Miranda Reason on the importance of names in fiction and the lasting legacy of stories

Day of Now began with an image I had, of two young siblings picking their way through the rusty cars of an overgrown street. They were armed, and their rucksacks were filled with items they had just scavenged from abandoned houses; things like food cans, tools and batteries. I wondered what they’d make of the faded, mouse-nibbled posters, paperbacks and DVD covers they came across; artefacts of a bygone time they didn’t remember. They’d be fascinated, wouldn’t they?

I liked this idea and spun it further. Supposing the siblings asked their father about these artefacts, and supposing the father, who was a film buff before modern civilisation fell apart, would start to tell stories, or retell them? Stories of films and TV shows he used to watch, sometimes novels he liked but couldn’t find in their immediate vicinity. And the siblings would lap it all up, all these wonders the lost world had to offer.

Stories are important, even if their importance isn’t practical in the sense of medicine or tools. They entertain, inspire and enchant. They connect people across time and space. If they survive, that is. If there’s someone to pass them on to the next generation.

To Dayna and Pax, my young protagonists, who have grown up in a post-apocalyptic Britain and know nothing else, stories form a bridge to the lost world. And as they have no memory of the time before, these stories become mixed with facts, until the entire dead world, as they call it, is turned into a place in which everything is equally true and untrue. Are flying machines really so much more believable than the giant ape who meets his end by them? No wonder they believe that our present is such an exciting, wonderful, magical place.

Pax’s go-to hero is King Kong, or the aeroplanes that brought the gorilla down, he can’t seem to decide which. Dayna is an X-Files fan without ever having seen a single episode. She calls Dana Scully her namesake – which is true in more ways than one. Being an X-Files fan myself, the name Dana – or Dayna, as I settled on – had a science-fictiony ring to it which I liked for my protagonist. I don’t usually go about naming my characters after other characters, but in this case it just fit. X-Files’ Scully was so rarely called Dana anyway, there was never any confusion in my mind, especially as their personalities are quite different: Dayna is Dayna, not Scully. Apart from anything else, Dayna believes in monsters.

So, that’s how it started. With Dayna and Pax and Father, living in their small bubble of survival by day, pop-cultural storytelling at night. Before trouble finds them, and sets Dayna and Pax on their journey through a landscape pockmarked with dangers, fanatics and survivors. And wonders too, because under this new, wild world are the remnants of a lost world the siblings idolise; the world of stories. This mindset can be problematic though, when they come across people, who aren’t always the heroes they claim to be…

Of course, I was also influenced by stories, and not just in the naming of my protagonist. As well as the scattered bits and pieces of pop culture found in the book (some of which had a big presence in my own life growing up, like The Simpsons), there are also stories that have, directly or indirectly, inspired certain aspects of Day of Now. Such as M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts and The Book of Koli, The Last of Us, Telltale’s The Walking Dead game series and 28 Days Later. Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven too, in theory, because of course it should belong on this list – a caravan of actors and musicians in a post-pandemic world, performing Shakespeare. So I’m adding it, even though I only read it after I’d finished my first draft. Also, though this is a different genre entirely, I’ve recently discovered on rereading Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights (which I’ve loved since I was nine) that I seem to have drawn some inspiration from there too.