We are joined today at the Hive by Barnaby Martin, composer, science teacher, and author who is here to talk with us about his debut novel The Quiet which will be released on the 15^th May 2025. You can read our hive review of it on 5^th May.

Barnaby Martin is a multi-talented storyteller and creator. Besides his writing, he is an award-winning and self-taught composer, video essayist and teacher. His music has been performed widely in the UK and internationally by groups including the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestra of Opera North and Westminster Cathedral Choir. His YouTube channel, Listening In, which he began in 2019 and for which he makes videos that explore the cross-section between pop culture and classical music, has garnered over 200,000 subscribers and ten million views. He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and now teaches in London, where he lives with his husband.

Thank you so much for agreeing to answer a few questions Barnaby. I really enjoyed The Quiet, and I found the mix of music and linguistics that it explored absolutely fascinating, while the authoritarianism of your imagined world was rather scarily real.

Thank you! I’m so pleased you enjoyed it.

So onto the questions –

I thought I’d start with an easy one – and for most authors the journey into publishing is a fairly straightforward sequence of events – have an idea – write a book – find an agent – get a publisher.  However, the gestation of The Quiet was a little different to the norm.

Can you tell us a bit about how the book came about?

So, it began with my YouTube channel. After about three years of making video essays, I got an email from Jack Fogg, an agent, asking if I’d ever considered writing a non-fiction book on music. I hadn’t – and the thought of it was honestly very intimidating – but I then started to take the idea more seriously. So, I spent the best part of 2022 writing a proposal for a non-fiction book on music. But as I was doing my research, I came up with a separate idea – an idea for a novel. That’s where The Quiet came from. And instead of going ahead with the non-fiction idea I somehow convinced Jack to take a chance and let me write the novel. I realise now that this was quite a risky move! After that, we went to publishers, and it was picked up. I’m so glad he believed in me.

The Quiet is your first novel, but you do have a creative background in composing and in analysing music with pieces shared on your website  and your YouTube channel .

What differences did you notice in the creative process for creating a novel and creating a piece of music, or creative non-fiction?

To be honest, it’s felt very similar. When writing music, or when writing creative non-fiction, I’ve always done a lot of research and spent a long time in the planning phase. After that, I’ve tended to write quite quickly, with little editing. Music is quite like fiction writing in a lot of ways, because I’m making everything up. I love that freedom – the ability to sit down and let it all happen.

Dr Hannah Newnham – as the protagonist seeking to protect her child – is a credible and compelling character. Her decisions always feel authentic and logical even when they are dangerous and the slow reveal of her backstory through memories and recollections works very well.

Where did you get your inspiration for her, and which aspects of her depiction most pleased you?

There’s a lot of me in Hannah. She’s more blunt than I am, but she’s as impatient. She’s a scientist and musician, so I drew on my experiences of studying and teaching science to find her. There are also other inspirations: Dr Banks from Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life (and Arrival), and maybe even Ripley from Alien. Hannah is not an action hero, but she’s tough and knows her own mind. I loved how she seemed to guide me through the story. I had a very detailed outline before I began writing, but she’d often have something else in mind. I’d have a plan for what was going to happen next, but she seemed to want to do something completely different. Other writers have said this – that the story is guided by the characters – and it’s very true. Her behaviour and character led me.

From what you’ve said elsewhere, the oppressive planet encasing Soundfield was the first seed of an idea from which the book grew. However, the re-emergence of a musical protolanguage forms a second speculative strand to the story.

How did that second strand come about and did you find it changed or reinforced the focus that the story was taking?

The Soundfield and the musical protolanguage came from the same place. I was researching the evolution of music and language for my non-fiction proposal, and I came up with the Soundfield as a way to get this protolanguage into the story. Very early on, it was just a framework but it took form and started to influence the story when Hannah came into the picture. She was a scientist, so she had to discover something. But whilst the mystery is very important — and getting the science correct is huge part of this for me (see later) – these ideas were really only the starting point. The direction of the story changed a lot when I found Hannah and Isaac. They are the heart of the novel.

