Adam Connell
Autore di Counterfeit Kings
Sull'Autore
Fonte dell'immagine: Taken by Jeannie Connell
Serie
Opere di Adam Connell
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome legale
- Connell, Adam
- Altri nomi
- Bang, Adam
- Data di nascita
- 1973-01-25
- Sesso
- male
- Nazionalità
- USA
- Luogo di nascita
- Huntington, New York, USA
- Luogo di residenza
- Westchester, New York, USA
- Istruzione
- NYU (BA in English and American Literature)
- Attività lavorative
- novelist
- Organizzazioni
- Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA)
- Premi e riconoscimenti
- Selected as an "Author to Watch" by Kirkus Reviews
- Agente
- Evan Gregory (Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency)
- Breve biografia
- I was born in 1973 and grew up on Long Island. Disregard what many people have said; Long Island wasn't a terrible place to grow up during the 70s and 80s. My parents and my sister loved me. But I was the least popular kid at school and Blah Blah Blah. You've heard this shit before. Hell, maybe you even lived it, too, like me.
What's important is that I loved to read. As I got into science fiction and fantasy and horror, when I became enthralled with genre books my local library was starved for, I got part-time jobs in Junior High and High School so I could buy the books I needed, that I craved, that nourished me.
I went to NYU to study Literature. To study books simply because there was nothing more I wanted to learn everything about. I didn't take a single class on creative writing. Most of my fans are surprised at this, but auditing a few of these classes I saw that they were too competitive for me, that half the students delighted in crushing the works of their classmates.
I wrote in private. I wrote alone in NYU's giant and lonely library. When I graduated and couldn't get a job in publishing, I worked elsewhere and I wrote at night. While my coworkers were becoming fast friends and going out for drinks, I abstained and stayed at home and wrote at night, every night.
My life has been one of sacrifice and success. I'm not complaining, because I've written some good books and I'll write many more. I know that the most satisfying act is not having put "The End" to a book I was proud of. The most satisfying is that hazy span between books. The gathering, like berries, of ideas and characters and themes and story.
Reading and musing and writing. They're more important to me than vegetables and water and air. (But not more important than my wife. Jeannie is the exception to my life of dust jackets and ink-stained fingers and notebooks.)
This, in 362 words, is who I am, or in pockets of doubt, who I strive to be.
Utenti
Recensioni
Premi e riconoscimenti
Statistiche
- Opere
- 4
- Utenti
- 43
- Popolarità
- #352,016
- Voto
- 3.6
- Recensioni
- 11
- ISBN
- 3
But not everyone likes the Guild and its fussy, stodgy ways: no post-1953 firearms are used in their hunts nor much other modern technology. And they forbid their members to hunt men.
That’s why the upstart hunting organization RifleHire has targeted the Guild, and Lansing in particular, for destruction.
Lansing takes charge of the Orion Guild’s contract to purge a herd of brindles, animals highly prized for their aphrodisiac meat and that can only be raised on Wildernesse. That happens to be the home planet of Lansing before he was forced into exile after his parents were wrongly accused of trying to undercut the government’s brindle meat monopoly.
But that’s not the only reunion taking place. One-armed Bledsoe is waiting there to hunt brindle too and disgrace Lansing after the latter forced him out of the Guild for illegally hunting men. A sadist, a proud man of many impoverishing vices, and really only skilled at shooting – preferably slow death shots rather than Lansing’s quick kills. In tow is Cass, a weird dog-woman chimera there to do the hunting and stalking and mundane camp duties for Bledsoe.
Overseeing Bledsoe’s RifleHire audition is Rose, a nymphomaniac armorer who just happens to be Lansing’s cousin and who has delusions of reuniting with Lansing after he sexually spurned her.
Lansing’s crew includes Wren, an ex-football player who isn’t taken seriously as a hunter. That’s why he issues an official challenge to Lansing as to who can kill the most brindles. And there’s Nadia a twenty-something trapped in a body that’s thirteen years old. She participated in the first High Hunt as the Orion Guild’s attempted assassination of Bledsoe was dubbed. She longs for the sexual thrill of killing something intelligent: a human.
And that’s not even listing the misfits rom RifleHire, a thuggish outfit that practices gang rape initiations.
There are several aesthetics a science fiction story can use: attempted prediction and realistic extrapolation, satire, or contrived setups to provide the metaphors or adventure plots an author wants. Connell uses the latter. So we get a too familiar future with Spam meat and the IFL (presumably the Interstellar or Interplanetary Football League) Wren played for. Nadia describes her body as being like a “bobby-soxer”. There are few technological extrapolations apart from the Longliner starships that ply the spaceways and the firearms RifleHire uses
.
Instead, Connell put his effort into the complex ecosystem of Wildernesse and the brindles as well as the details (there are a lot of flashbacks in this novel) of Lansing’s other hunts of alien creatures.
Sometimes the Quentin Tarrantino-ish dialogue isn’t distinctive enough for each character. Almost every character has some sort of physical problem. And quite a few also have psychological problems, some, frankly, not very believable.
I was a bit bored with it on the first reading until about the three-quarters mark when it really picked up, and Lansing reveals unexpected depths.
The story is complete though Connell says he is working on a sequel. I suspect some of the (surviving) RifleHire characters will show up in it.
Still, I would be curious about such a sequel.
Recommended if you like hunting stories, thugs, and lots of gunplay.
[Review copy supplied by the author.]… (altro)