Recommended Reading by Professionals With... James Knapp

In this series, I ask various publishing professionals (including authors, bloggers, editors, agents etc.) to recommend 2-3 authors or books they feel haven't received the recognition they deserve.

Today's recommendations are by James Knapp. James Knapp's first novel, State of Decay was a Philip K. Dick award nominee, and won the 2010 Compton Crook Award. He's since completed the Revivors trilogy and written the first novel of a new series, Burn Zone, under the pseudonym James K. Decker.

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1. First up is T.C. McCarthy, author of the Subterrene War trilogy which includes Germline, Exogene, and Chimera (Germline won the 2012 Compton Crook Award).  He weaves stories of very broken people in very dangerous environments, and he does it all with a poetic flair that really stuck with me.  It’s much more than just futuristic war.   A struggle over rare earth elements has come to a head under the mountains of Kazakhstan, where soldiers sealed in suits of armor fight in tunnels under tons of rock.  In Germline, an embedded reporter quickly is forced to turn soldier, and the way it changes him so completely makes for compelling reading.  McCarthy explores the human psyche, what we're willing to do in order to survive, and the effects that the horrors of war can inflict on us.  He introduces genetically engineered soldiers, but explores the ethics of that (or lack thereof), and the mindset such soldiers might have, or be forced to have.  He wraps it all in a great series of novels, and he does it all believably and memorably.  His short story "Somewhere it Snows" proves that he's equally good at exploring other worlds, too, and I sincerely hope that he does.  Writers like him are the type that we want to stick around, and so I'm recommending him to anyone who likes hard science fiction - even if military fiction isn't usually your thing, give him a try.
2. Next is Alex Hughes, author of the Mindspace series, which so far includes Clean, and Sharp.  I'm a big fan of science fiction and also noir, and her work has strong elements of both.  I likened Clean to a fun blend of Blade Runner and Chinatown, but that doesn't truly do it justice.  Her vision of a future Atlanta feels real, a hot, steamy place where a talented but damaged telepath named Adam uses his abilities to help track down criminals.  The handling of 'mindspace', the sort of psychic residue left behind by people, is something I'd like to see a lot more of.  Telepaths are able to perceive it, almost like an additional sense, and can use it to sort of look into the past.  Adam struggles with an addiction that Hughes handles perfectly, a fight that occurs day to day, minute to minute.  I'm really hoping this series turns into a long running thing.
3. Lastly, although I don't read a lot of fantasy, I want to give a shout out to fantasy author Myke Cole whose work I was introduced to at Balticon (his debut novel Control Point won the 2013 Compton Crook Award, and the second novel in the series, Fortress Frontier, is out now) - he writes Military Fantasy so it’s a mixture of bullets and spell slinging.  His real-life military experience brings a lot to the table, and really pushes his work from just guns and explosions into a much broader examination of what it means to be in the armed forces.  You'll learn a lot of military jargon, and my fantasy-loving friends assure me that his magic system is top notch.

I realize that two of the authors on this list have won awards for their work.  Have they been recognized?  Yes.  Have they gotten the recognition they deserve?  Not in my book - not yet.  I'd like to see all three on the best sellers list, so give them all a read.  You won't be sorry.

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Stay tuned for the next post where we learn who literary agent Joshua Bilmes thinks we should be reading more of!

Book Review: The Burn Zone by James Decker

Pros: interesting story, fast pacing, unique aliens, complex plot

Cons: too many big revelations at the end made it hard to comprehend them all

Sam Shao's apartment is attacked and her adopted military father accused of treason and taken away by four military personel.  Aside from the fact that Sam knows her dad's innocent, she's also stunned that one of their attackers is a disguised haan.  As a surrogate for haan young, Sam is able to pick up on the aliens' emotions through her brain-band and can't understand how one of the fragile beings could survive the violence of the attack and its aftermath.  Running from the authorities, Sam tries to figure out what her father discovered that's worth killing for.   

This is a fast paced SF thriller, jumping from place to place as Sam tries to find a twistkey her father acquired and hid.  Along the way she gets help from a hacker friend, a rogue haan and friends from her, and her father's, pasts.

The story takes place in an overcrowded future, where street meat and scrapcake (made from human flesh) are illegal substitutes for feeding humans when over 80% of the food produced goes to feed the alien haan in return for haan technology.  Some of the descriptions in the book are brutal, as humans are pushed to the brink of reason.

The plot is complex and it's interesting watching Sam try to avoid the various groups hunting her.  Information about what's really going on is doled out in bits and pieces, making it hard to put the book down.  I did find the ending a bit rushed in that you learn a LOT, too much to process so quickly.  I'm sure I missed a lot of the nuances of Sam's discoveries because there were so many all at once.

