Like all the best ideas, it started over lunch. We were talking about China, or at least our series of stories about and from China, or maybe it was our series of short fiction to mark the fall of the Berlin wall, but someone - it was probably me - was going on about how the world looks a little different through the lens of fiction when Simon Jeffery said we should do a set of short stories about oil.
It seemed obvious when he said it. I mean, it's all around us, seeps into everything we do, but we don't see it, we can't see it, because it's simply everywhere. It powers us into work, takes us on holiday, lights up our homes and cools down our food. It washes us and dresses us and stirs our tea. The computer I'm typing this on - and the computer you're reading it on - is made from oil.
As for the writers, well, some of these seemed pretty obvious, too. One year on from the catastrophe at the Deepwater Horizon, it seemed pretty clear that we wanted to hear from Tim Gautreaux. On this side of the Atlantic Rose Tremain and Joanna Kavenna give the project a firm grounding in contemporary life. And who better to divine where our obsession with the black stuff might take us than China Miéville?
I'm no specialist on literature from the Middle East, but Claire Armitstead pointed me in the direction of Robin Yassin-Kassab, and the translator Peter Clark confirmed it was no coincidence I'd seen work by Saudi novelist Mohammed Hasan Alwan in a couple of recent anthologies of the most exciting new Arabic writing. An African perspective came from one of my favourite authors, Alain Mabanckou, while territory of a different sort is opened up by the graphic novelist Simone Lia.
So here they are, or at least here they will be, with a story a day from now until Good Friday, with Rose Tremain raising the curtain on the series with Captive. Here's where we find out if there really was anything to what I was banging on about in the Guardian canteen. Can fiction change the way we think - can fiction change the way we feel - about oil?
