Dystopia

An Interview with PETER LINEY

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Liney-Detainee

Peter Liney’s The Detainee has been on my radar for a little while, now, yet I keep getting distracted from reading it. With this interview, an excerpt and a guest post up on the blog already, I really should get my butt in gear and read the novel. Very soon, hopefully. In the meantime, here is what Peter had to say about his novel, writing, and more…

Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Peter Liney?

Well, first and foremost, he’s a writer. I’ve done all kinds of jobs – selling sewing machines in the Oz Outback, modeling, acting, fashion buying, decorating, teaching, etc., etc. – but the one constant has always been writing, the one dream has always been success. And no, I don’t agree with writing for yourself; no matter what we do, we want to be appreciated for it. Continue reading →

Guest Post: “SEEDS IN THE DESERT” by Peter Liney (Detainee Blog Tour)

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Liney-DetaineeI’m not exactly sure when THE DETAINEE started to take shape in my mind. For a long time I had this notion that I wanted to write a book about the human spirit, about the fact that, no matter how dark the situation, given hope, we always find a way to survive. Like those seeds that lie dormant in the desert, year in, year out, waiting for rain, and when it comes, suddenly burst into the most beautiful of life. Or the victims of kidnapping, political prisoners, those held for no reason and often under the most appalling of circumstances, where do they find the will to survive? To wait for the arrival of that shower of life-giving rain? Continue reading →

Review: TERMINUS by Adam Baker (Hodder)

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Baker-TerminusAn intense tale, that proves there’s (un)life in the zombie genre yet!

The world has been overrun by a lethal infection, ravaged by a pathogen that leaves its victims locked half-way between life and death. New York, bombed to prevent the spread of the disease, has been reduced to radioactive rubble. A rescue squad enters the subway tunnels beneath Manhattan, searching for the one man who can create an antidote. The squad battle floodwaters, lethal radiation and infected, irradiated survivors as they race against the disease that threatens to extinguish the human race.

Adam Baker is an author who has been on my radar for a long time, but for some reason I keep missing his novels. With his third novel, though, I was more proactive. As soon as I got my mitts on Terminus, I dove right in. This is an atmospheric, gripping and suspenseful novel. I loved it. Continue reading →

Guest Post: “Why I Didn’t Write My Book in an Elevator” by Jack Skillingstead

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Skillingstead-LifeOnThePreservationUSHere’s the so-called elevator pitch for my new novel, Life On The Preservation.

A man discovers his city is caught in a time loop. He fears he may be losing his mind. Then a girl from outside the loop arrives. They find each other and solve the mystery. It’s Dark City meets Groundhog Day.

I never actually delivered this pitch. In fact, I only wrote it just now. One time I did find myself in an elevator with David Hartwell, who is the senior editor at Tor Books. I wasn’t even tempted to blurt a pitch at him. All I said was, “Nice tie.” David is famous for his ties. After that, we did what most people do on elevators. We stared at the doors and waited.

On publication day, which was May 28th, I did a public reading from, Life On The Preservation. The reading took place at the University Bookstore in Seattle, Washington. Duane Wilkins, who runs the excellent science fiction section of the store and who is probably as well-read as anyone ever has been in our genre, had this to say in his introduction:

“I don’t know how to explain this book.”

Then he stared into space for a while, repeated himself, and suggested I might do better at describing Life On The Preservation. Presumably, he believed I could describe my own novel because, after all, I’d written it. But I couldn’t, even though I’m a fairly articulate person. If I’d had my elevator pitch handy I might have recited the thing, but I doubt it. Besides, I only wrote the elevator pitch five minutes ago.

People who like to give writing advice will often tell you that if you can’t describe your book in one paragraph you probably don’t have a saleable idea. If that’s true, I’m living in the wrong universe. Though I have described both of my novels in one or two paragraphs, I did it only after the books were finished and sold and the publishers asked me to do it, so they would have some copy to put on the back of the book and to advertise it in catalogues and around the internet.

Skillingstead-LifeOnThePreservationUKThe truth is, you don’t know what your book is about until you’ve written it, and if the book is any good it lives in the details – details that you discover along the way. At my University Bookstore reading I could have described LOTP as a story of alien destruction, time loops, transhuman survival in an environment of outlaw art, paranoid estrangement and redemption. I could even have said its secret theme concerned living in the world you create – whether you acknowledge you’ve created it or not.

