From Timothy S. Miller (timothymiller):

"I was convicted of being Japanese. It was my only crime, and when found guilty, I was sentenced to Assimilation."

So begins Black Sheep, by Ben Peek, a dark dystopian journey into a world where segregation is perfected, and opposition--even in thought--results in the mind numbing horrific act of Assimiliation.

Isao Dazai, having recently immigrated to Asian-Sydney from Asian-Tokyo, finds himself in a world--once again--divided by race. Sydney is no different than Tokyo. Segregating Asians, Africans, and Caucasians into walled cities guarded by featureless Segregators, grave consequences result at even the thought of crossing cultural boundaries.

From the beginning, (not counting the fact that the first few lines of the book offer up his fate) we know that Isao is destined to buck the system.

While he is continually curious about the happenings in African or Caucasian-Sydney, his apathy and restlessness, even in his own Country (before immigrating to Asian-Sydney) speaks more of an existential angst, a discomfort in his own skin, than a true desire to search out alien culture. "...it was a well kept secret that I believed that I could live in any city, in any country, and feel the same ambivalence."

But we're not just talking about angst rising out of the uncertainty and discomfort of your own existence, we're talking angst that blooms and thrives in an environment where all of your actions are caught on surveillance cameras, your voice recorded, and dissidence rewarded with the stripping of your pigmentation--an erasure of sorts--placing you in environs eerily reminiscent of Nazi concentration camps.

While I was hoping for the dark brooding humor that plagues (in a good way) his blog, Peek's Black Sheep--while void of lightheartedness, (this is dystopian after all)--was impossible to put down.

Peek creates a sterile world where your name is your sickness, your Family is your enemy, individuality is prohibited, and nothing is ever what it seems.

It must be review week for me. I've noticed that these things tend to come in groups.

Anyhow, a while back, Miller told me that Black Sheep had ended up as the extra curricular reading in a course out in Texas, if I remember right. For a moment, I thought I should apologise to people, but then I realised that this meant people had to buy my book, and course marks were a suitable bribe. Since the book is pretty much dead, the idea of anyone buying it seems alien and obscure, I decided this was quite a good thing.

Link to Amazon, where you can buy it, review it, recommend it, do whatever with it.

This is John reading Black Sheep.

A critique?

Well, perhaps of what happened when a girl saw him reading it:

I started reading Black Sheep whilst I was sitting at Town Hall station. The lady sitting next to me took a look at the cover and laughed. I guess they should be issuing the book with "adult/mature" covers just like they do for Harry Potter so as to prevent the reader from experiencing embarrassing moments just like I had.

Life, hey?

Black Sheep has been reviewed by Martin Lewis (ninebelow) on Strange Horizons:

Through an accident of history two sub-genres of science fiction have achieved unquestioned literary respectability: post-apocalypse novels and dystopias. They are both forms that are essentially about the struggle for survival; in post-apocalypse works the struggle is primarily physical and in dystopias it is primarily mental. Isao Dazai, the narrator of Ben Peek's Black Sheep, is in a dystopia [1]. He has food, water and shelter but—to use Marx's appropriately science fictional turn of phrase—he is alienated from his species being. He is utterly alone in the world.

...

Just as most post-apocalypse novels boil down to someone wandering around looking for tinned provisions and dodging cannibals so dystopias often follow a basic pattern: a growing awareness of the protagonist's status as a square peg in a round hole, the inevitable confrontation with authority, a desire to escape from the cloying embrace of the state, contact with the rebel underground, a final taste of freedom cruelly withdrawn. (Like post-apocalpyse novels it is inevitable that a dystopia can have only the most tentative "happy ending.") This is the path Black Sheep takes but, rather interestingly, Peek short circuits it in the middle. Dazai's crime is the same as always—dissent—but his punishment is cruel and unusual in the extreme. Subjugated by the state within a hundred pages of the novel, Assimilation strips him of his skin, his face and his personality. Time passes. Fifteen years disappear before Dazai's awareness return. It is a brave move for a writer to skip forward so far in just a handful of pages and one that is successful here. Unfortunately it only throws into stark relief that this boldness is not present elsewhere.

This steers us nicely towards a topic I haven't mentioned so far: race. If you've seen a copy of the book you might be surprised it's taken me so long to get around to this topic, because one of the first things you are likely to think when you read the back cover is that this is a book inextricably linked to the subject. Actually though, it turns out to be little more than window dressing.

...

