Influences

Nowhere has been influenced by many things. It is impossible to create fiction in the hyperreality of the modern world without being aware of an incredible range of influences and cultural commodities. Fiction does not just draw on experience or on other fiction; the networked world and the hyperlink have made myriad forms of cultural expression interchangeable and immediately available; elsewhere is effortlessly near in every half-houred absurdity of television hysteria and its blunt propaganda feed. Indeed, such is the anxiety of influence in the modern world, that Karl, the novel's anti-hero, has a phobia of accumulated cultural artefacts - he has trouble visiting museums and galleries; television makes him nauseous. It is in these complex and often confusing surroundings that Nowhere is to be found.

The suggestions made below are in no way even remotely exhaustive, and are listed only to give an example of what to expect from Nowhere.

Literature The paranoid and encyclopedic imagination of Thomas Pynchon, especially in The Crying of Lot 49; the terrifying humour of Don DeLillo's White Noise and global consequences of his Cosmopolis; the complex masquerade of Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man; the tone of Michel Houellebecq in Whatever; the widescreen energy of Kerouac's On the Road; studies of claustrophobic and aggressive intimacy in Tennessee Williams' plays, especially The Glass Menagerie; the jealousy of Tolstoy in The Kreutzer Sonata; the creation of doomed Beauty in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned; the elaborate fictions of Borges; Kafka's tortuous investigations and revelations; Dostoyevsky's underground notes; the futureproof dystopian visions of Orwell and Huxley; the Nowheres of Thomas More, Samuel Butler, and William Morris.

Poetry August Kleinzhaler's travelers' experiences; Walt Whitman's individualistic anthems; Rimbaud's disordered sense; Verlaine's acute agony; the cruelty of Baudelaire.

Pop Science The selfish genes and memes of Dawkins and Dennett; emerging theories of emergence; the no-nonsense neuroscience of Steven Pinker; the elegant simplicity of Darwin's ideas.

Philosophy The anti-progress polemicising of John Gray; the re-mythologising clarity of Mary Midgley. The spectacular analyses of Guy Debord, and the Situationists. The writings and lives of the Existentialists from Kierkegaard to Camus, who labour the Sisyphean task of existence.

Cinema Wim Wenders' road movies and the French New Wave, especially Pierrot le Fou, Zazie dans le Metro and Jules et Jim; the disjointed impressionism of Nicholas Roeg, and the sublime English spirituality of Powell & Pressburger; the intense point-of-view technique of Robert Bresson.

Music Suggested soundtrack: Leave Them All Behind, Ride; Funny Break, Orbital; How To Disappear Completely, Radiohead; Lost Property, Divine Comedy; Pictures of You, The Cure; Resigned, Blur; Central Reservation, Beth Orton; Then, The Charlatans; Parallel Lines, Shed Seven; Witness, The Delgados; Fugitive Motel, Elbow; Vapour Trail, Ride; So Here We Are, Bloc Party; The Asphalt World, Suede.

Painting Edward Hopper's secularization of experience; Lichtenstein, and the commodification of Pop Art.

Photography William Eggleston; Stephen Shore. Robert Frank; Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Places London; Los Angeles; San Francisco Bay Area; the desert roads of California, and diners and budget motels, and the English equivalent at Brighton.

People All the characters are fictitious.