Comparisons have been made between The Quiet and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road which George Monbiot described as “the most important environmental book ever written” in an article calling for action on climate change. Yet Climate Change is never mentioned as the cause of the apocalypse in The Road and – although you have said the Soundfield acts as an accelerant for Climate Change, the anthropogenic aspect of climate change element is relatively understated in the book.

As someone with an interest in climate change fiction I’m curious about what climate messages – be it hope, anger, or instruction – you would want readers to take away from The Quiet?

The Soundfield accelerating climate change (and also enhancing UV radiation) was initially a useful narrative tool – it meant people couldn’t go outside, it led to the refugee crisis, it introduced conflict into the world. But I suppose it also allowed me to put forward my own views on climate change. I believe we should be angry, but there’s also a lot of reason to hope. I follow a YouTuber called Simon Clarke who talks a lot about the fantastic work that is being done around the world to combat carbon emissions. This hope isn’t necessarily in the book – I would have to ‘solve’ the Soundfield for that – but the anger is there. Layla, a secondary character, is a climate refugee. One of millions. And, through her, we realise the devastation that can be brought about by extreme changes in climate.

Part of the mesmerising appeal of The Quiet is the way in your world building you weave elements of familiar normality within a kind of dystopian fabric. A bit like Antti Toumainen’s portrayal of Helsinki collapsing into disorder in The Healer.

Where did you get your inspiration for the unnamed setting and how did you decide to tweak the familiar into the alien?

Originally, the book was set in London, using landmarks like St Paul’s Cathedral and the Tate Modern as part of the story. But my agent and I came to the conclusion that it would be better to remove the specificity of the world building. He was right to suggest this, because it makes the setting feel other-worldly whilst also retaining a sense of reality. The buildings are real, the people are real, this dystopia could be real (although it’s really not that dystopian; this is not The Road or 1984) and so hopefully the reader can imagine themselves in the world of the book whilst also being grateful that it doesn’t exist. I’ve always loved those types of books as a reader, and so it’s where I went as a writer.

You are also a science teacher and your musical compositions reference ideas of quantum mechanics, event horizons and singularities. One well developed impact of the Soundfield in The Quiet is the increased danger from UV exposure which leads to interesting ideas about UV suits and the risks of flying high near the boundary of the Soundfield. However, I’d always understood UV risks to be more a consequence of damaged Ozone than global warming.

How did your science background feed into the writing of The Quiet and to what extent do you think scientific fidelity in fiction is impossible and compromises are inevitable and necessary for the story?

Scientific fidelity was incredibly important to me for The Quiet. The book began with research, and so from the get-go the science was there. I had this idea in my mind that if a scientist or academic – specifically a geneticist or musicologist – picked up the book, they would find accurate and well-described science. Equally, if someone who hasn’t come across the ideas before did some research of their own, they would find it backed up by real-world evidence and theories. It also helps me as a writer. It makes the world feel more true and I care more about the characters’ struggles. This approach was inspired by writers like Ted Chiang and Margaret Atwood who have committed themselves to finding scientific or historical precedence for their ideas. That being said, I don’t think it is possible for everything to make sense. Your point about UV radiation is a perfect example. I wanted the UV levels to be much higher but I didn’t really have a good explanation for it. There comes a moment where you have to take a leap of faith!

The Quiet’s portrayal of a nightmarish combination of a refugee crisis, societal repression and environmental disaster feels scarily relevant in our current turbulent political times.  (Indeed I have seen a few memes along the lines of “If you ever wondered how you would have responded to the 1930s rise of fascism, you’re doing it now.”) Certainly the characters of Theo, Layla and Hannah’s mum all feel like they could have stepped off the pages of a contemporary newspaper (or social media post). Ursula K. Le Guin said in 2014 that “Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”  However, Hannah’s journey illustrates the tension between resistance and personal survival.

How far do you think The Quiet could or should be either a warning or a call to action for its readers?

