Eclipse Corona
It couldn't happen again.
Not in your lifetime, you say. Not in this, the first quarter of the 21st Century.
If that's what you think, you'd better take another look around.
Media manipulation has become mind control – and mind control, an art – Secret treaties have been made in back rooms, on the Internet, and in Secret laboratories. The power of the Second Alliance has coalesced, and terrorism institutionalized. New concentration camps bring "Ethnic Cleansing" to a terrifying intensity. The Second Alliance stands poised to conquer the ruins of Europe with a brutality.
Your only hope is the New Resistance. People like:
- Dance Torrence and his fellow urban warriors on Earth
- Claire Rimpler on the L5 colony, FirStep
- Smoke, the damaged visionary
- Alouette, a precocious cyber-jacked little girl on the cutting edge on a strange new frontier of human collective-consciousness – the Entelechy...
Ordinary people bound together by the truth and a single purpose: to keep the secret darkness from becoming humankind's Total Eclipse... or die trying.
John Shirley
John Patrick Shirley (born 1953) is an American science fiction and horror writer of novels, short stories, and television and film scripts.
John Shirley's most significant cyberpunk novels are City Come A-Walkin and the Eclipse (A Song Called Youth) trilogy. Avant-slipstream critic Larry McCaffrey called him "the post-modern Poe". Bruce Sterling has cited Shirley's early story collection Heatseeker as being a seminal cyberpunk work in itself. Indeed, several stories in Heatseeker were particularly seminal, including Sleepwalkers, which, in just one example, probably provided the inspiration for William Gibson's "meat puppets" in Neuromancer. Gibson acknowledged Shirley's influence and borrowing ideas from Shirley in his introduction to Shirley's City Come A-Walkin.
A Song Called Youth
A Song Called Youth consists of three books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.