He also runs infinity plus ebooks, publishing the work of Eric Brown, Anna Tambour, John Grant, Kaitlin Queen, Paul di Filippo, Iain Rowan, Neil Williamson and others.Brooke applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Harmony, and reported the following:
I'll have to work from the UK edition for this, as I don't have any copies of the US edition yet - the pagination may be a little different.Learn more about the book and author at Keith Brooke's website and blog.
Page 69 is actually quite a slow page. Have I failed the test already?
My protagonist, Dodge, is walking through his home city, and I've used the journey to trigger a flashback to when he had roamed these streets in a gang of teenagers, dodging the occupying alien forces and coming up against other gangs.
The flashback ends and Dodge just wants to be home:
"I'd done my job, and I didn't need any more trouble. I just had to get home before seventh and curfew."
So he's been out on risky business, then. And the city's under curfew: maybe this quiet passage is working okay for building up a bit of tension after all.
Later:
"At this point I was still slow to understand what was happening, but my home city had turned dangerous since the four refugees had arrived from Angiere, even here in this chlick-pet human enclave of Satinbower."
Yes, definitely signs of something big - and dangerous - afoot. The city that he's been walking through, a strange mix of alien and human, is changing and what was once familiar and relatively safe has now become threatening.
And that's a fair snapshot of the book as a whole: the story of a bunch of humans who have grown up on an Earth that has always been occupied by aliens, coming to understand that there's a bigger picture - one that might have no place at all for humankind...
--Marshal Zeringue
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