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Guy Saville was born in 1973. He has lived in South America and the Middle East and is currently based in the UK. The Afrika Reich is his first novel. He followed it in 2015 with The Madagaskar Plan, also a work of alternate history.
Guy Saville's website
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What inspired you to write The Afrika Reich?
I always admired Robert Harris's novel Fatherland and wanted to write my own alternative history where the Nazis win the war. However, I thought Harris's book was so definitive there was nowhere to take the story. Then in 1999 I read Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (perhaps the most influential of the what-if-the Nazis-won novels). In it there is an oblique reference to the Nazis' terrible experiment in Africa. That stuck in my head and I began to imagine what Africa would have been like if the Germans had conquered it. I began some initial research and spent 2001 to 2003 writing a "psychedelic" version of the book influenced by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now; it was interesting but unpublishable! My agent suggested I re-write it as a thriller.
Thinking back to Fatherland, I realized it was a sub-genre of the thriller: the police procedural; while another classic, Len Deighton's SS-GB, was an espionage novel. To take my book in an original direction, I decided to make it an action-adventure thriller in the tradition of Alistair MacLean (The Guns of Naverone, Where Eagles Dare) or, in keeping with the Africa setting, H. ...
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