What the Zeitgeist Wants

Christopher Brown writer and lawyer christopherbrown.com

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*A Christopher Brown book trailer for his new science fiction novel “Rule of Capture.”

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I don’t make it here often anymore, but I do have a new book out and this is the trailer for it.

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Sunday morning field notes from an airport hotel

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.

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Wall Street Journal and Agony Column on TROPIC OF KANSAS

This weekend's Wall Street Journal included a nice review of Tropic of Kansas by Tom Shippey—an unexpected highlight of a great weekend that also included an exceptional installment of Armadillocon, Austin's annual conference on imaginative literature.

And this morning, my interview with Rick Kleffel at the KQED studios in San Francisco is now available online (in both 1-hour and 7-minute versions), after airing on several Northern California NPR affiliates. Rick also has a generous review of Tropic of Kansas, asserting the book is neither dystopian nor utopian, but merely "utopian"—telling it like it is:

“...As hellish as things look; climate change, economic disaster, and Untied, not United States – Brown is happy to offer us some solace as well. Not everybody with a modicum of power buys into the madness. The possibility for real change is present, and low technology is there to help. The experience of reading Tropic of Kansas is thrilling not just because Brown is a masterful plotter with Sig (sort of) maturing into a genuine hero, the kind of character that makes readers want to cheer out loud. One of the major thrill here is realizing that this is not the future. It’s the present, lightly re-mixed, with a plot that reality sadly seems to lack.

It’s hard to turn the pages fast enough as you read Tropic of Kansas. Brown writes set-pieces with a powerfully cinematic eye, but remembers to invest them in character. And, as you are reading, Brown’s visionary writing and world will drop your jaws every time his perceptions laser their way into the heart of today. This happens early and often; importantly, the book was written well before today, so that Brown’s vision seems topical without resorting to “ripped from the headlines.”

It’s also critical that this is not Another Book About the Dire, Awful World. Things are bad in Tropic of Kansas, but not entirely so. There’s a soupcon of “getting-better-ability” even in the most horrific situations. This isn’t dystopian or utopian fiction, but just, what you might call “Topian,” which is to say a system that has Humans in it and thus is incapable of reaching Heaven or Hell. We can imagine both, but we know in our hearts that it’s Purgatory for us..."

Wall Street Journal—"Double Dystopia"

Narrative Species/Agony Column—"Christopher Brown's Tropic of Kansas: Topian Fiction"

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TROPIC OF KANSAS

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Book giveaway for Tropic of Kansas by Christopher Brown Jun 20-Jun 27, 2017

Enter to win one of 10 free copies available. Giveaway dates from Jun 20-Jun 27, 2017. Enter for a chance to win 1 of 10 advanced reader copies of Christ...

Goodreads is giving away ten copies of my novel TROPIC OF KANSAS—details at the link.

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There's a new excerpt from the opening of my forthcoming novel TROPIC OF KANSAS up at Tor.com, in which a young fugitive is deported back to a U.S.A. that has been walled off—from the other side. 

Tropic of Kansas, by Christopher Brown, at Tor.com.

Forthcoming July 11, 2017 from Harper Voyager.

Pic: Half title interior page from TROPIC OF KANSAS, design by Renata de Oliveira.

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“The Rule of Capture,” my piece about property rights, animal rights and realtors for the debut issue of Reckoning, an annual journal of sf-inflected writing on environmental justice, is now available online. It’s a somewhat experimental piece, narrative nonfiction that bobs and weaves and blurs into fiction. Thanks to Reckoning editor Michael J. DeLuca for the prompt.

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Stoked to see what my hero the amazing Joe Lansdale just had to say about my forthcoming novel TROPIC OF KANSAS. Joe was a big influence on the book, and sets a high bar in his work and his life. Check out the SundanceTV adaptation of his Hap and Leonard books, now available for streaming on Netflix.

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What's the difference between a CEO and a president?

Christopher Brown is a gonzo cyberpunk writer who delves into the real-world story of Saddam Hussein’s Frank Frazetta collection, but by day he’s a high-powered lawyer who’s worked in government and the private sector (it’s the intersection of these two Browns that penned his outstanding, forthcoming debut novel, Tropic of Kansas, which you should pre-order right now).

In a new column, Brown uses Tropic of Kansas’s corporate-presidency dystopia (an eerily prescient premise that predated Trump’s bid for the presidency) as a springboard to look at the different roles that CEOs and presidents play, especially the outsider “organizational transformation” CEOs who swagger in with bold vision and leave behind ruin for the company, riches for themselves, and short-term gains for the investors who vaulted them into position.

http://boingboing.net/2017/03/15/were-in-the-darkest-timeline.html

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Nice recap by Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing of my new piece up at Medium on democracy, dystopia and the cult of the CEO

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Monday morning sun salutation, in a hidden urban wetland

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Read: an excerpt from Tropic of Kansas, a spookily prescient comic dystopia about trumpism

Christ Brown’s debut novel, Tropic of Kansas, will be out in July – but Brown finished it years ago, long before the darkly comic trumpian political intrigue it envisions became more like factual reporting than satire.

Barnes and Noble have just published a long excerpt from the book for your delectation – I have a review of it scheduled for July 11.

https://boingboing.net/2017/01/19/read-an-excerpt-from-tropic-o.html

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Thanks to Cory for this heads up about the excerpt from my forthcoming novel now up at Barnes & Noble.