But, while true enough, that description isn’t anything but a laundry list of related generalities. And I must say that, generally, I distrust generalities. Before I wrote LOTP I took several stabs at the one-paragraph description. I even tried to outline chapters. It felt a little like looking at a slide show from a vacation I hadn’t yet enjoyed. Here’s a pretty picture of a beach with random people lying around! Yes, the people are strangers, ciphers, and the beach looks like any other beach. But there it is! And I’m going!

My early efforts of transforming Life On The Preservation from a short story to a novel looked something like a generic beach with sun-bathing ciphers. This is because I was desperate to get organized and write a novel that pushed all the right buttons – you know, the buttons that would make people love the book and shower me with contracts and money. Of course, those first attempts to expand Preservation turned out to be abysmal failures. I learned that – for me, at least – there is only one way to discover whatever it is that might be original within myself. I had to go there and document the journey every inch of the way. Only then could I begin to organize my fancy slide show.

*

Life on the Preservation was published by Solaris Books on June 6th. Here’s the synopsis…

Inside the Seattle Preservation Dome it’s always the Fifth of October, the city caught in an endless time loop. “Reformed” graffiti artist Ian Palmer is the only one who knows the truth, and he is desperate to wake up the rest of the city before the alien Curator of this human museum erases Ian’s identity forever. Outside the Dome, the world lies in apocalyptic ruin. Small town teenager Kylie is one of the few survivors to escape both the initial shock wave and the effects of the poison rains that follow. Now she must make her way across the blasted lands pursued by a mad priest and menaced by skin-and-bone things that might once have been human. Her destination is the Preservation, and her mission is to destroy it. But once inside, she meets Ian, and together they discover that Preservation reality is even stranger than it already appears.

“The 5th Wave” by Rick Yancey (Penguin)

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Yancey-5thWaveA Sinister new YA Dystopia Series

After the 1st wave, only darkness remains. After the 2nd, only the lucky escape. And after the 3rd, only the unlucky survive. After the 4th wave, only one rule applies: trust no one.

Now, it’s the dawn of the 5th wave, and on a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs from Them. The beings who only look human, who roam the countryside killing anyone they see. Who have scattered Earth’s last survivors. To stay alone is to stay alive, Cassie believes, until she meets Evan Walker. Beguiling and mysterious, Evan Walker may be Cassie’s only hope for rescuing her brother – or even saving herself. But Cassie must choose: between trust and despair, between defiance and surrender, between life and death. To give up or to get up.

There is a lot to like about this novel. The world-building is interesting, the characters are (for the most part) well-defined and well-written. The story is focused, giving it a quick-pace and addictive momentum. I really enjoyed reading this, despite one major niggle around the middle. Certainly, it’s easy to see why people have been talking about the series, and why Penguin think they are on to a winner. Among the better YA dystopia series, certainly.

The opening chapters offer one of the best introductions to a dystopian future I have read in a long while. We get a great sense of the environment in which Cassie, the first protagonist we follow, is operating and trying to survive. We also learn what the waves of alien attacks have done to the survivors, both physically (billions dead) and mentally (this is now paranoia city…).

“If you can’t trust anyone, then you can trust no one. Better to take the chance that Aunty Tilly is one of them than play the odds that you’ve stumbled across a fellow survivor. That’s friggin’ diabolical. It tears us apart. It makes us that much easier to hunt down and eradicate. The 4th Wave forces us into solitude, where there’s no strength in numbers, where we slowly go crazy from the isolation and fear and terrible anticipation of the inevitable… This is what the Others have done to us. You can’t band together to fight without trust. And without trust, there was no hope. How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.”

And so, survivors “put on a human face so no human face can be trusted. The only answer: Kill everyone or risk being killed by anyone.”

