The Unlikely Diary of Prince Kal the Alien by Ross Welford – The Federation of Children’s Book Groups

It’s great to welcome Ross Welford to the blog sharing his thoughts on his tenth book published for children!

 

 

The Unlikely Diary Of Prince Kal The Alien is my tenth book in as many years. (It sounds a lot but plenty of authors are more productive.)

My first, Time Travelling With A Hamster, appeared in January 2016. I was lucky to be riding a wave of outstanding British middle-grade debuts. Around that time there were first appearances by Piers Torday, MG Leonard, Maz Evans, Peter Bunzl, Ross Montgomery, Lisa Thompson, Patrice Lawrence, among many others. Thankfully they have all faded into well-deserved obscurity!

Joking aside, those wonderful storytellers all brought something different to the market. More by accident than design, I provided the science fiction. Well….sort of.

I still flinch a tiny bit when I’m referred to as a “science fiction “ writer. I think it is because, despite enjoying many sci-fi books and films, I have never considered myself a particular fan of that genre; at least, not in the way some people are.

Ursula K Le Guin and Isaac Asimov have never made it to the top of my TBR pile. As for Star Wars and Dune and Blade Runner? Meh.

What always attracted me more was impossible things happening in a rational, recognisable world: things like time travel, immortality, invisibility and so on. This often pulled my stories into a sci-fi orbit – but to me it always seemed more like magic.

Not the magic of wizards and spells and dragons. That is, not until my latest book, The Unlikely Diary Of Prince Kal The Alien – the most obvious blend of magic and science that I have yet written.

Prince Kal is not your average alien-from-outer-space. Well he is, except he doesn’t know it! Hailing from a planet where magic – the wizards-and-spells kind – is still a powerful force, pint-sized Prince Kal accidentally steers his magical Anywhere Cabinet to a beach in Northumberland.

The clash between the slightly pompous and very bewildered Kal and modern British bureaucracy (he is placed with a foster family and overseen by Social Services) underpins the plot to return to his home planet and provides much of the humour in the book which, at a mere 35,000 words, was a joy to write.

In the early drafts of the book, however, Prince Kal was not a magical prince with his own court sorcerer, pointy hat and six-legged pet oofus. He started life as much more regular alien; one who had probably crash-landed on earth. And that is where my doubts started…

I had written a couple of chapters. Yet I couldn’t get over two things:

1. An alien crash-landing on earth is not exactly original;

2. …and even so, I had already explored that idea in 2020’s The Kid Who Came From Space.

I plodded on, knowing that my heart was not really in the story. (Most writers, I am sure, will recognise this feeling.)

It was a children’s film that flipped the switch in my head. I was watching an adaptation of Astrid Lindgren’s (excellent) 1981 book Ronya The Robber’s Daughter. This is set in a mediaeval land of castles, bandits on horseback and – crucially – gnomes and trolls. It was a land, then, where magic existed as part of normal life.

Of course, this is not a new concept at all. But I tried to imagine what would happen if a land like that somehow collided with modern-day Britain.

Suddenly – and with a huge sigh of relief – I knew what Prince Kal was like, and how he would behave. Situations popped into my head and made me laugh as I was writing. I imagined how amazed Prince Kal might be at the science that we take for granted….

Is it science fiction? Not really. Perhaps. I don’t care. What I care about is the finished product which I absolutely love!

Illustrator Harry Briggs’ cover perfectly captures the confusion and impatience felt by Prince Kal – cast adrift in a land of electricity, tinned soup and old ladies who swim in the North Sea for fun.

Magic and science collided with a bang and ten years on, the result is my favourite book yet.