Stoked to see this Starred Review of RULE OF CAPTURE in the new Publishers Weekly—”a glimmer of hope that the usurpers of the Constitution may be beaten at their own game, ‘one case at a time.'”
(And the part of me that worked hard to tune this generic polyphony especially loves reading that “Brown keeps tight control of his narrative even as this alternate America slips its gears.”)
Just found out that my novel TROPIC OF KANSAS is a Kindle monthly deal, on sale through the end of June for $1.99—a great chance for those who haven’t read it, in advance of my new related book RULE OF CAPTURE coming out later this summer (and now available for preorder).
I’ve been keeping a low profile online lately as I finish revisions on my forthcoming novel RULE OF CAPTURE, but I was able to share some of my 2018 reading over at the Aqueduct Press blog, including some of the weird research I have been doing for the new book—like the curious little handbook pictured above. Thanks to Timmi Duchamp and the folks at Aqueduct for having me back again.
This week brought the news that Tropic of Kansas is a Kindle Monthly Deal from now through November 5—$2.99 for the e-book. Thanks to all of the folks who have already checked it out.
This week’s memory feed also served a reminder of one of my favorite squibs on the book, from one year ago in Booklist:
A nice boost as I crank on what’s next.
This just (turned) in, to my editor at Harper: the manuscript of my new novel, RULE OF CAPTURE. Coming your way in a year or so, publishing gods permitting.
Today is the one-year anniversary of my novel Tropic of Kansas. I have been very fortunate in the reception the book has had, and am deeply appreciative of the support of readers, reviewers, colleagues, and the team at Harper who made it possible. The book’s recognition last month as a finalist for the 2018 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science fiction novel was the culmination of an amazing year.
If you read the sampling of what folks have said about the book, you’ll find many crediting the author’s prescience, or remarking on the way the book seems ripped from the headlines. The truth is that I worked hard to set the book in a very different version of reality from the one we live in. It was essential to do that, I thought, to take the book where I wanted it to go. I wanted to imagine an America facing the kind of revolutionary unrest I saw people enduring in other parts of the world when I began writing the book in 2012, often as the consequence of our own actions. At the same time, I tried to ground it in realism—a speculative realism that puts a fun house mirror up to the world. So I focused on the parts of America I see out there that we have allowed to degenerate into what we used to call third world, threw in ideas like CEO presidents, corporate mercenaries, flying killer robots, ecological exhaustion, direct democracy, network politics, insurrection, and the possibility of Anthropocene renewal, and played with the mixing board. That my dystopian experiment resulted in a book whose scenes echo in the daily train wreck that is our newsfeed just proves the well-established truism of the Gomi-no-Sensei.
Tropic of Kansas is a dark book, as many remarked. It went to dark places in an effort to find its way to a more hopeful future. It didn’t get all the way to utopia, but you could see it from there, out there on the horizon. Tropic of Kansas did well enough that I get to write two more novels that explore similar territory, through the point of view of a lawyer in an America that is experiencing the end of the rule of law— “Better Call Saul meets Nineteen Eighty-Four.” I’m about to turn the first of those books in, which has been a lot of fun to work on. Part of the aspiration, in addition to telling an entertaining story, is to frame a window onto the possibility of American renewal, grounded in green thinking and emancipatory politics. I like to think that science fiction has a role to play in imagining better real tomorrows, especially if it works hard to tell the truth, and that if we do our jobs well we might even fashion a means to actually open a crack in that window.
I appreciate the opportunity, and the support of all of those who have given my work a shot.
In the year 2017, science fiction writers will be invited to appear as commentators on Sunday morning public affairs shows.
I was deleted to have the opportunity to appear as a guest on “Story in the Public Square,” a great new program hosted by Jim Ludes of the Pell Center at Salve Regina University in Newport and G. Wayne Miller of the Providence Journal-Bulletin, broadcast on Rhode Island Public Television and the SiriusXM P.O.T.U.S. channel. We discussed Tropic of Kansas, dystopian realism, and the nexus of speculative fiction & American political life, in what I thought it was an engaging conversation. I very much appreciated the opportunity, and expect we will see more public dialogues like this as our daily reality becomes increasingly science fictional.
The view from the fifteenth floor of the airport hotel looks out through a frame of pebbled concrete bolted to the structure. The pebbles are shades of pink and grey, harvested from local rock to make the brutalist sun-shading of the 1970s. I wonder how long the rock was there in the earth before they harvested it to create a place for business travelers to sleep between flights and meetings.
