Titan Books picks up new cyberpunk thriller (news).
George Sandison of Titan Books has acquired World English Rights for the debut novel from Australian SF writer T R Napper. The agent was John Jarrold. Thirty-Six Streets is a cyberpunk thriller with lashings of military SF: Ghost in the Shell meets Apocalypse Now, set around 150 years in the future.
Lin ‘The Silent One’ Vu is a gangster and sometime private investigator. Born in Vietnam, raised in Australia, everywhere an outsider. She lives in Chinese-occupied Hanoi, in the steaming, paranoid alleyways of the Old Quarter – known as the Thirty-Six Streets.
Through grit and courage Lin has carved a place for herself in the Vietnamese underworld. But when an Englishman comes to Hanoi in search for answers over the murder of his dear friend, Lin’s life is turned upside down. She is drawn into the grand conspiracies of the neon gods: of regimes and mega-corporations, as they unleash dangerous new technologies in a quest for absolute power. Lin must confront the immutable moral calculus of an unjust war. She must choose: family, country, or gang. Blood, truth, or redemption. No choices are easy on the Thirty-Six Streets.
T R Napper was an aid worker for more than a decade, living throughout East and Southeast Asia. He returned to Australia after three years in Hanoi, where all he did was read battered science fiction paperbacks, explore the city with his son, and write, write, write in all the spaces in between.
T R Napper began writing fiction in 2013. Since then he’s sold short stories to Asimov’s magazine, several to Interzone, and others.
In 2017 he won the Aurealis Award for Best Short Story for “Flame Trees”, (Asimov’s Science Fiction, April/May 2016); and another of his stories “A Strange Loop” (Interzone, January/February 2016) was included in Neil Clarke’s Best Science Fiction of the Year.
He was awarded a creative writing doctorate in 2019 for his thesis The Dark Century: 1946 – 2046. Noir, Cyberpunk, and Asian Modernity.
Among several current jobs, he works as a dungeon master for the local community centre, running a D&D campaign for young people with autism.