Most importantly, we get to know Cassie very quickly. Within about 5% of the novel (yes, read this on my Kindle), I felt I knew her pretty well, and certainly felt myself rooting for her. She is a bit true-to-type and is probably exactly what you expect from a YA heroine/hero, sure, but Yancey writes her well. She is a good guide, with an engaging, inviting voice. However, and this is my greatest issue with the book, this state of affairs did not last. I found Cassie’s character changed completely once she met Evan. She went from being hyper-self-sufficient to, effectively, totally-dependent (paranoid still, but dependent nonetheless). This weakened her. Though, she’s also not blind to the strangeness of her situation…

“Somehow the fact that I was rescued by a very good-looking guy with a lopsided grin and large, strong hands is the most unnerving thing that has happened to me since the Others arrived.”

Her interest in Evan, while sometimes a bit over-the-top, is also quite well done, reflecting the conflicted, bumbling, hormone-influenced confusion when it comes to people teenagers develop crushes on:

“What?” Smiling that damned lopsided, sexy grin, shoulders up, hands stuffed deep in his pockets with a sort of aw-shucks attitude, which I guess is meant to drive me the good kind of crazy. What is it about him that makes me want to slap him and kiss him, run from him and to him, throw my arms around him and knee him in the balls, all at the same time? I’d like to blame the Arrival for the effect he has on me, but something tells me guys have been doing this to us for a lot longer than a few months.

All of the other protagonists go through pretty realistic evolutions. The army has been collecting surviving teens and children, transporting them to the training facility, leaving adults behind for… clean-up. The militarisation of the young is troubling, certainly, but it is addressed through the eyes of some of those recruits. (A lot of YA novels seem to promote weapons-skills…) Our second main perspective is presented through Ben, who comes to be known as “Zombie” at the training camp. He develops into a more interesting character than Cassie, by the end of the book. All of his comrades are varied characters, and interesting to read about, too – certainly Ringer, who I enjoyed: she’s clearly a little mad, closed off (maybe edging towards sociopathic, actually). Sammy, whose call-sign is “Nugget”, was another good character, so very young and yet thrust into such horrific situations, brutal training, and a grueling environment.

Some of the early chapters with Evan felt a little muddled. As did some attempts to create uncertainty in the reader – there were at least two scenes that felt like attempts to make us question what we knew, when we’d already been doing that, and throwing these in ruined the tension and were obvious, and just a little artless. Minor niggles, I suppose, but they were clear. On the whole, though, Yancey’s prose is tight and well-crafted. It’s nothing spectacular, but he has a clear style, and one that pulls the reader on through the story.

Overall, though, Yancey has created a sinister, atmospheric and gripping alien-invasion-dystopia. The Waves are well-conceived, with the eponymous wave utterly devious.

The 5th Wave is flawed, but it’s gripping and well-executed. I definitely recommend it, and can’t wait for the next book in the series.

Upcoming: “Your Brother’s Blood” by David Towsey (Jo Fletcher)

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TowseyD-YourBrothersBlood

I kind of stumbled across this by accident, but it sounds pretty great. So, here’s some information about David Towsey’s debut novel, Your Brother’s Blood, coming from Jo Fletcher Books in September 2013… The publisher’s blog included the following comment, “Think The Road – but also think Warm Bodies, this book is going to stir up a storm.” This sounds right up my alley, then. Here’s the synopsis…

Thomas is thirty-two. He comes from the small town of Barkley. He has a wife there, Sarah, and a child, Mary; good solid names from the Good Book. And he is on his way home from the war, where he has been serving as a conscripted soldier. Thomas is also dead – he is one of the Walkin’. And Barkley does not suffer the wicked to live.

Review: RED MOON by Benjamin Percy (Hodder/Grand Central)

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PercyB-RedMoonUKA superb literary horror novel

Every teenage girl thinks she’s different. When government agents kick down Claire Forrester’s front door and murder her parents, Claire realises just how different she is.

Patrick Gamble was nothing special until the day he got on a plane and, hours later, stepped off it, the only passenger left alive. A hero.

President Chase Williams has sworn to eradicate the menace. Unknown to the electorate, however, he is becoming the very thing he has sworn to destroy.

Each of them is caught up in a war that so far has been controlled with laws and violence and drugs. But an uprising is about to leave them damaged, lost, and tied to one another for ever.

The night of the red moon is coming, when an unrecognizable world will emerge, and the battle for humanity will begin.

Red Moon is one of the best novels I’ve read this year. It’s long, but never felt like it dragged. I savoured every chapter. A near-perfect literary horror novel. Continue reading →