They say that inspiration can strike from anywhere. In Malaysian-born London-based novelist Felicia Yap’s case, it was during a suspenseful moment on a fashion runway.
The year was 2012, and Yap was a catwalk model at the University of Cambridge in Britain. As she was preparing for a show, one of the backstage assistants suddenly handed her a leather bag.
“I remember thinking, as I was gliding down the elevated platform, the lights in my eyes: why is this bag so heavy? What if someone had put a bomb inside, and we were all going to die? If I had known I was going to die today, would I have lived my life differently yesterday?” says Yap, 41, with a laugh during a recent Zoom interview.
Years later, Yap would write a story based on this event. It’s the basis of her second novel Future Perfect, which tells the tale of Police Commissioner Christian Verger, who is called to investigate after a bomb explodes at a fashion show, killing a beautiful model. Whoever did this is still at large, and could very well strike again.
But the investigation is the least of Verger’s worries. His fiancee Viola has just left him. Not only that, but his voice assistant Alexa is 99.74% sure he is going to die tomorrow. Which gives him about a day to both solve a crime and win his love back.
Talk about a very stressful time.
Yap’s novel Future Perfect, published by British imprint Wildfire, moves at a frenetic pace, going from 1980s Montana to 1990s Manhattan and a drone-filled Britain in 2030.
“I like to write my books around a ticking clock. So here, you have this detective who, it has been predicted, has only one day to sort out all his matters. It’s a suspenseful story, and there are elements in it which I hope gets readers to not stop turning pages, ” explains Yap.
“But the novel isn’t just a race to solve a murder. There are strong human elements too. Future Perfect is ultimately about a couple who have left each other but are wondering whether they should get back together.”
Born in Cheras, and now residing in London, Yap didn’t exactly have an early career path that pointed to her being a full-time fiction writer.
She read biochemistry at Imperial College London, before getting a doctorate in history (and a half-blue in competitive ballroom dancing) at Cambridge University. She has written for The Economist and The Business Times. She has also worked as a radioactive-cell biologist, a war historian, a Cambridge lecturer, a technology journalist, a theatre critic, a flea-market trader and a catwalk model.
With that sort of past experiences – academic and street-wise, Yap was more than equipped to give high-concept thrillers a chance.
She first entered the literary spotlight a few years ago, when her debut novel Yesterday (2017) was the subject of a bidding war between several publishers, before eventually being picked up by Britain’s Hatchette Publishing Group for a six-figure sum.
Yap had been reported to be working on a prequel to this novel, titled Today. She reveals has she has completed a full manuscript for Today, but it still isn’t ready to hit the racks.
Instead, readers first get to immerse themselves in the fascinating world of Future Perfect. One of the most fun things about writing this story, Yap says, is trying to imagine how the 2030s would look like.
In her world, for example, drones have become even more commonplace in everyday life, and have been designed to look like birds for aesthetic purposes.
“Someone very wise told me, to understand the future you have to look back at the past. So to understand what happens 10 years ahead, you have to look back to what happened in 2010, and then draw a timeline elaborating what might happen, based on what has already taken place, ” elaborates Yap.
Much of her new book revolves around predictive technology, which Yap is already familiar with.
While writing for the science and technology section of The Economist, she had produced many articles on this subject, most notably on how technology is being used to detect forest fires and tsunamis.
If that wasn’t enough, Yap also brought in some big guns as consultants. The beta readers for Future Perfect included Blaise Thomson, former head of Siri Europe, and William Tunstall-Pedoe, who developed the voice assistant Evi (that was later acquired by Amazon to create Alexa in 2012). Yap knew them both of them through dancing sessions back at the University of Cambridge.
“They all gave me very useful suggestions about what might happen in the future, what might be possible and what would not. They gave me some very exciting insights, ” says Yap.
Things ahead are going to be very exciting for Yap. Her Los Angeles-based production company Mutressa Movies is working on a film or TV adaptation of Yesterday.
Yap is also working on another novel: what it is about, however, the author gleefully refuses to tell us.
Between her fiction work and science background, what does Yap personally think about predictive technologies? Does she believe that we might someday reach a stage where machines can foretell everything?
“I think we can predict the future with some accuracy. Although not the full picture. For example, now our smartphones know so much about us. There was a paper recently by the University of Cambridge that even a simple Facebook like could predict things like a user’s political affiliation. What’s to stop our smartphones, in the future, from using information to predict our personalities and habits?” says Yap.
“But then again, there are still a lot of things we may not be able to predict. And maybe the unpredictability of life is what makes it worth living. Maybe it makes us human. For example, in Future Perfect, my character is told he’s going to die soon. Is that information you’d really want to know? Maybe some things are better off not being predicted!” she concludes.
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