Empire State [Paperback]

Adam Christopher (Author)

Book Description

Release date: December 27, 2011

THE EMPIRE STATE IS THE OTHER NEW YORK. A parallel-universe, Prohibition-era world of mooks and shamuses that is the twisted magic mirror to our bustling Big Apple, a place where sinister characters lurk around every corner while the great superheroes that once kept the streets safe have fallen into dysfunctional rivalries and feuds. Not that its colourful residents know anything about the real New York… until detective Rad Bradley makes a discovery that will change the lives of all its inhabitants. Playing on the classic Gotham conventions of the Batman comics and HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, debut author Adam Christopher has spun this smart and fast-paced superhero-noir adventure, the sort of souped-up thrill ride that will excite genre fans and general readers alike.

File Under: Science Fiction [ Pocket Universe | Heroes or Villains | Speak Easy | Loyalties Divided ]

e-book ISBN: 978-0-85766-194-4

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Adam Christopher’s debut novel is a noir, Philip K Dick-ish science fiction superhero story… As captivating as a kaleidoscope… just feel it in all its weird glory.” - Cory Doctorow, New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother
 
"A fascinating debut novel that meshes noir sensibilities and science fiction together and keeps the reader guessing throughout. Adam Christopher handles in intricacies of parallel worlds, time travel and suspense with a skill lacking in many more-seasoned authors." - Mike Stackpole, New York Times bestselling author of I, Jedi
 
"Adam Christopher maintains a punchy, bestseller prose style that keeps the action rocketing along, and protagonists that seem right both in their own setting, and appropriate to what we already recognise as super heroes.  Empire State is an excellent, involving read, and it fully deserves to be the start of a new universe." - Paul Cornell, DC Comics and Dr Who writer
 
"Down these steam driven streets a man must go... straight into a pocket universe of trouble. Brutal, knowing and deft, Adam Christopher delivers." - Jon Courtenay Grimwood

"Stylish, sinister, and wickedly fun, Empire State is not your average sexy retro parallel universe superhero noir." - Lauren Beukes, award-winning author of Zoo City
 
"Destined to be a science fiction classic, Empire State is a breathtakingly original noir tale of intrigue, mystery, and quantum physics, deftly played out in storytelling so brilliant I'm finding it hard not to hate the author." - Diana Rowland, author of My Life as a White Trash Zombie
 
"From first to last page, Adam Christopher's Empire State careens along at a furious pace. Along the way, he beautifully meshes the best noir tropes with science fiction and wraps it up in a world (or two) that rivals some of the classics of speculative fiction." - John Hornor Jacobs, Author of Southern Gods
 
"A daring, dreamlike, almost hallucinatory thriller, one that plays with the conventions of pulp fiction and superheroes like a cat with a ball of yarn." - Kurt Busiek, Eisner Award-winning writer of Astro City and Marvels

"Fantastic stuff... The author is truly at the top of his game here. Goddamitt, I want more." - The Founding Fields

"Explosive… an effective portrait of a bleak, confused, subdued city. Most impressibely, the novel becomes more unpredicatable as it goes along. Thrilling stuff. 4****” -  SFX Magazine
 
“Watch out for this Adam kid, he’s nobody’s sap. He’s got a sharp nib and a sharper wit. He’d steal your last few hours before you could say ‘cat’s pajamas’, and you’d thank him for it.” - Billy Campbell, star of The Rocketeer
 
“Empire State is a fantastic piece of fiction, it's like one of those people that you just want to be seen with because they are so cool, radiating so much style, charm and charisma that if harnessed could power Hollywood for a century. 5*****” - SFBook.com
 
“Empire State is a big, blockbuster action book. It has images that will stick with you. Earlier in the week, I tweeted that I kept picturing an HBO TV series trailer as I read this book. That's what you're going to get.” - Do Some Damage
 
“An exuberant homage to the superhero genre powered by a fabulous noir plot and wrapped up with a retro science fiction sensibility. It’s effortlessly inventive and thoroughly entertaining.” - Maura McHugh
 
“Rocket-powered superheros, Prohibition era bootleggers, private eyes, mysterious men in masks; and more twists and turns than you can imagine. All in all a very fun read.” - The Dragon Page
 
“It has a private detective and tons of fog, superheroes, robots, moonshine, gas masks, guns and ironclads. What’s not to love? And I know this is a monumentally shallow comment to make, but the cover art is stunning. Rad is a fabulous character, one that I won’t forget any time soon. 4****” - Fantasy Nibbles
 
“A fast, likeable novel which aims not only to surprise, but frequently to confound - with intrigue, superheroic subversion, and a few robots playing into the mix! There's also an airship. I mean, who doesn't love airships?” - Drying Ink
 
“The written equivalent of crack cocaine. 10/10” - Spoiler Alert
 
“There are twists, turns, crosses and double-cross in this one. It has a delightfully pulpy feel to it, especially during the airship chase. It's almost here, and I think you'll find it worth the wait.” - Adventures Fantastic

"This is simply one of the greatest science fiction books I have ever read.  9/10" - Starburst Magazine

"Verve and imagination abound in this accomplished debut."
- Christopher Fowler, The Fiancial Times (December 3, 2012)

About the Author

ADAM CHRISTOPHER was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and grew up watching Pertwee-era Doctor Who and listening to The Beatles. In 2006, Adam moved to the sunny North West of England, where he lives in domestic bliss with his wife and cat in a house next to a canal. When not writing Adam can be found drinking tea and obsessing over DC Comics, Stephen King, and The Cure. He is also a strong advocate for social media, especially Twitter, which he spends far too much time on, avoiding work.