The aliens were really cool.  The more you learn about them the stranger they become.

In the end I really liked the book, though I'm hoping if there's a sequel some of the end of book revelations will get more discussion.

Guest Post: CONJURING ALIENS

Today I welcome James K. Decker, author of The Burn Zone, and pseudonym of James Knapp, to my blog.  I've read his previous books, State of Decay, The Silent Army, and Element Zero and highly recommend all three.

The Burn Zone hits stores February 5th. 

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Making stuff up is fun, but it’s hard.

Although I've written a lot of Science Fiction, The Burn Zone marks the first time since college that I've ever written about an alien species. They are central to the story, in fact one of the first ideas that sparked the series was imagining one of what I came to call the Haan watching a human from the shadows of an alleyway, but their creation was one of the most difficult parts. At the time, I had a sense of how I wanted them to be - intelligent, and helpful, but secretive. I had no idea how involved coming up with my fictitious species, the Haan, would become.

There have been hundreds of alien species concocted by writers over the years - just go to tvtropes.com and follow any alien thread and you'll see (just finish this post first...once tvtropes sucks you in you will never emerge). Coming up with something that hasn't been done is no simple task, as almost anywhere you step will press your shoe squarely into a used trope. How the haan look physically is something that went through a few iterations, but though I'm sure parts of them may have been done before, I like where they landed. I knew that I needed them to be somewhat humanoid in appearance, but that I didn't want them to be 'prosthetic forehead' aliens (not a dig - some of my favorite television sci-fi like Star Trek and Farscape put them to very good use). Their physiology is very different from ours as you will see, but their spindly figures, translucent skin and glass-like bones are arranged in a two legs, two arms, one head configuration, and for a good reason. I put everything on display with the haan, and their hearts, beehive ribcages and other organs are visible, if cloudy. The ambient light from their eyes illuminates the inside of their faces and skulls, to reveal shapes like feeding tubes, their two brains, and other nodules of less-clear purpose. Alien, but not without a certain degree of elegance, and with an innate level of exposure that makes them vulnerable.

Still, while appearances matter (as the haan well know), the key to any alien race (or fantasy race, if you lean that way) isn't as much about how they look as it is about who they are. Unless you're dealing with, say, the xenomorphs from Alien where the point of them is to be dangerous and little else, then the race has to have depth to it. They have to have societal norms, and deviations from those norms. They have to have purpose, at both the group and individual level. I knew going in that I didn't want a single trait race who came from a planet of merchants, or a planet of warriors. I wanted them to be cohesive as a group, because they have to be out of necessity if nothing else, but vary in attitude as individuals. Nix, the haan we get the closest look at in The Burn Zone, ultimately goes against the grain because he doesn't agree with a lot of his kind's attitudes about their situation.

The haan are essentially stranded in the middle of a huge city, their ship surrounded by a force field. After years of turtle-ing, they slowly began to emerge. We meet them fifty years in, when relations are still tense but they've begun to be granted extra space in the form of colony districts which are surrounded by security walls. Because of the situation they're in, the haan are, understandably, cautious, and secretive. No human has ever been inside their ship, or even behind the force field that surrounds it. They reveal themselves slowly, and what is seen in the first installment of the series is just the tip of a very large iceberg.

What drew me to the idea of using aliens at all, though, and what interested me most of all, was the idea of a much more advanced culture, even a small sample of one, stumbling into an already entrenched society of less advanced people. There may not be many haan compared to humans in the city of Hangfei, but Cortez didn't have that many people with him relatively speaking when he found the Aztecs, either. That's not to say the haan are conquerors - they're not - but they have a huge impact on the world around them nonetheless. The world they find themselves in is extremely overcrowded, and space is at a premium. If the haan want to grow, and to survive, then they'll need a share of that space, and getting it won't be easy. How far they're willing to go, both at a group and individual level, to ensure their race can survive is something the book studies.

I can say no more without risking spoilers. I hope you'll see how their situation plays out in The Burn Zone, and I hope you enjoy the world, and the aliens, I've created.

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James K. Decker was born in New Hampshire in 1970, and has lived in the New England area since that time. He developed a love of reading and writing early on, participating in young author competitions as early as grade school, but the later discovery of works by Frank Herbert and Issac Asimov turned that love to an obsession.

He wrote continuously through high school, college and beyond, eventually breaking into the field under the name James Knapp, with the publication of the Revivors trilogy (State of Decay, The Silent Army, and Element Zero). State of Decay was a Philip K. Dick award nominee, and won the 2010 Compton Crook Award. The Burn Zone is his debut novel under the name James K. Decker.

He now lives in MA with his wife Kim.