Black Sheep is told in the first person and the fact that both the quotes above reference Kumiko is not coincidental. She is the only thing that sustains him but, is barely enough to sustain the narrative. Obviously, protagonists need not be sympathetic and it is only the tyranny of the reading group that suggest characters need to be people we can relate to. However, Dazai is very unappealing and he is unappealing in a specific way: he is pathetic. Reading the novel I was put in mind of the bears at London Zoo. Fed and cared for they have nonetheless degenerated once estranged from their natural environment. Like these animals Dazai is listless, apathetic, and fatalistic. There is a thin line between pity and contempt and, like the materially destitute, Dazai initially engenders the former but, through familiarity, it gives way to the latter. Black Sheep offers a portrait that is by turns fascinating and frustrating; for all Peek's skill in delineating Dazai's character there is a weakness to him that makes him and his story unappetising.

Early on in the process of collecting my thoughts for this review one of the words I kept coming back to was "thoughtful." The more I examined it, though, the more I realised it wasn't quite the right word. It captures the tone of the novel but suggests a more active, probing intelligence than that which is apparent here. No, meditative is the right word. In its studied ambiguity Black Sheep shades from subtlety into blandness. In principle you could applaud Peek for drawing no moral and seeking no conclusions but in practice it means that, like his protagonist's skin, his words have been bleached of all colour.

It's an interesting review, I think, and one that's engaging in the content of the book, which I like. In fact, I don't ask for much more in a review.

Lewis' comment where he notes that the three 'pure race' cities is problematic is right, of course. The flaw is what he points out: "What does it mean, for example, to be Asian? Asian here seems to mean broadly South East Asian rather than Subcontinental Asian so someone from Japan is Asian but someone from Pakistan is not. Have over a billion people been simply wiped off the map? What about the Middle East? How does Peek's many-years-hence Race War relate to the current putative Religious War?" It was one of those things that I had problem with while writing, and eventually decided that, if you got caught up on that--in trying to see how it would really work in real life--then the book was never going to function, because it's impossible. Likewise, having any kind of racial purity is ridiculous, too, but that was always kind of the point. The way I dealt with that was to simply tell myself that it was either going to work for you, or it wouldn't, and maybe eight years after having written it, I'd maybe find a different way of that now, but I still think it's the best to just let it go and wait for the reaction.

Other than that, the bit I found most interesting was his comment that race was window dressing, and not terribly important to the book. I've seen the comment before, so obviously it's one that people are getting, and it's been strange to see. I suppose I just never thought people would say it--as an author you sit round and map what you think are the weak points of your work, and you wait for reviewers to identify it, or at least, that's what I do. But that wasn't one I thought of, and maybe it's a cultural thing--the Australian responses to it seem to have gelled with the racial content a lot easier, but maybe it's something else entirely. Either way, it has made for something to enjoy while reading the responses to the work, and what else can you say, huh?

Buy one, I suppose.

Two reviews, both of them by Jeff VanderMeer.

The first comes from his write up of best novels in the year on Locus Online. There, Black Sheep is checked and described as a book that "served up dystopia Pacific Rim-style, in often searing and seering prose."

In Publisher's Weekly, VanderMeer also reviewed the anthology Paper Cities, which contains my story 'The Funeral, Ruined':

Original genre anthologies have been a mixed bag in recent years, with an overreliance on established household names at the expense of nurturing new talent. At times, too restrictive themes have tended to create a sense of sameness. Not so with urban fantasy. As Jess Nevins points out in his excellent introduction, urban fantasy is “a mode of storytelling rather than a subgenre, and as such accommodates a variety of themes and approaches.” This idea of variety, along with a willingness to publish new and established writers alike, helps explain the considerable appeal of this ambitious and entertaining anthology.

Stand-out contributions include Richard Parks's folktale-influenced “Courting the Lady Scythe,” Cat Rambo's ethereal “The Bumblety's Marble,” Jay Lake's sometimes brutal “Promises; A Tale of the City Imperishable” (set in the same milieu as his novel A Trial of Flowers), Ben Peek's more contemporary “The Funeral, Ruined” and Anna Tambour's indefinable but brilliant “The Age of Fish, Post-Flowers.” In Tambour's story, man-eating “orms” threaten New York City, despite the presence of an iconic wall. The nameless narrator's account of her group's attempts to survive is both matter-of-fact and mysterious. Similar elements power many of the other stories: a keen underlying intelligence and an easy acceptance of fantasy, with little explanation of that element, wedded to strangely resonant images and situations.

