Available 17th January from HarperVoyager. E-book and mass market paperback.
Among this week’s new comics was the first issue of an 8-part miniseries, The Sheriff of Babylon (Vertigo/DC). I was intrigued by author Tom King’s plug for the book, which boasted authenticity in spades. As a young man, incensed by the 9/11 atrocities, King joined the CIA and found himself, age 23, living and working in occupied Iraq. So this is a bit like having a Batman book written by a former superhero.
I expected realism, insight, and the day-to-day nitty-gritty of the Green Zone and surrounding districts, all of which I got.
What I didn’t expect was King’s command of the medium. Working with artist Mitch Gerads, he doesn’t just adapt the usual filmic and novelistic techniques, as many writers do, but goes for the unique opportunities available in comics, the repeated panels setting up a rhythm that is well-nigh irresistible. He’s not the first to use such methods by a long way, but, wow. Does he do it well.
Set some ten years ago, the book remains all too timely. This week, the UK government voted to bomb Syria. You can read arguments for and against elsewhere on the web, but the very proliferation of ISIS, or Daesh, as it is also known, suggests that decades of Western military involvement in the area have gained only the most short-term goals, along with the enrichment of a few large corporations, and a major increase in the debt of Western nations.
In short, the War on Terror has gone the way of its predecessor, the War on Drugs. More and more resources have been poured into the battle, yet the problem keeps on getting worse.
And strategies have not been changed.
It seems the West suffers a failure of understanding, not just about extremism, but about the whole geographical, cultural, political and religious situation in the Middle East. Today, as some would have us believe, we don’t even know who the enemy is. Those refugees, fleeing the devastation ISIS has already wreaked in their country, are labelled as potential terrorists. The Muslim you may work with, socialize with, pass in the street – or actually be – is suddenly a terrorist sympathizer, secretly longing for the downfall of the western world.
There’s a devastating scene early in this issue of Sheriff, in which the hero tries to talk down a suspected suicide bomber. I won’t reveal what happens, but it seems to encapsulate in miniature the Western military experience. Those Americans involved are well-meaning, decent guys, just trying to do their jobs. They’re actually compassionate, for God’s sake – and it still goes wrong.
I have great hopes for The Sheriff of Babylon. If future issues match this first one, it will be a joy to read, at a time when the real life situation offers very little joy indeed. Before closing, I should point out that any political views expressed above are mine, not King’s. I don’t know which way he’s going to play the book. I suspect it’s going to be complex. I suspect it’s going to feel real.
And one more thing. It’s a detective story.
Chicago styles itself the most American of cities. The city that works. They’ve got a big thing about work. “Work hard, play hard, go in next morning,” as someone put it to me. In summer, temperatures can go up to a hundred degrees. In winter, twenty below, when you factor in the wind chill, which is considerable. This vast and sometimes daunting metropolis also has the distinction of being named after a particularly smelly kind of onion.
And finally, my part of the blog hop. I’m way overdue on this, so apologies to all concerned, and belated thanks to the excellent Bishop O’Connell for nominating me. His website is http://aquietpint.com/ and his novel The Stolen is now available from Harper Voyager – and doing rather well, too. Cheers, mate!
I remember there was one of those quizzes on Facebook which, among other things, asked what you considered a hero to be. My wife answered something on the lines of , “a good person,” or “a person who always does the right thing.” I picked “one who rises to the occasion”, and I think that pretty much captures my views on heroism. I’ve known a few people who’ve done truly heroic things in their time, but meet them “off duty”, as it were – ie, when they’re not being heroes – and you’d never know. If they’ll talk about the incident at all, they’ll likely play it down, make a joke of it, or tell you how afraid they were, or how much they complained, or how they think they should have done it differently, done more, done something other than the thing they did. Heroes don’t know they’re heroes, and that’s part of their charm.
My novel, The God Hunter, has a hero, and his name is Chris Copeland. But I doubt he’d call himself a hero; he’s more like someone who gets squeezed into a corner till he has only one way left to go. That it tends to be the right way is a result of a code of ethics he himself would probably not even acknowledge he possesses. He can certainly be ruthless, self-centred and cunning, but – well. There’s an incident early in the book which tells you what he’s like. He’s got a god just starting to incarnate right in front of him. For all manner of reasons, this would be An Amazingly Bad Thing, and Chris’s first thought is that he could just walk away, and leave the mess for someone else to clean up. He could do that, and he could justify it, both to himself and his superiors. Only he doesn’t. He goes in, solves the problem at considerable risk – and inadvertently sets in motion the whole plot of the book.
There’s a touch of Indiana Jones about him, maybe, though with a little less bullwhip and a lot less talk about museums. Chris is not some gentleman adventurer. He’s not Superman and he’s not doing any of this for the good of his health. He’s proud of what he does – it’s a skill, and few people possess it – but Chris, like most of us, is an employee. He works for a large company which he doesn’t always trust (again, like most of us). And he wants to keep his job.
All the major characters in The God Hunter are at some point of crisis in their lives. There’s Anna Ganz, chain-smoking detective, stuck on a case she knows will sink her career. There’s company man Shailer, realizing he’s only in favour as long as he’s useful. And then there’s – well, there’s another character. Not altogether human. And he’s got issues of his own.
That’s the world of The God Hunter. Ordinary people, just like you, like me, thrown into extraordinary circumstances. Ever wonder how you’d make out? You think you’d cut it? You think Chris Copeland can?
Read the book… find out.
Jonas is a tank-born, Administrator caste–but for the last six years he has been masquerading as a true-born, one of the ruling class whose ancestors walked on Earth. While fleeing from his doomed mining outpost he is kidnapped by the space pirate Keldra, who forces him to help her in her obsessive campaign against the Worldbreakers, the alien machines that destroyed the planets and left humanity living in the debris. As he tries to understand his captor and is forced to face the demons of his own past, Jonas finds himself torn between escaping, seeking revenge on Keldra for killing his crew, and joining her in her crusade.
Belt Three features brain implants, mind-controlled spaceships, solar sails, the social consequences of mass reproductive cloning, memory hacking, religion, doomed love affairs, nuclear missiles, a mad computer, robots that shoot laser beams, and the Remembrance of Clouds.
I’ve neglected this poor blog of late – too busy writing the sequel to The God Hunter – but I have been busy writing for other people, so it’s time to give them a big shout-out and say thanks for all the invitations. It was a real pleasure.
Meanwhile, the excellent A.F.E. Smith, author of Darkhaven, banishes me to a desert island. She’s not the first to want to do so. That’s on her own blog at http://www.afesmith.com/blog/barren-island-books-tim-lees.