Okay, only just “Tomorrow”, but I’ve been busy. Dragon Age, as a wise man once said, does not play itself.
The other two short stories in the Mean Streets anthology I mentioned yesterday were Remi Chandler and John Taylor. In the other order, then:
Take Neverwhere. Neverwhere is one of my favourite books in the world, so this is a good start. Take the central conceit – a world parallel to London that is full of weird shit – and literalise it. The Nightside is a hidden world within London town, a classic fantasy subcity of out of time adventurers and out of universe horrors; of evil beyond your mind and technology beyond our ken; a world that normality may occasionally stumble into, but never lasts long within. Then put a PI there, give him a hidden backstory and a genre awareness, season with mixed metaphors, and continue into the future. It’s a darker side of the same concept Neverwhere explored, with back story and structure where Neverwhere had whimsy and flow. Where it occasionally trips over is a need to explain the world around it, though this builds a deeper universe you feel you comprehend. In both cases, you understand the world you’re in as the character does. Oh, and there’s always the rising tide of bad juju.
A Kiss Before the Apocalypse by Thomas E. Sniegoski
Now you should start recommending things at me 🙂
You know what I am like with books, but strangely I picked up Crichton’s Prey 2 nights ago and have almost finished it already. I would expect you have already read it though. If you haven’t, its about the evolution and worrying combination of nanotechnology, micro-biotechnology and computer programming, and the ultimate creation of self replicating, self sufficient and rapidly evolving, flying nano-bots…Sounds a bit crazy doesnt it.
Howabout ‘The Moscow Vector’ or ‘The Lazarus Vendetta’ which are both Robert Ludlam books but co-written (or you could say actually written) by Patrick Larkin. They are both Covert One novels and are basically about terrorist threats and a super army general/spy/batman hero. Sounds a bit cheesy but they are well written.