What is Tom Harper reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Tom Harper, author of Zodiac Station: A Novel.

His entry begins:

I’ve been reading Maurice Druon’s The Iron King, the first book in his Accursed Kings series about the Capetian monarchs of France in the fourteenth century. I only needed one reason to pick it up: the cover quote from George RR Martin that said, ‘This is the original Game of Thrones’.

I’m a big fan of Game of Thrones, both the TV series and the books. As lots of people have commented, it’s really historical fiction about history that didn’t happen (with dragons) – with the advantage that as it’s made up, you live it forwards, rather than through the distorting lens of known historical outcomes. That gives it a shock value you don’t get with real history: it reminds you that at the time, no-one knew who was going to survive, let alone win. I never really felt...[read on]

About Zodiac Station, from the publisher:

For fans of Dan Brown and Michael Crichton—an eerie, evocative thriller set in the unforgiving Arctic from the author of The Orpheus Descent.

Deep in the Arctic, the US Coast Guard icebreaker Terra Nova batters its way through the frozen sea. A gaunt figure skis out of the fog on the pack ice. He says his name is Thomas Anderson, and that he’s the lone survivors of a terrible accident at the research outpost Zodiac Station, located on the ice-bound island of Utgard.

Ten days earlier, he’d arrived at Zodiac Station looking to resurrect a career destroyed by scientific scandal. But things quickly went wrong when the man who hired him, brilliant biochemist Martin Hagger, turned up dead, at the bottom of a crevasse. The base commander insisted he fell. But footprints in the snow told a much different story. As Anderson tells a tale of sabotage, suspicion, and paranoia, the mystery only deepens.

When other survivors are discovered and their stories cast doubt on Anderson’s reliability, it seems the grim fate of the scientists at Zodiac Station may involve human greed, jealousy, oil company trickery, Russian espionage, genetic experimentation, and global warming. But the truth is something no one on the Terra Nova could have imagined.

A fast-paced, gripping thriller that marries science and adventure, Zodiac Station is as chilling and unpredictable as the fierce Arctic landscape.

Visit Tom Harper's website.

My Book, The Movie: Zodiac Station.

The Page 69 Test: Zodiac Station.

Writers Read: Tom Harper.

--Marshal Zeringue