The past few years have not only seen a string of big-name super-hero movie blockbusters. They have also been pretty good years for super-hero fiction. And two of our very own Zeno clients wrote some of the best!
First up, Samit Basu‘s TURBULENCE was released in the UK and US by Titan Books to great, global critical acclaim. (No, seriously, we’ve had reviews from so many countries!) The much-anticipated sequel, RESISTANCE, is due to be published in mid-2014. Here’s the synopsis for TURBULENCE, just in case you haven’t been convinced, yet…
Aman Sen is smart, young, ambitious and going nowhere. He thinks this is because he doesn’t have the right connections—but then he gets off a plane from London to Delhi and discovers that he has turned into a communications demigod. Indeed, everyone on Aman’s flight now has extraordinary abilities corresponding to their innermost desires.
Vir, an Indian Air Force pilot, can now fly.
Uzma, a British- Pakistani aspiring Bollywood actress, now possesses infinite charisma.
And then there’s Jai, an indestructible one-man army with a good old-fashioned goal — to rule the world!
Aman wants to ensure that their new powers aren’t wasted on costumed crime-fighting, celebrity endorsements, or reality television. He wants to heal the planet but with each step he takes, he finds helping some means harming others. Will it all end, as 80 years of superhero fiction suggest, in a meaningless, explosive slugfest?
TURBULENCE features the 21st-century Indian subcontinent in all its insane glory — F-16s, Bollywood, radical religious parties, nuclear plants, cricket, terrorists, luxury resorts, crazy TV shows — but it is essentially about two very human questions. How would you feel if you actually got what you wanted? And what would you do if you could really change the world?
And secondly, Lavie Tidhar‘s latest boundary-pushing novel, THE VIOLENT CENTURY, was published in October in the UK by Hodder Books. (A limited edition was also published by PS Publishing.) Here’s the synopsis…
They’d never meant to be heroes.
For seventy years they guarded the British Empire. Oblivion and Fogg, inseparable friends, bound together by a shared fate. Until one night in Berlin, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and a secret that tore them apart.
But there must always be an account… and the past has a habit of catching up to the present.
Now, recalled to the Retirement Bureau from which no one can retire, Fogg and Oblivion must face up to a past of terrible war and unacknowledged heroism — a life of dusty corridors and secret rooms, of furtive meetings and blood-stained fields – to answer one last, impossible question: What makes a hero?