The highlight for me over the past few days leading into the craziness of the yuletide season (aside from my birthday, wrapping novel #3, and a couple of days’ R&R in a hotel in Atami 熱海市 with some very nice saké, overlooking a wild Japanese sea), was getting this YouTube review of One Hundred Years of Vicissitude by way cool cat fellow-writer Caleb J. Ross. It’s serious, funny, off-beat stuff and wraps up everything in a very tidy 4:26 minutes.
A week ago I also got to indulge in my first “twitterview“, a series of interactive questions/answers conducted over an hour or so by Novel Publicity (with thanks to Emlyn Chand & Phil Jourdan for organizing the thing), and if you’re curious you can check out the graphic transcript HERE.
I strangely had to confine all answers to minimal grabs, which was an experience and a half.
Said twitterview happened to correspond with my finishing off the manuscript for novel #3. Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? ended up clocking in at 97,000+ words.
While my first two novels were an homage to sci-fi/dystopia with noir undertones and classic hardboiled cinema (Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat) and surreal, slipstream fantasy (One Hundred Years of Vicissitude), this latest tome pays respect to two things I love the most — one of them being 1930s-40s noir detective stories.
In particular that written by Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye) and Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man) and the film adaptations by rather brilliant directors like John Huston, Robert Altman and Howard Hawks.
The other thing? Comicbooks.
More info soon, but let it be said here that for this the novel I wanted a more professional take on the visual concept and I also liked the idea of disparate visions of the same person — it’s the way comicbooks, after all, work in the real world. Bryan Hitch’s perception of Captain America in 2009 was far different from John Buscema’s in 1969, and this is one reason I asked artists from the UK (Harvey Finch & Andrew Chiu), Italy (Giovanni Ballati), the USA (Dave Acosta), Japan (Yoko Umehara & Kohana Yamadera), Russia (Saint Yak) and Australia (Paul Mason) to get involved.
Paul Mason’s is the appropriately Aussie variation you see here.
To celebrate this time of year, I’ve got together with my American publishers Another Sky Press and we’ve decided to offer FREE the epub/Kindle/PDF versions of my noir/dystopia/sci-fi novel Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, written in close collaboration with Kristopher Young (Click), set in near-future Melbourne and paying homage to 75 years of cinema…
You can go grab it HERE. Alternatively the trade paperback is only $4.74.
The novel (paperback or digital) also has a nifty wraparound cover by the great Scott Campbell.
Anyway, have a brilliant December/January, whatever your religious persuasion (or lack of it!) and we’ll butt heads again in 2013.
Andrez Bergen / Little Nobody 