the obvious and I think, I hope, it helps endear him more to a reader.
LOARN: Who do you think is the wittiest football pundit, past or present? Please give examples.
SCOTT: I think Gary Lineker is terrific, both on screen and on Twitter, a genuinely smart and witty man. I also love Gary Neville on Sky - when it was first announced that he was moving into punditry I was very dubious as he’d always seemed to be a fairly stolid and dour figure on the pitch and I couldn’t imagine him being an engaging broadcaster. I was quite wrong, as I think he’s the best one working today - intelligent, perceptive and honest. I love Ian Wright’s passion for the game and how he doesn’t take himself too seriously and I do also enjoy Roy Keane’s withering, simmering disdain for all around him in the studio! I feel like some of it may be a bit panto at times, playing up to his image, but it’s enjoyable all the same.
LOARN: In ‘Galactic Keegan’, you chose not to use the coarse vocabulary associated with the football terraces. Considering how often these words are used as the basis for comedy, what was the thinking behind your decision?
SCOTT: I’m really pleased you picked up on that - this was a direction that I was very keen to go in. I’m no prude, far from it, and enjoy plenty of comedy with colourful turns of phrase but I find a lot of football-based humour goes down the road of the cruel and mean-spirited - which is fine, but isn’t my thing. I also felt that, because Keegan himself has always seemed a decent, kind and sincere person, that he wouldn’t be the kind of man to go around effing and jeffing all the time. I wanted the humour of the novel to be warm and good-natured, gentle in its own way - basically, I wanted Keegan and co to be affable people a reader would enjoy spending some time with. And in a way, avoiding swearing and explicit humour actually posed an enjoyable challenge - sometimes in comedy it feels like swearwords can be chucked in lazily to cover where a joke should be and so avoiding that meant I had to try to be more inventive.
LOARN: Some of the most crucial scenes in ‘Galactic Keegan’ take place in a library. Growing up, who were your favourite authors?
SCOTT: I was an avid reader as a kid, it was my whole life and I spent many a happy hour in our local library - I still remember the wonder I felt when my parents signed me up and I found out I could take books away for free. Heaven! I loved Dahl of course and I adored Tolkien, I remain a huge fan of Lord of the Rings to this day. I was always all about the story - if I read a blurb and the plot intrigued me, I didn’t especially care who it was by or when it was set. As I got older, I became (and still am) a Stephen King obsessive, I think he’s a master of characterisation and few authors leave me grieving for no longer being able to spend time with a group of characters once the book is over as King does. Aside from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is a towering influence on every comic sci-fi written since, I never actually read very much comic fiction growing up - in fact I used to get frustrated when fantasy novels threw in kooky sidekicks or comic relief! To my shame I actually only finally got around to reading Adrian Mole within the last couple of years and am, predictably, kicking myself for not having done so sooner. They’re complete perfection, I can’t wait to start them all over again.
LOARN: Did you plan the core plot of the novel to match your incredibly popular Twitter account?
SCOTT: The plot for the book came to me as I sketched the whole thing out. I knew I wanted Keegan to lose and have to fight for the one thing he loved the most - his football club - and so I needed a reason for that to happen: funding is cut because of the war effort. But I wanted Keegan to be able to be pro-active in getting it back, and so the idea of a spy on the loose felt ideal - KK feels that if he can catch the spy himself, he’ll then get his club back… and the rest unfurled from there.
LOARN: In the book, Palangonia is in lockdown and plagued with a mysterious virus called ‘infinite malaise’. Palangonia FC play a team called the Blipplip, of whom Keegan says, ‘Their species is just microscopic bacteria. We’ll walk all over them.’ Are you spooked by these coincidences, and is there a crossover with your day job in the NHS?
SCOTT: Without ever intending it, it ended up being weirdly prescient, as the plot features a lockdown placed on the Compound. I had no concept at all when writing it that the book would be published during a time when much of the world was in the middle of one! It was of course completely coincidental though, to be honest, I rather wish it wasn’t the case because I wanted this book to be pure escapism and an avenue for people to get away from it all for a little while, so having such clanging overlaps with the real world (there’s also an authority figure also breaks the curfew secretly for selfish reasons, another eerie echo of real life!) was not something I was remotely hoping for. Fingers crossed there won’t be an imminent alien invasion any day soon or I’ll really start to worry…I’ve worked for the NHS since I was twenty, sixteen years now. I work behind the scenes rather than on the frontline but that world, medical terminologies and jargon, is very much ingrained into me now and I’m sure that seeped through at times during the book. Dr. Pebble-Mill, one of the most sympathetic characters in the novel, is essentially an amalgamation of many of the good and decent medical professionals I’ve interacted with over the years, someone working under a great deal of pressure and expectation but who just gets on with the job with minimal fuss, for the good of everyone. He’s possibly my favourite character in the novel and I think that must come from my NHS experience.
LOARN: Where will Kevin Keegan’s next Galactic adventure take him?
SCOTT: The process of writing and getting the book published has been such an exciting and surreal experience for me that I must admit I haven’t thought properly about the idea of what would happen in a sequel! While I’d like to write a non-Keegan novel next, I’m so fond of the character and that world that it would be a pleasure to return. It never feels like a chore or a slog. I guess it all hinges on how well this one is received and I’m such an anxious pessimist with regards to my own life that I always assume the worst, which means that anything else is a bonus really!