This is a difficult question to answer. I am not going to pretend that I am saying things in The Quiet that haven’t already been said before. I am also not going to pretend that I think it will make a big difference in the world. Even if someone does read the book and strongly agrees with the message I’m putting forward, it’s likely they would have held those opinions prior to reading. So, why are these things in the book? Because they mean a lot to me. I wrote The Quiet at a time when the immigration policy in the UK was more extreme than it is now. The Bibby Stockholm, the barge that was slated to hold 222 refugees off the coast of Dorset, even made its way into the story. It’s where Layla and her family stayed when they arrived in the unnamed country where the book takes place. I, like a lot of people, was significantly affected by the lack of humanity in this and other immigration schemes. Layla became such a significant character in the novel because the refugee crisis that was happening on our own shores was so much on my mind. But there is always light and shade. Hannah is in favour of supporting refugees – we see that through her hatred of her brother’s involvement in the armed forces – but equally, she looks out for herself. She doesn’t go on marches, she doesn’t join militant or anti-government groups like others, because for her, the most important thing is to safeguard her life and those she cares about. If I could achieve anything with this novel it would be to make people think. I wanted to explore these themes but I didn’t want to preach. I’ll leave that to others.

Language and protolanguages are a huge element in the story. In your acknowledgments you mention the book The Singing Neanderthals by Steven Mithen – which considers the idea that music and language are both born from a common musico-linguistic protolanguage stem.

I loved the references you made to language particularly in these two quotes

“If you’ve only ever spoken German, or Japanese, or Afikaans, your mouth and muscles are formed around that language like tree roots wrapped around a rock.”

And

“All language fails in some way. How can you say what it feels like to love someone? How can you say what it’s like to feel guilty? It’s all messy, distorted, memories played over and over in your mind, burnt out like a videotape replayed too many times.”

As someone very concerned with the meeting of words and music, of meaning and emotion, what most fascinates you about our use of both?

Well, one of the biggest questions in The Quiet is whether or not we can find meaning in something that appears meaningless. This is something that the characters – Hannah and Elias in particular – talk about a lot, and I’ve been part of similar conversations in the world of contemporary music. Composers often try to be very intentional with their choices – ‘I wrote this chord/melody because I wanted to evoke this emotion’, ‘This part is meant to represent X or Y’ – but more often than not the reasons for those choices are lost in translation. A lot of music doesn’t have programme notes and people often listen without knowing the context of a piece, and so the original ‘meaning’ of the music – if there was any to begin with – disappears. Personally, I believe what Hannah believes, that music is the language of emotion and that it evolved to communicate a part of ourselves which can’t be communicated via spoken language. I like this idea. It feels natural to think that if a mother couldn’t hold her newborn baby, she would sing to it instead.

Working as a teacher and being discoverable on the internet can bring some curious attention, so some authors take refuge behind a pen name.

How have family, friends, colleagues and pupils reacted to this new authorial aspect to your public persona?

It’s been amazing. My family and friends have been incredibly supportive and have given up so much of their time reading drafts. My husband and parents, in particular. I couldn’t have done it without them. As for my pupils, as you can probably guess it took them all of three seconds to find out I had written a book (I didn’t let slip). They’re very excited. They ask me questions about it when we should be talking about chemistry. If my colleagues are reading this, then rest assured that I am nothing but professional.

You are something of an accidental author – in that The Quiet was not the book you (or your agent) were initially looking for.

What is next for your writing? Are there more stories to be told beneath the Soundfield, or has another creative novum snagged your creative attention?

I’m exploring a lot of different options for stories at the moment, including ones set in the same world as The Quiet. But I’m also very keen to write novels in different settings and genres. My deal with Pan Macmillan is for two books, so there will definitely be a least one more from me!

And finally – where there any other questions you would have liked me to ask, and how would you have answered them?

No, all good. Thank you so much for the interview. These have been incredibly thought-provoking and interesting questions. I’ve loved it.

Well I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the experience and obviously it takes a thought-provoking book to generate some thought-provoking questions!  I’m looking forward to reading your next book and thanks again for taking some time with us here at the Fantasy-Hive.

The Quiet is released today 15th May – so go out and buy it now!