His entry begins:
I just finished reading Yellowface by R.F. Kuang and loved it. It’s the perfect example of how important original story concept is. Imagine pitching this: Two young writers, one, Asian, a superstar, the other, white, floundering, are friends from college. When a drunk Athena Liu dies while eating pancakes, June Hayward steals her manuscript and successfully sells it as her own. Only, the book is about Chinese laborers in Europe during WWI, and fanatical social media sleuths are discovering holes. This satirical novel searingly targets publishing, fandom, racial appropriation, cancel culture, and the toxicity of the internet. What a great story idea. It’s one of those...[read on]About Sunset, Water City, from the publisher:
In the powerful conclusion to the sci-fi noir Water City trilogy, faith, power, and tech clash when our nameless protagonist passes the responsibility of saving the world to his teenage daughter. For fans of Phillip K. Dick and The Last of Us.Visit Chris McKinney's website.
Year 2160: It’s been ten years since the cataclysmic events of Eventide, Water City, where 99.97 percent of the human population waspossessed or obliterated by Akira Kimura, Water City’s renowned scientist and Earth’s former savior.
Our nameless antihero, a synesthete and former detective, and his daughter, Ascalon, navigate through a post-apocalyptic landscape populated by barbaric Zeroes—the permanent residents of the continent’s biggest landfill, The Great Leachate—who cling to the ways of the old world. They live in opposition to Akira’s godlike domination of the planet—she has taken control of the population that viewed her as a god and converted them into her Gardeners, zombie-like humans who plod along to build her vision of a new world.
What that world exactly entails, Ascalon is not entirely sure, but intends to find out. Now nineteen, she, a synesthete herself, takes over this story while her father succumbs to grief and decades of Akira’s manipulation. Tasked with the impossible, Ascalon must find a way to free what’s left of the human race.
The Page 69 Test: Sunset, Water City.
Q&A with Chris McKinney.
My Book, The Movie: Sunset, Water City.
Writers Read: Chris McKinney.
--Marshal Zeringue
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