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Angry Robot; Original edition (December 27, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0857661930
• ISBN-13: 978-0857661937
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.3 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #242,798 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Adam Christopher was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and grew up watching Pertwee-era Doctor Who and listening to The Beatles, which isn't a bad start for a child of the 80s. In 2006, Adam moved to the North West of England.

Adam's fiction has appeared in Pantechnicon, Hub, and Dark Fiction Magazine, and in 2010 he won a Sir Julius Vogel award, New Zealand's highest science fiction honour.

When not writing Adam can be found drinking tea and obsessing over superhero comics and The Cure.

Visit www.adamchristopher.co.uk

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Great atmosphere and concept, flawed characters and plot... January 4, 2012

By Stefan TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Angry Robot is one of those publishers you just have to keep an eye on, because they come out with some unique, surprising fiction. Their books tend to defy genre conventions and often are impossible to classify. To mess with our heads even more, they then stick weird little filing instructions on them, such as "File Under: Fantasy [ Aztec Mystery Locked Room Human Sacrifice The Dead Walk! ]" for Aliette de Bodard's Servant of the Underworld, or "[The Mob & Magic Ancient Secrets Zombie Wizardry Bet Your Life]" for Matt Forbeck's Vegas Knights.

So when Angry Robot announced Adam Christopher's Empire State and mentioned a Prohibition-era parallel universe in the book description, deftly combining two topics I dearly love, I couldn't wait to get my copy. (And if you're wondering, this one says: File Under: Science Fiction [ Pocket Universe Heroes or Villains Speak Easy Loyalties Divided ]). Unfortunately, Empire State didn't entirely live up to my expectations, but there's still a lot to love about this intriguing debut novel.

Rex Braybury is a small time bootlegger in Prohibition-era New York who is shaking down one of his clients when a competitor shows up and threatens to cut his burgeoning criminal career short. The resulting chase scene ends with him more or less accidentally witnessing a major confrontation between the city's two major superheroes, the Skyguard and the Science Pirate -- a fight that will prove to have major consequences....

A few chapters later, we're introduced to private detective Rad Bradley, who lives in the Empire State, a strange -- but strangely familiar -- city that's perpetually at war with an unseen Enemy somewhere beyond its mist-shrouded shores. It's the year Nineteen, and all is not well. The Empire State's citizens survive despite rationing, Prohibition, an overbearing bureaucracy, and the fact that people's memories seem to be strangely incomplete. In this odd environment, Rad manages to stay afloat by taking scarce P.I. jobs, living in the back room of his office and regularly visiting the neighborhood speakeasy. When we first meet Rad, he is being accosted by two men wearing gas masks who demand to hear what he knows about "nineteen fifty"... until the Skyguard appears to save him. The real puzzler, however, is how the Skyguard managed to rescue Rad, because -- as Rad's friend Kane Fortuna informs him shortly afterward -- the Skyguard was supposedly executed before he saved Rad...

Empire State is a debut novel that has a lot going for it, but ultimately it didn't quite work out for me. I expected a different result, because there's a lot here that I usually love. There's Prohibition-era material -- and I often love stories set in this period. There's noir. There's a pocket universe. There are, for crying out loud, actual superheroes. Dear reader, I was so ready to love this book.

The problems ultimately all go back to the characters. The book gets off to a bit of a false start with Rex the bootlegger. We don't really get the chance to get to know him, because he's only allotted three chapters before he abruptly disappears from view and Rad takes over. Rad is slightly more interesting as a main character, but like Rex he never really grabs your attention. Like too many of Empire State's characters, Rad simply never acquires much depth. There's actually a great explanation for this lack of depth in the story, but we don't find out what it is until much later. Unfortunately this means that, for a good chunk of this novel, you're reading a story populated by characters that feel like shallow reflections of real people. I found myself losing interest a third of the way in, and while I was curious enough to keep going, I was sorely tempted to give up several times.

