Guardian book club: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

My final reading of my own books occurs when the FedEx man brings the page proofs to be checked. In the case of Cloud Atlas, this was back in 2003, so these days it's not uncommon to meet readers whose knowledge of the book surpasses my own. Cloud Atlas's Wikipedia entry covers the book's more obvious themes and content, so here I'll stick to "The Making Of"-type angles, and a few Roads Not Taken.

I'd had an idea for a polyphonic "Russian Doll" novel ever since Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller had wowed me at uni in the late 80s. Calvino's book is made of interrupted narratives which are never returned to – my idea was to write a novel whose narratives would be returned to, and completed in reverse order. For me, the number nine has always been a helpful sub-divider of the blank page at the "Where do I begin?" stage – not for any mystical reasons, but because nine gives you four stages, or "way-stations" for the outward journey, one destination, and four stages back. Cloud Atlas's original structure, then, had three narratives set in the past, three in the present and three in the future. Once I was under way, however, each section grew to about 100 pages long, and it takes a braver writer than me to go up to 900 pages, so the final manuscript had a two-two-two formation. One of my three "lost narratives" concerned a Korean rap musician, and I visited Seoul one freezing New Year holiday to scout for locations. Being too miserly to waste my research, I used it to form the background for one of the future narratives, set in Seoul.

The germ of the opening (and closing) Adam Ewing narrative, about a notary crossing the Pacific in the 1850s, comes from a section in Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel, about a Maori tribe called the Moriori, who discovered what we now call the Chatham Islands, but within a few generations "forgot" both their Aotearoan homeland and how to build seagoing canoes, and came to believe that their islands were the only land in the oceanic cosmos. This combines two of my favourite themes: islands, and the fragility of knowledge. For mid-19th-century language I ransacked Herman Melville, in particular Moby-Dick and his superb sketches of the Galápagos Islands, The Encantadas.

Robert Frobisher, the louche second narrator of Cloud Atlas, can trace his ancestry to a book called Delius As I Knew Him by the frail composer's amanuensis, Eric Fenby. An early reader commented that Ewing and Frobisher sounded too alike, so I made Ewing straighter and Frobisher more morally ambiguous and sexually unfussy. Frobisher's language comes from Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Isherwood.

Luisa Rey, an American investigative journalist, is a mix of the 1970s TV detectives I enjoyed as a kid, All the President's Men and James Ellroy, whose plot-velocity always impresses me. Luisa appears in a short scene in my first novel, Ghostwritten, as an older woman – this was the second time I'd re-employed a character from an earlier book. Timothy Cavendish, Cloud Atlas's fourth protagonist, also has a short scene in Ghostwritten.

The care home that Cavendish finds himself incarcerated in comes from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and a young man's fear of senescence. My teenage reading diet was rich in colourfully jacketed science fiction, so conjuring up an underground dome staffed by clones for my novel's fifth section came naturally enough. Architectural features from pioneering SF classics such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We and The Machine Stops by EM Forster – yes, that EM Forster – are present, with rich dollops of Blade Runner. The university where Sonmi is housed is a carbon copy of the technical college where I worked in Japan and wrote a chunk of the novel. The question/answer format for the story was inspired by (if that's the right verb) those interviews you get in Hello! magazine, where every question is a loaded one.

Cloud Atlas's central section is set two or three centuries from now in Hawaii, whose inhabitants are well on the way to resembling the Moriori of the Adam Ewing section. On my bleaker days, humanity's future looks disturbingly like its past.

Russell Hoban's post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker impressed me enormously (still does), and my characters speak a similar broken-down mutation of English. I visited the radio telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea in 2001, and sometimes a place screams at you to use it, so this is where my protagonist Zachary undergoes his own temptations of Christ. Structure-fanciers will note that this scene is the structural peak, or mid-point, of the entire novel.

Watching the FedEx man drive off with your page proofs, you feel a mix of emotions not unlike, I imagine, that felt by a parent watching a grown-up teenager leaving home: fondness, a little bereavement, hope that it succeeds, and a certain resignation. That's how I feel about Cloud Atlas, too: it's yours now.

Next week John Mullan looks at readers' responses.