I agree with you, Martin, about the ‘little touches’. The were the most difficult part of the story to adapt – some I was able to change into the new setting and a couple I think I even kept as they were, but there were definitely several occasions where I didn’t come up with a suitable alternative.

If I’d taken a little more time over it I could probably have come up with a more convincing future society, complete with its own brands and ‘little touches’, and perhaps avoided the wobble that you identified.

What I found most interesting about the exercise were the passages that seemed to slip most naturally into a completely new genre. On a fundamental level very little had to change, despite the very different genre.

Thanks for reading it!

However, one of the things I liked about the original was the little touches that really root it in its setting. For example: “Pizza Express, as it happens, only the best.” I could have done with a few more things like this to really evoke the future. There is certainly some of this in Jones’s story but it wobbled a bit between his cyberpunk city and the realife Nottingham of the original.