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<\/p>\nI’ve written a lot of things during my career: science fiction, fantasy, horror, various hybrids of all of the above.\u00a0\u00a0 And once upon a time, like many writers, I wrote a novel about the times and events I’d lived through… a story about my own generation, the Boomers, about our dreams and our disillusionments.\u00a0\u00a0 It was centered on the music.\u00a0 Of course it was.\u00a0\u00a0 Rock n roll was as central to my generation as the Vietnam War, the counterculture, television, and the sexual revolution.\u00a0\u00a0 All those things wove together.\u00a0\u00a0 Of course, being who I was, I added a fantasy\/ horror element.\u00a0\u00a0 The resulting novel was called THE ARMAGEDDON RAG.\u00a0\u00a0 It was nominated for the World Fantasy Award (but lost, alas) and got some great reviews.\u00a0\u00a0 I think it sold about twelve copies, but that’s another story.\u00a0\u00a0 Oddly enough, it also opened the door to television and film for me, when a produce named Phil deGuere optioned it for a feature film… (that never got made, alas again)… but that’s another story too.<\/p>\n
This post is not about the RAG, not really.\u00a0 It’s about another generational novel, one that has just been published, written by Lewis Shiner.\u00a0\u00a0 Lew is an old friend, one of my original Wild Cards writers, the creator of Fortunato, the Astronomer, and Veronica, among other characters.\u00a0\u00a0 He was a mainstay in the early Wild Cards books back in the 80s and early 90s.\u00a0 His first novel FRONTERA was a Hugo finalist, and he was one of the rising stars of the “mirrorshades” movement when cyberpunk came along.\u00a0 After that, however, Lew’s muse led him off in other directions.\u00a0\u00a0 He drifted away from science fiction and wild cards, and went on to write a number of mainstream novels… about skateboarding, about tango dancing, about race relations, and yes, about rock music (the excellent GLIMPSES, a World Fantasy Award nominee — unlike ARMAGEDDON RAG, it won).<\/p>\n
And now Lew has written his magnum opus. \u00a0 It’s a huge book, maybe five times as long as my RAG… much longer than anything Shiner has written before… but not a word is wasted.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s called OUTSIDE THE GATES OF EDEN.<\/p>\n
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EDEN starts in the 60s and goes all the way up to the present day and the near future.\u00a0 Along the way it touches on the counterculture, the Summer of Love, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, and so much more… it is, in short, the story of a generation.\u00a0\u00a0 Honestly, I really don’t know how Gen Xers or millenials will respond to it.\u00a0\u00a0 Maybe they’ll see it as a historical novel, as distant from themselves as a novel of the Civil War.\u00a0\u00a0 I can’t imagine a Boomer not responding to what Lew has done here.\u00a0\u00a0 I read this in galleys, long before publication, and I find myself thinking back on it often.\u00a0\u00a0 Let me give this one the ultimate compliment:\u00a0 I wish I had written it.\u00a0\u00a0 I didn’t, though.\u00a0 Lew did.<\/p>\n
You can read it for yourself by grabbing a copy from SubPress at:<\/p>\n