Stormland
They call it Stormland: a sprawling, largely abandoned region of the southeastern coast of the USA, where climate change's extreme weather conditions have brought about a ''perfect storm'' of perpetual tempests; where hurricane-strength storms return day after day, 365 days a year.
The heart of Stormland is Charleston, South Carolina, a flooded ruin where hundreds of people remain for their own peculiar reasons; where thugs prey on the weak, and a strangely benevolent cult tries to keep everyone insanely sane. Here, plutocratic evil takes advantage of Stormland's lawlessness to cultivate a weirdly puppeted theater of cruelty.
Swept into the turbulent vortex of Stormland is an unlikely duo - a former serial killer and a former US Marshal - who must work together to bring light to America's late twenty-first century heart of darkness.
A cyberpunk detective thriller set in a maelstrom of climatic upheaval, classism, and corrupt power, Stormland paradoxically dramatizes the resilience of the human spirit.
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.
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