Not every tale in the anthology is successful. Hal Duncan's “The Tower of Morning's Bones” continues his trend of excessive symbolism, summary and posturing in short fiction. Forrest Aguirre's “Andretto Walks the King's Way,” a forced march of a story illuminating different aspects of a feudal-era society, is an honest effort that never really comes to life. The editor also might have been better served excluding a couple of ill-advised short-shorts like Vylar Kaftan's workplace fantasy, “Godivy.” Yet for all of their flaws, even these stories display a high level of technical expertise and ambition.

Rounded out by very good contributions from Mark Teppo, David Schwartz, Barth Anderson, Catherynne M. Valente and Cat Sparks, Paper Cities is a delightful and absorbing read. In coming years—as the talents collected herein, including editor Sedia, become better known—this quirky anthology may take on even greater significance.

I just thought I'd quote the whole thing, but who is going to argue with being listed as a stand out contribution?

You can buy both Black Sheep and Paper Cities off Amazon. The latter is not yet released, however.

Carrie Laben (teratologist) wrote a review for Black Sheep which is pretty neat:

But with that out of the way, the book shines. Peek takes the standard dystopian furniture, all the ubiquitous cameras and brainwashed grunts and creepy identical houses and small bands of idealistic rebels and the like, and at first he seems to be going down the standard dystopian paths with it. But then he takes several unexpected turns - first into Dick-esque paranoia, and then into a series of confrontations with the fact that the solution to our hero's dilemma isn't as simple as raging against the machine. In fact, there may be no solution at all.

One of the real strong points of Black Sheep is in the characters who collaborate with the government. You have, of course, those who collaborate out of fear, and those who enjoy petty power for petty power's sake. But you also see people acting out of genuine conviction, both genuine conviction that the system is good and genuine conviction that the system is flawed but repairable by people working from within. And people who feel that a series of compromises that allow most people to live a tolerable life, even at the cost of breaking a few eggs, is better than throwing everyone into chaos. And people who just genuinely don't appear to think about politics at all. And, for that matter, people who bitterly oppose the current order - because they want something that is, from our protagonist's point of view, even worse.

Read the rest here. Then you can buy the book off Amazon, or wherever you manage to find it.

(Am currently running a two day workshop for gifted and talented people. My assistant is an unemployed ex principal with a phd, and two masters degrees. I remember when they used to be students.)

"Society has fractured into three supposedly pure race factions and multiculturalism is a crime in this bleak Orwellian debut, set in the far future. After the Culture War more than a century earlier, the United Nations divided the races to prevent violence and bigotry. Sydney, Australia, has become Asian-Sydney, Caucasian-Sydney and African-Sydney, and crossing the borders is strictly forbidden. Isao Dazai, a recent immigrant from Asian-Tokyo, dares to wonder what the other cities are like, despite fearful warnings from his wife, Kumiko. When she turns him in for speaking multicultural heresy, Isao is sent away for Assimilation, a dehumanizing procedure that strips him of his individuality. Thirteen years later, Isao manages to overcome his programming and becomes desperate to confront Kumiko, who has built a political career on her patriotic betrayal. Although the characters rarely rise above the roles of philosophical mouthpieces, Peek sketches chilling images of a future where individuality is deadly and only sameness provides safety."

—Publishers Weekly.

I'm not exactly sure what the deal is with Publishers Weekly, but I got no complaints with reviews like this. I did an interview with them last week, too, though I'm not sure when it'll be up (or printed, whichever way it works).

But hey, you bought the book?

No?

Amazon, Galaxy, or wherever else you want to go. Don't let some nice reviews, a few interviews, and some offers to write here and there fool you: I've still got to sell a shitload and get word of mouth out for it to mean a thing. That be the lesson for the evening.

Over at the newly relaunched for the web Fantasy Magazine, Sean Wallace (oldcharliebrown) has posted the opening of Black Sheep up in the aim of selling more copies of the book--a cause I'm more than happy to help. So I have nicked it to place it here, so you don't have to jump any links.

BLACK SHEEP, Chapter One

I was convicted of being Japanese. It was my only crime, and when found guilty, I was sentenced to Assimilation.

The trial took three hours, and when I arrived at the Assimilation Centre, Sol Demic, cold, grey clouds had knitted the sky tightly together. Beneath them, Asian-Sydney was a wet, grey creature, and its buildings scraped down to the ground alongside the rain, their outline drawn in thin lines of black ink that led to the sidewalks where nine-foot-high drooping lampposts and figures of men and women dressed in grey and shielded beneath black umbrellas waited. I couldn’t see their faces, and they did not look up as I passed. The guard tower on the wall of Sol Demic that I passed as the van entered the gates, was a faceless station, misted grey and blind to me from my position at the van’s window.