The window looks out onto a wide ancient plain between the forks of the Trinity River which has been almost entirely converted into a platform for launching hairless apes into the sky. Sixty-five million of them a year on more than two-thousand flights a day. They start coming at dawn and never really let up, making their own tunnels of wind just over the hotel, lined up in air traffic controlled constellations of avionic light threaded out across the eastern sky. Wide freeways lead to the airport from every direction, and to the parking lots of the seemingly infinite number of corporate hotels, identical office parks and shitty chain restaurants that append the complex, terrestrial mirrors of the network of hundreds of other airports that send the planes here and accept its departures.
I brought my trail running shoes for my weird weekend in this zone, and as I look out the window I imagine lines through the green space allowed by this Anthropocene overlay that straddles two counties and four muncipalities. There is an empty field right down there, a triangle of maybe four or five acres. In the field are twenty-seven bales of hay faded to grey, left there a long time ago, hidden at ground level behind the towering sunflowers of late summer. On Friday as I arrived men were laying a new road next to the field, preparing to pave it with every square foot of impervious cover the municipal development code of this particular suburb allows.
The water towers of Irving, of which there are many, each feature an image of wild horses running across these plains. And as I jog over the fresh-mowed Bermuda grass that grows in the rights of way, I imagine when it was like that here, with herds of fast mustangs roaming free, ready to be harvested like found money by enterprising pioneers. I am old enough now to realize how recently in time that was, and maybe even how brief a period a time of this place between the rivers was, because really the horses were as invasive as the imported grasses under my feet, an accidental gift of the Spaniards to the people who had walked here from the other side of the world.
Running along the grassy median of the road that follows the southwestern fenceline of the massive airport, you can see the people driving out of the brand-new subdivision of custom homes opposite the outer edges of the tarmac, and you can see that many of them are people who just got here from the other side of the world, or from the other class realities of this country. The sort of people who are not deterred by the signs in the lawns warning of the avigation easements encumbering the houses, agreements in advance to endure the noise of low-flying aircraft. They will not be here long, in these way stations on the way to American affluence.
Go mustangs, say the ball caps of the preppy old white people riding their BMWs to the SMU game.
On the other side of the George W. Bush Presidential Freeway, I noticed another wide field. As I stepped off the turf to cut through to it, I found native grasses coming up in a spot along the edge that evaded the bulldozers. The gentle grade of the field beyond that led up to an old billboard painted over black, accidental abstraction in a zone given over entirely to the self-expression of corporate persons. As I stopped to take a picture, a big hawk lifted off from the light armatures at the base, headed for a stand of exotic trees over there by the office park.
I came here for a weekend conference I thought was about imagining better futures, or at least other futures, but turned out to mostly be just another celebration of the repeat consumption of juvenile narratives of wonder by adults seeking escape from lives in the cubicles of those climate-controlled buildings. And on the last morning when I look out the window at the terminal to the sky, I realize this is that future that our predecessors imagined. I also remember the creek I saw flowing under the airport perimeter fence, and the prairie grasses I saw there holding out in a few square feet that the spreadsheets missed. I wonder how long ago it was that this plain was made by water, and whether these concrete creeks will overflow and drown the office parks sooner than the engineers think.
My story “A Natural History of Vacant Lots”—really a piece of speculative nonfiction—is now available at Texas Architect and in print in the magazine’s September/October issue.
The Los Angeles Public Library has an interview about Tropic of Kansas up at their blog—some great questions that really bit into the material.
And the September 15 issue of the Times Literary Supplement has a roundup of new American dystopias, including Tropic of Kansas, remarking on the book’s “thriller-ish swagger,” “the rather richly imagined wasteland of [the book’s] mid-America,” and it’s “Twainian journey downriver to the Missisippi’s end,” and even pulling out Roland Barthes to explain the book’s narrative strategies for world building.
Texas Architect: “A Natural History of Vacant Lots”
Los Angeles Public Library: Interview with an Author: Christopher Brown
The Los Angeles Review of Books just posted a great long essay on Tropic of Kansas, with contributor Christopher Urban positioning the book as a rare example of a contemporary dystopia of resistance, and comparing it to both Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Richard Adams’s Watership Down.
Tropic of Kansas is an entertaining and engrossing read — and it shows that contemporary dystopian literature need not forgo aspects of ‘resistance’ but can, in fact, be all about it.”
LARB: “Dystopian Resistance: Christopher Brown’s ‘Tropic of Kansas'”