“Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat is sci-fi-lite, at least according to one of my mates — which surprised me since I believed it safely slotted into the sci-fi genre and I didn’t know there was a style called sci-fi-lite. Probably he was making it up.

“Most people are now telling that TSMG is far more oriented toward noir than science fiction, which I guess is attributable to the heavy influences of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett as much as other writers like Philip K. Dick and Graham Greene. Does that actually tell you anything about the book? I hope it does. I’m terrible at snap-synopses.”

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“I’m chuffed you like that angle, since it came later on in the development of the story. Floyd, for me, always was a bit of a cynical last-hero-standing, a kind of Charlton Heston type circa Planet of the Apes or The Omega Man.

“But at some point I began to wonder what I would do or act like if I were cast into the same situation as Floyd. At around the same time, from about 2005, I was heavily back into rediscovering noir cinema from the ’40s, and watching a lot of Akira Kurosawa’s post-WWII domestic dramas like Stray Dog and Drunken Angel. Throwing all these things together as part and parcel of Floyd’s character seemed like a good idea at the time, and I still like the depth and layers it brings. It also added to a sense of “otherness” for Floyd, since half his dialogue and his way of thinking is out-of-whack with everyone else—old fashioned and nostalgic, I guess.”

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“The hard-drinking, hard-boiled and witty hero, Floyd, would usually be the detective in a [Raymond] Chandler story but here in the “new” Melbourne, post-event, he’s placed in a bubble-like world as a “Seeker”, with more authority than a Chander detective, to seek, locate, apprehend, contain and terminate Deviants.

“Chandler’s heroes have to fight the system to get some resolution and Bergen’s hero is no different. He’s only doing the job to pay his sick wife’s hospital bills, and he never gets to see her. He lives with the nagging fear of being “relocated” but somehow can’t keep his acerbic mouth shout. He’s constantly in trouble with authority, despite being in authority himself. And just as in Chandler’s novels, the hero’s instincts usually turn out to be correct.

“Ultimately however what makes this book a good read is not plot nor form, but observation, wit and dialogue.

“In the background of a wasteland, Bergen makes as many allusions to film as T.S. Eliot made to literature. There’s a useful “Encylopedia Tobacciana” at the end of the novel which you can check out if you’re not sure what a reference is to, and similarly a glossary for the slang contained in the novel. These add to the sense of the quirky, as does the calligraphy in the book itself and the typeset. Chandler could perhaps be scratching his head about some of this, safe up in heaven-dead, but his own writing always struck me as kind of idiosyncratic, and we’re living in different times now, brother. In a modern age of conspiracies and corporate agglomerates, I think he’d be pleased as to where Bergen has taken his legacy…

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“This particular yarn is one that’s bubbled away since it surfaced in a short story I wrote in the late 1980s. That short story was about six hand-written A4 pages in length, and was basically the dream-sequence from the existing novel; in that original tale, however, it was anything but dream-like.

“I can’t remember the title of the short story (possibly ‘Il Desinenza’, which roughly translates as The Termination in Italian) though the current protagonist Floyd was still Floyd then; the weather was just as bad, he still fended off rain with a newspaper, and the joint influences of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out, and my ‘60s/’70s comic book heritage hung pretty obviously onto my coattails.

“Back then, as the story wraps itself up, it’s a Controller—a Seeker’s nemesis already—who does the dirty work and affects termination. “Next time, shoot straight,” I recall penning as Floyd’s cynical quip while he cleans up the mess.

“Somewhere en route along the past twenty-odd years it’s become Floyd whose aim and life is amiss, and we added about 200 pages into the mix.

“I say ‘we’ because my erstwhile collaborator over the past three years of the novel’s gestation has been my editor Kristopher Young – the author of Click – who’s invested so much of his own ideas that the story has definitely shaped up as collusion.

“But I’m getting ahead of myself, which I have a propensity to do; you may also have discovered that I tend to waffle a lot and use semicolons unwisely.

“After the short story was written I shelved it for several years. The ideas continued fermenting somewhere in my coin-locker brain, until 1992 when I resurrected the romp while I was living in Richmond, in Melbourne (Australia), and extended it to a 162-page manuscript. I still have that version in a drawer next to my desk here in Tokyo—it’s all dog-eared and there’re different typefaces within the same tome as I started out on my mum’s electric typewriter, which of course ran out of ink, then graduated to my partner’s dad’s boxy, black-and-white screened Apple Macintosh with a dot matrix printer.

“I remember scratching my head at the time, trying to nut out a half-decent title, and came up with We Are Not Afraid, We Serve. It always was a half-hearted moniker that lacked pizzazz. I was 27 at the time and I do cringe now when I look back at much of this.”

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“It could be one hundred percent bona fide reality, or one hundred percent surreal sham. But it is a contemporary homage to old skool detective noir, thrown into a blender with low-brow sci-fi of the near future and current social trends that are pervading the Western world – with the last city in the world being Melbourne, Australia. So I guess if you’re from Melbourne it’s easier to pick up on the realism.”

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“When I went to Detroit in 2004 to DJ, the people putting on the party took me for a spin through the inner city. That was a riveting eye-opener for me; there’s nothing like that in contemporary Australia or Japan. Although the recent earthquake and tsunami left a similar legacy, that was after I finished the novel. I remember seeing these ruined, grand old buildings and derelict car factories in Detroit, like the huge Packard plant, and thinking that this was what the novel’s no man’s land, Richmond District, would be like – with the added bonus of constant rain.”
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