Memorial Award in 2004, and also reviews fiction for the Financial Times. He is the author of Firefly: Big Damn Hero with Nancy Holder and Firefly: The Magnificent Nine. He lives in south-east England.Lovegrove applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Age of Legends, and reported the following:
Ironically, page 69 of Age of Legends features a sex scene. I swear I did not plan it that way for the purposes of some metatextual “69” joke. In the original manuscript the scene crosses from page 57 to page 58. The pagination in the published novel is, obviously, different because the typesetting is different.Visit James Lovegrove's website.
The sex scene is not gratuitous. Neither is it terribly sexy. It’s certainly not romantic.
The participants are the story’s antagonist Derek Drake, who is the extreme right-wing Prime Minister of a near-future United Kingdom, and a Russian TV journalist, Tatjana. She has just interviewed him for a Russian television news network, and they have then nipped upstairs at 10 Downing Street for some very athletic bedroom-related recreational activity.
Tatjana is, as it happens, a “gift” from her country’s president to Drake, a token of appreciation. Both Drake and President Vasiliev are political hard men and they share similar views on immigrants, gay people, and so forth. One might even suspect, if one was being particularly cynical, that Vasiliev helped Drake get elected.
Drake, it should be noted is married. For the sake of balance, it should also be noted that his wife Harriet isn’t much better when it comes to respecting their nuptial vows. She is conducting an ongoing affair with the head of Drake’s private security force, Major Wynne.
Do I have a very low opinion of politicians? You decide!
--Marshal Zeringue
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