Neon Leviathan is out now – and the reviews are excellent

The day has come. My short story collection is now out in the world.

I’m not sure how to do soft sells or hard sells, or anything in between. So let me say this: buy it you bastards, and read it. It’s good.

Don’t believe me? Don’t blame you. I wouldn’t. But it’s been getting good reviews from advance readers. So instead of me saying how amazing I am, I’ll let others say it. How fucken humble am I?

Richard-Fucking-Morgan (author of Altered Carbon)

“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.” 

 

Tangent Online:

“In reading this collection, I’m reminded of a quote from Orwell’s Animal Farm, in which the old donkey Benjamin says “Life will go on as it has always gone on—that is, badly.” There are some humorous moments, such as when Col and Jack steal a woman’s shoes in “Ghosts of a Neon God,” along with one or two noir-style tales like “A Strange Loop,” but every story seems to emulate this one Orwellian quote in one way or another. And that, I think, is the appeal of Neon Leviathan. The malleability of identity and perceived reality aside, life always goes on as best it can. It might not be glorious, it might not be happy, it might not even be what we’ve been made to believe it to be, but—in the end—humans will persevere in whatever way they can, just as they always have.”

 

Adrian Tchaikovsky (UK Author) (in the Foreword to the collection)

“Each one of the stories in this volume is a carefully-crafted masterpiece that, whilst it presents a narrative of its own, is nonetheless a window into a larger world, a current of history that flows a winding path from one to another, carrying us with it.”

“Napper’s own personal history feels as though it pervades the collection. An Australian with more than a decade overseas on the sharp end of foreign aid, he’s seen a great deal of how human nature can twist under pressure, or under temptation…[his stories] have an acute sense of place, not just in a generic cyberpunk future but an Australian and Southeast Asian one that builds on tensions of race, sovereignty, class division and international relations, all currently front and centre in today’s news.”

 

Spells and Spaceships: (Yes this one is over the top, I know, and I can’t hold a candle to the authors he mentions (my wife said, when I read it to her: did you write that Tim?). But look, if I touched a reader out there like this, then that’s fucking great. I love this.)

“Above all else, it really made me think. For a book to change your outlook on life is a huge achievement. I almost had the bravery to label it the 1984 of this generation; I genuinely feel this will be seen as a really important work in time to come and the potential for ‘Napper’ to eventually be spoken in the same sentence as ‘Gibson, Dick, Leguin, Huxley, Wells.’”

 

Out of this World SFF Reviews:

“Suffice to say I’d be hard-pressed to come up with another book that rivals NEON LEVIATHAN when it comes to mind-blowing concepts, shocking storylines, and insane futuristic drugs and technology.”

 

Anna Smith Spark (UK Author):

“Brilliant… it’s rare for people to write well and deeply about the aftermath of violence, about its effect on the perpetrator, but Napper does this so, so well.”

 

Track of Words

“This isn’t escapist fiction, it’s thought-provoking, concern-provoking science fiction at its best and most haunting. Powerfully, worryingly relevant and relatable… but at the same time wonderfully written, and utterly compelling. There’s beauty hidden amongst the darkness, in quiet moments of emotion and human connection, but more prevalent is an agonising sense of inevitability, of characters incapable of escaping their lot in life with everything stacked so firmly against them… it feels like an important [work] too, with a strong voice and a lot to say.”

 

 

 

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