Imagine a world in which slavery and colonialism never existed. It might seem hard to conceive, but Courttia Newland has done just that with his new novel, A River Called Time.

Set in Dinium, a dystopian version of London (which was called Londinium during Roman times), the book centres on a character called Markriss Denny, who is able to have out of body experiences that let him travel to “different, parallel versions of himself”.

One version of Markriss wins an award to enter “The Ark”, the centre of Dinium inhabited by the city’s privileged residents. Another version is a cult and spiritual leader.

“Dinium is basically a parallel version of London, the London that would’ve existed in my imagination if slavery and colonisation hadn’t happened,” Newland, 48, said at a UEA Live event with the broadcaster Amy Nomvula.

In this parallel existence, “race as a social construct doesn’t really exist” and migration would have happened “a lot earlier and not as a result of the enslavement of people”.

“Some of the kids are European, some are African, [but] no one says that stuff,” Newland said. “It’s a city of huge class hierarchy instead of race. It’s about money and wealth rather than it being about skin colour. There are whole boroughs that are poor boroughs. Class drives everything.

“There’s low-level pollution. People wear masks mostly – I wrote this before the pandemic – that’s because they cannot really breathe the air. There’s sickness.

“People who fought in the war, they’ve come back and become migrants. They’re addled by sickness. It’s like post-war London areas that haven’t been rebuilt.”

The Ark was built over about 80 years by a “huge multinational corporation” that specialises in technology and that won a tender for the project.

“It’s supposed to be this thing that’s going to save people in Dinium,” Newland said. “Then it becomes a capitalist venture. It’s a huge indoor centre. People pay to go in there, or you can win an award if you’re a poor person. It’s got four floors. It’s got everything you can imagine in a city, [only] it’s indoors.”

Newland drew on a wide range of influences when researching A River Called Time, reading books on everything from Egyptian cosmology to African religions to quantum physics.

The novel was a long time in the making for Newland, who published his first novel a quarter of a century ago and has been a screenwriter, playwright and creative writing tutor, among much else.

“I started writing part one in about 2006,” he said. “I didn’t write part two until 2018. There was a big gap. There are various reasons for that. I couldn’t find a publisher. I was sending out part one. I was getting lots of good feedback, but people were, like, ‘What is this?’

“But, looking back, if I’m honest, I was scared of the second part. I felt really daunted about writing it. This is a huge venture. When I went back to it in 2018, I was scared. How am I going to do this?”

In part three, which Newland felt would be “a great bit to write”, he brings the reader back into a world in which race and all that goes with it does exist.

“It was tricky intellectually, [although] it actually wasn’t tricky once I got into it,” he said. “I wrote the rest of the book in 2018. At this stage I felt, ‘I can do this.’ It came out of me. I couldn’t stop.”

The novel was finished in part thanks to an editor friend who asked about the sci-fi novel Newland was believed to be writing. He initially denied the novel’s existence, but later sent out the full outline to the editor and was given an advance to help him complete the book.

“She said, ‘I think you can do it. We’ll give you some money so you can do it.’ I was like, ‘It’s all coming back to me.’ I had to fix the first part and bring it in line with how I write now. But I couldn’t bring it too much to how I write now. I wanted to keep that energy,” Newland said.

As the event at the UEA neared its end, Newland, responding to a question about how to overcome writer’s block, recalled an episode where he found on his computer some excerpts from earlier writings that he thought had been deleted.

He realised that this discarded material was actually very good, illustrating to him how previous self-doubt had made him underestimate his own work.

“You have these two voices on your shoulder,” he said. “One saying, ‘You’re really good.’ The other, ‘You’re terrible.’ After you have finished writing, that voice is the strongest one, the doubting one.

“I would just say, do it. Write with the thought you can fix this. So don’t worry about the first draft. Just get to the end.”

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