The Travel Agent was my first published short story, coming out in Interzone 130, and it came joint 4th in the readers' poll for 1998 (not that big a deal, you might think, though it means whoever voted for it conspired collectively to rate it above works that year by Brian Stableford, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Thomas M Disch, Ian Watson, Michael Moorcock and Charles Stross). It was translated into French for Galaxies #31, December 2003

Click here for a PDF of The Travel Agent or here for html.

The story is a conflation of a couple of ideas. I noticed that the Drug Enforcement Agency appeared to tackle drug abuse in the USA by attacking the producers in foreign countries more than the consumers in their own country, and I wondered if other outgoing currency flows deleterious to the US economy could be given a similar treatment.

The other idea is that various of the world's famous ancient tourist sites might be recent fakes, or at least could plausibly be presented as such by a conspiracy-minded and/or cynical agency. This is not that new a concept: the monks of Glastonbury faked King Arthur's tomb in 1190 to attract wealthy visitors. The idea for a story occurred to me at Abu Simbel in Egypt, where the statues of Ramses II and the hill they were built up against looked thousands of years old. But you can go inside the hill: it is hollow, made of concrete, with lights and ladders and gantry-ways, like the inside of a Bond set. I'd known from TV documentaries that the statues had been moved out the of the way of the new Lake Nasser with the building of the Aswan Dam in the 1950s, but seeing the innards of the new construction got me thinking: What if every ancient wonder was like that inside?

Put the two together, and you have the Tourism Enforcement Agency. Technically there are one or two problems with The Travel Agent: a lack of clarity in some places, and perhaps a too-great reliance on knowledge of obscure facts in the real world without enough in-story planting of relevant clues. But other than that I am quite happy with the story as it stands.

Some reviews: Mark Kelly in Locus Online: "A funny and disturbing piece that slides easily between farce and paranoia." and Steve Carper in Tangent Online calls it "a conspiracy theory of such seductive explanatory power that it makes the truth a pale and fragile thing by comparison," though he also has some criticisms you can look up yourself, one of which is for something I wasn't directly trying to suggest but is an understandable misreading caused by the lack of clarity in my writing alluded to above.

Photos: Machu Picchu in 1993 and Stonehenge in 1966 have me in them (in those days you could stand on the stones); I took the pics of Abu Simbel in 1989, the Great Wall of China in 1988 and York Minster some time in the early 70s (it overlooked my school).