It was a kind of worship. Looking up at the shelves in my room, as a kid. Looking at my books. Thinking about all those universes. There was something approaching awe in me, sitting there on the floor, looking up at that. Those cracked spines the legendary names those vivid violent enthralling romantic worlds, all contained within.
Thinking I could be up there, on the shelf, was inconceivable. Not in the Princess Bride sense. In the actual 
sense. I never imagined I could write a book, then or until much later. No-one in my family had ever been to uni, and certainly no-one had any artistic pretension. This isn’t a criticism or a lament, just a statement of my former reality.
(Click the PDF icon, upper right, if you prefer reading a black-on-white script)
Now I have a PhD and I’m about to have something that sits up there, on the altar of imagination. I still do that, by the way. I still sit down on the floor and look up at the expanses of books that line my shelves. Stare at the names and the titles and the colours on the spines. In a couple of months, I’ll be able to look up there and see something stamped with my name. I still don’t really believe it.
My collection, Neon Leviathan, is coming out and I’m proud of it.
It’s coming out – which as I hope I’ve made clear now, is surreal and amazing to me – and has been blurbed by none other than Richard Morgan. This makes it all even more surreal, and I’ll tell you why. About a decade ago, a couple of years before I turned to writing fiction, I read Altered 
Carbon. I thought to myself: wow. Science fiction noir (or as some others call it, cyberpunk), is still alive and well. If I ever become a writer, this is the sub-genre I’ll pick. In the afterword for my collection, which I’ve included as a bonus, below, I explain why I am attracted to cyberpunk.
But before I get there I want to include the full quote from Richard Morgan.
“Haunting and iridescent – combines the paranoid weirdness of the best Philip K Dick, the chilly but cool-as-fuck future gleam of cyberpunk, and an achingly beautiful literary inflection reminiscent of mainstream heavyweights like Murakami or Ishiguro. T. R. Napper’s futures feel at once gritty and vertiginous and close-focus human in the way only the best SF can manage. Whatever roadmap he’s working from, I can’t wait to see where he’s taking us next.”
The comparison to masters like Murakami or Ishiguro is ridiculous, of course – I do not exist in the same literary ballpark as either. But what really pleased me – aside from the effusive praise – was one of my favourite writers, Richard Morgan, comparing me to my favourite author of all time, Ishiguro. Like I said: surreal.
Okay, before I move on to the Afterword, I am going to have to do the one thing I don’t like about all this: ask you to buy the collection. The link, here, will take you to the publisher’s page. There are hard and e-copies. You won’t get either until the beginning of February, but pre-orders really help drive the algorithm on Amazon, which in turn puts Neon Leviathan into the minds of people who otherwise would never had known it existed. Anyway, it’s there, and it’s bloody good.
Afterword
They say: write what you know; write what you care about; write the stories you want to read. The problem is that these can be three very different things.
A lot of the stories in Neon Leviathan are dark. You may have noticed. Not always what I want to read, but sometimes what I need to. Why this darkness? Well, I’m not much one for self-revelation, and the preceding stories should all be read as things in themselves. Suffice to say I was an aid worker for over a decade, and inevitably came into contact with pervasive corruption, and with the worst of human suffering. It is a profession with high rates of PTSD. Noir as a sensibility is one to which a former aid worker might understandably be attracted.
But I’m not interested in writing only from the dark heart of modernity. It can’t rain all the time. The pain has to be leavened with humour; the social realism with the wild and hallucinogenic. Philip K Dick was a formative influence on me: he blew my mind when I was twelve. He wrote about the surreal and paranoid world just under the surface of the quotidian. That, for me, is good science fiction: speculations so strange yet grounded into the everyday that they make you to think twice about the nature of reality.
Then there is East and Southeast Asia. East Asia has, obviously, been central to such seminal science fiction noir texts as Neuromancer, Blade Runner, and Ghost in the Shell, fusing their near-future visions with the techno, teaming, sometimes squalid city-life of places like Hong Kong and Tokyo. Those aesthetics have certainly made their mark on my writing. Although Southeast Asia is a region where I’ve spent most of my adult life – whether through work or study – it is also a place I can only write about as an outsider. This is fine. Noir and cyberpunk have always been the stories of the outsiders. Nothing wrong with that sensibility.
Having said that, after three years living in the Old Quarter in Hanoi, I am in a position to make the following observations. Hanoi is a vibrant, frenetic, unapologetic city; a city always on the move, yet 
anchored in its rich culture. A thousand years old, yet rapidly changing as the future arrives; at the feet of its gleaming skyscrapers wait the street urchins in conical bamboo hats, selling fruit from the backs of their bicycles. A city with an underbelly, with those of a mind to look: the dive bars, the labyrinthine back alleys; the blinking neon signs of the karaoke joint-cum-brothels; the Buddhist temples sprinkled in among a raucous and fevered nightlife. Hanoi is a noir metropolis with a ringside seat to the coming Chinese century. I would certainly cite that city as an influence.
And finally, I do like a good fight scene. You may have noticed that, as well.
So the stories came from many places: from need, from want, from fear and from my failures, and from lived experience. I used it all and I gave it all.
