Going Places: A Guest Post by Kassia St. Clair

The basic facts are these. In January 1907, the Parisian newspaper Le Matin published a front-page challenge: “Will anyone agree to go, this summer, from Peking to Paris by motorcar?” In response, five automobiles set off a few weeks later bound for the City of Light some 8,000 miles west. Among the crews were French motoring veterans, a star journalist, an Italian prince and a con artist. There were few roads worthy of the name and no gas stations: fuel had to be transported in advance by camel and donkey and left in caches. The chosen route wound through a desert, along train-tracks, over rickety bridges, across rivers and not one but two age-old empires on the brink of collapse. It was chaotic and various participants chronicled and photographed the entire thing leaving a vast trove of evidence to sift through. Early on, I decided I wanted to use this race to talk about the world at a moment of profound technological and cultural change brought about by the motorcar itself. The story had everything: high stakes, comedy, drama, romance — between man and machine rather than two individuals, but one shouldn’t be greedy — rich historical sources and skulduggery.  

Another thing that journeys and books have in common is they rarely go as planned. True, I did unearth new sources, previously undiscovered shenanigans and tracked down surviving relatives who shared photos and memorabilia with me. But I had hoped to retrace the Peking—Paris route in an old, white Toyota Landcruiser, an idea quashed by two years of covid travel restrictions and the Russo-Ukrainian war. What I had imagined as a writing experience of vast landscapes, dog-eared atlases and notebooks full of Cyrillic receipts, largely took place in three-meter-by-two meter shed in a suburban London garden, with a large custom map of Eurasia pinned to one wall and a fox gently snoozing on the roof. Then I got pregnant. I ended up writing the final chapters at 4 o’clock in the morning after the first feed of the day, or sometime later, bouncing gently on a yoga ball with a baby in a sling strapped to my chest. It was disorientating, transportative and most definitely a journey; I was a better and more resilient writer at the end of it. And the book? Well, I’m hopelessly biased, but I think The Race to the Future is pretty incredible, and I hope you will too.