So Empire State may not be a good fit for readers who first and foremost look for well-rounded characters, but on the plus side its concept and setting are fascinating. The book's atmosphere and premise occasionally reminded me of Philip K. Dick. That's never a bad thing. There's a grey emptiness to both the characters and the setting that's somehow a bit Kafkaesque. (Don't you wish Kafka had written science fiction noir set in an alternate Prohibition-era New York?) Much of the novel is set in an odd, distorted version of reality that manages to be at the same time sinister and campy -- a pulp fiction world that has darkness creeping in from the edges. It's an unsettling, unique place to visit.

Maybe it was the strength of this setting, and the way Adam Christopher left his fictional universe wide open for further exploration, that made this novel such a good fit as the first starting point for Angry Robot's Worldbuilder, a site where readers can share fan fiction and art set in the world of Empire State. It's nice to see a publisher actually encourage fans to work and play in one of their authors' fictional universes, and even nicer that some of this fan art may eventually even be published by Angry Robot.

Empire State is a book I fully expected to love. I wanted to love it, because its concept is so damn cool, but in the end I had to admit that it simply didn't work for me. The "Alternate Prohibition" setting is a great idea, and it's wonderful that Angry Robot and Adam Christopher have opened it up as a playground for others, but the actual novel somehow feels like an outline that wasn't properly filled in, mainly because the characters just don't have enough substance to carry an entire book. Still, this is a promising debut, and I'm confident that it will find a large readership because it's full to the brim of neat ideas. If you're looking for atmosphere and concept, Empire State is definitely worth a look.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Audacious and fun but seriously flawed December 27, 2011

By TChris TOP 50 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback

Start by combining a depression-era gangster story with a comic book saga of superheroes wearing rocket boots, mix in a private detective, toss in a rogue robot, add an alternate history in which a parallel version of New York City is isolated and at war with an enemy that surrounds it, top it off with transdimensional travel and time confusion and you've got Empire State. Sounds like a mess, doesn't it? Empire State is such a strange novel that, despite being unimpressed with Adam Christopher's prose and unenthused about the storyline, I kept reading just to find out what would happen next. I suppose that's a recommendation of sorts.

The two superheroes who once protected New York City -- the Skyguard and the Science Pirate -- have taken a holiday from crime fighting so they can battle each other, leaving the depression-era city at the mercy of bootleggers and mobsters, predators and corrupt officials. One defeats the other and a gangster named Rex Braybury seems to defeat the winner.

Years later, a private detective in Empire State named Rad Bradley (who bears an uncanny resemblance to New York's Rex) is hired to find a missing woman. The woman's corpse turns up before Rad has a chance to conduct a serious search. The evidence suggests that the woman was murdered by a robot but in this novel things aren't always as they appear. Besides, robots are generally found only on the ironclad ships that sail off to war in defense of the Empire State, never to return -- except, that is, for the ironclad that recently came home and is now quarantined at a safe distance from the port. Could a killer robot have come from the ship? Rad, his reporter friend Kane, and a strange character named Captain Carson resolve to find out. Rad soon uncovers secrets about the war and the robots that are concealed from the Empire State populace. Later he learns an even bigger secret about the nature of the Empire State itself.

Adam Christopher's writing style is ordinary, at best -- not awful, but this isn't a novel you'll read for the beauty of its prose. The convoluted plot just barely holds together. In the end I thought this was a novel in search of an identity; it doesn't quite know what it wants to be. It doesn't work as a crime or detective story, despite the presence of a detective and mobster, nor does it succeed as an action/adventure story. Empire State is more tongue-in-cheek sci-fi than serious speculative fiction (I wouldn't even regard it as serious comic book fiction; I'm not sure why superheroes are part of the plot) but it often reads as if it were meant to be taken seriously. Still, if you ignore the absence of any reasonable explanation for nearly anything of consequence that happens as the story unfolds, Empire State does have some limited entertainment value.

Part of the fun of Empire State is picking out all the in-jokes. In the Empire State, Seduction of the Innocent isn't Fredric Wertham's infamous diatribe against comic books but a quasi-religious "moral code" written by The Pastor of Lost Souls. (Of course, a character named Frederick turns up in the novel.) From a street named Soma to a theater production called Boneshaker, the novel is filled with thinly veiled references to the history of science fiction and comic books -- the character Kane, for instance, brings to mind Bob Kane, who created The Batman. Mix together Bradley and Braybury (the twinned characters from the parallel worlds) and you get Ray Bradbury.

Based solely on its audacity, I am tempted to recommend Empire State, but I can do so only with the warning that its many flaws nearly outweigh the fun factor that might motivate a reader to give it a try. I would give Empire State 3 1/2 stars if that option were available.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Goes off track and doesn't get better February 13, 2012

By Matthieu Hausig VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

While the premise of this novel was interesting, the story didn't hold together for me. The writing was uneven and the characters weren't well executed. Normally this is the type of book that I just dig right into but I couldn't get immersed. The characters were just too flat to be memorable, all the more troublesome when there were dopplegangers of them in play. As the story progress it gets progressively looser and goes off the rails, with the ending pretty much a mess. From the description, I had hoped this would be a much better novel, but I was disappointed.