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Cover of my forthcoming novel Tropic of Kansas, now available for pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Harper Collins.  The book was included last week in Barnes & Noble’s list of major sf editors’ top books of 2017—“With a stark yet lyrical style, this tale carries the transgressive tradition of Huck Finn to a much, much darker place...”  More below and at the links if you’re interested.

Advance praise:

“Timely, dark, and ultimately hopeful: it might not ‘make America great again,’ but then again, it just might.” —Cory Doctorow, New York Times bestselling and award winning author of Homeland and Walkaway

“Futurist as provocateur! The world is sheer batshit genius…A truly hallucinatorily envisioned environment.” —William Gibson, New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Neuromancer and The Peripheral

“This stunning novel of a time all too easily imaginable as our own highlights a few of the keen-voiced, brave-souled women and men who balance like subversive acrobats on society’s whirling edges. Read Tropic of Kansas for the sheer pleasure of sunning yourself in Brown’s warm words; read it for its characters’ heart-stopping-and-starting actions in the face of crushing oppression, read it for the way this book melts through years of glacial dread you didn’t realize had accumulated. Read it to burn with the joy of realistic hope.” —Nisi Shawl, Tiptree-award winning author of Everfair and Writing the Other

“This extraordinary novel is probably more American than America itself will ever get.” —Bruce Sterling, award winning author of Islands in the Net and Pirate Utopia

“Savvy political thriller meets ripping pulp adventure—a marriage made in page-turning, thought-provoking heaven…A story of valiant heart and brain up against the worst architectures of greed and power.” —Jessica Reisman, SESFA award-winning author of Substrate Phantoms

“Eerily prescient revolutionary picaresque.” — Reckoning magazine

“Compelling, startling…the best book I read [this year].” — Endless Bookshelf

Acclaimed short story writer and editor of the World Fantasy Award-nominee Three Messages and a Warning eerily envisions an American society unraveling and our borders closed off—from the other side—in this haunting and provocative novel that combines Max Barry’s Jennifer Government, Philip K. Dick’s classic Man in the High Castle, and China Mieville’s The City & the City.

The United States of America is no more. Broken into warring territories, its center has become a wasteland DMZ known as the “Tropic of Kansas.” Though this gaping geographic hole has no clear boundaries, everyone knows it’s out there—that once-bountiful part of the heartland, broken by greed and exploitation, where neglect now breeds unrest. Two travelers appear in this arid American wilderness: Sig, the fugitive orphan of political dissidents, and his foster sister Tania, a government investigator whose search for Sig leads her into her own past—and towards an unexpected future.

Sig promised those he loves that he would make it to the revolutionary redoubt of occupied New Orleans. But first he must survive the wild edgelands of a barren mid-America policed by citizen militias and autonomous drones, where one wrong move can mean capture . . . or death. One step behind, undercover in the underground, is Tania. Her infiltration of clandestine networks made of old technology and new politics soon transforms her into the hunted one, and gives her a shot at being the agent of real change—if she is willing to give up the explosive government secrets she has sworn to protect.

As brother and sister traverse these vast and dangerous badlands, their paths will eventually intersect on the front lines of a revolution whose fuse they are about to light.

Forthcoming July 11, 2017

Preorder Tropic of Kansas from Amazon

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Found on this rainy morning while rambling in the woods behind the dairy factory.

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With all this talk of building border walls, it’s easy to forget we already have one.  A brief tour via Street View, at my blog.

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Some urban exploration field notes from an abandoned semiconductor fab, at my blog.

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Cinco de Mayo in Dealey Plaza

I got to Dallas before sundown, just as happy hour was starting to turn into something else.  You could feel it welling up, even from the fourth floor of the hotel.  Like they had trapped Dionysus inside the mall across the street and were making him do humiliating tricks on the mechanical bull.

C E N T R U M

On the way up I saw the photo of the day, the one where the candidate’s sphincter-like mouth is poised above a taco salad, ground beef smothered in processed cheese and red sauce, presented in a fried tortilla like an unfolding flower of baked human skin.  It was only later that I saw the placemat he was using, the skin of one of his ex-wives, only partially covered by an 80s bikini, laid out on the page of a glossy magazine.

This is the day the gringos drink Mexican beer, celebrating the dream of that lazy playa where they can escape the capitalist master they were born to serve, the one who built the glass castles from which they pour after work, looking for the ways the city will permit them to try to feel alive.

Stay thirsty, my friends.

They killed the most interesting man in the world that day.  Maybe he became too threatening, with his old world rico suave liberated from the idea of labor. More likely they retired him to Boca Raton.

The mouth of the rat.  Where thieves lurk.  

Boca is the hometown of the tabloid that ran the picture they were talking about on Tuesday, the one where some guy who could be anybody, maybe even the Cuban father of the other candidate, is standing there with the assassin, handing out political leaflets.  

Fair Play.  No one says that anymore.

If you walk past the bars overflowing with horny young consultants loaded on Dos Equis and sampled mantras of the celluloid whores of Saigon, past the black crystal temples of business process outsourcing and generally accepted accounting principles, you may find yourself standing under the sniper’s perch on the sixth floor, the one they keep open just the way he had it, so you can look through it if you are willing to pay $16 for the thrill.

The view from the grassy knoll is free.

Abraham Zapruder was here, says the plaque.

In the morning the fighter pilot I grew up with takes me for a jog around the golf course and tells me we are preparing for war with China.  One of his squadrons has adopted Darth Vader as its mascot.  Later we eat toast and talk about all the unconstitutional orders American military officers have followed in recent history.

Fortuna Fortes Juvat.  Too bad Google can’t translate it.