The Segregators opened the back of the van a moment later. They were faceless too: hidden beneath smooth black masks that offered only a featureless curve and black glass eyes; the remainder of their uniform was black padded armour, a pistol, nightstick, handcuffs, and leather pouches that weaved along their belts. One was male, the other female. They stared at me as the doors swung open, and then the one on the right—the male—climbed into the van. It sank and rocked beneath his weight as he approached, reaching down to grab the loose chain that held my limbs together.

Outside the van was a barren courtyard surrounded by tall concrete walls, and five towers along it. The sound of traffic seeped over the walls: a small number of automobiles, not much for an average day in Asian-Sydney, but always less in the wet. Such a minor thing, but I would never be aware of it again.

Water ran down my face and one of the Segregators dug a nightstick into my back, propelling me towards the entrance. I went, offering no resistance. There was no point, anyway.

Inside Sol Demic’s halls, neon lights swept over my face. The walls were white, new born but sterile, and there was no sound beyond the stumbling trip of my feet and my chains. The Segregators never said a word, never told me when to turn into a doorway, or when to stop. They used their nightsticks: digging into my back to get me to move faster, slapping my right side to have me turn right, my left to go left.

Eventually I reached a door that didn’t open, and I waited for one of the Segregators to open it.

It had been one hour since my trial had finished.

The Judge, a dour, sagging, sinking past his bones old man, had said: “Isao Dazai, you have broken the United Nations Laws of Nationality. In doing this, you have put the good people of Asian-Sydney in danger of Multiculturalism, a most heinous crime for which we, as People of the World, must be ever vigilant against. The court has viewed the evidence that has been presented before us, and we find that not only are you Japanese, but that you are Japanese with full awareness that you are living in Australia. Your willing embrace of this state, your flaunting of it actually, is nothing less than frightening, and we are forced to worry just what impact you have had on those around you. I am forced to ask myself just how scared your family are, and find myself with no alternative than to recommend counseling for them, while for you, Isao Dazai, I have only one choice. It is the ruling of this court that your punishment be the only kind that can be given to someone of your . . . illness. We find that you will be Assimilated.”

No one had said a word to me afterward.

I did not see my wife, Kumiko, during the trial. I did not know if she had even been present.

They had removed me from the court because I would not walk out. I mumbled questions, whispered pleas, but none of it mattered, and soon the doors to the van were closed, then locked, and in the cold dark, I knelt at the small window and watched as Asian-Sydney passed by all too quickly.

A nightstick jabbed into my spine, pushing me through the now open door and into a small, unfurnished room. The floor was tiled white, and at the other end of the room stood a door, which slid open.

Three men entered. The first two were tall, lean men wearing flowing white coats which billowed in their wake, while the third man, shorter, wore only overalls.

“Ah, here he is, here he is,” said the first of the men, older than the others, and his head completely bald. His narrow face was covered in fine, intricate lines, as if a sculptor had chiseled him. His dark eyes glittered and shone as he stared at me intently, then said, “The chains. Take them off, please.”

The male Segregator bent down, and the lock clicked open. A moment later, my hands and feet were free—though the chains might have stayed, for all the difference it made.

The bald man’s hand curled around my chin, twisting my head from left to right. “How old are you? Thirty, I would guess.” He plucked a strand of black hair out of my head, then murmured, “It is an easier procedure on teenagers and anyone over fifty. Did you know that?”

I could think of nothing to say.

“Sho,” said the man, not turning from my face but continuing to scrutinise it. “Take him to his cell, have him changed there.”

The third man stepped from behind the others. Everything about him was thick and coarse: his lips, eyebrows, overhanging forehead, neck and short, stubby body in his creased, dirty white overalls. Without a word, he clamped his hand around my arm, and dragged me out the doors that he had come through.

I turned once, a slight twist of my head to hear the bald man talking to the Segregators:

“Was his trial quick?”

“Yeah. We had lots on him—”

And then the door slipped shut.

Neon lights passed over me again, and the walls quickly turned in a running, white haze without distinction. The only sound was the rubber squelch of Sho’s soles as he plowed down the corridors, doors sliding open and shut, corners twisting until he had led me deep into Sol Demic.

Eventually we came to a narrow, dead-end, whitewashed corridor that was lined a dozen electronic locks, six on each side. The small catches over the doors were closed, but they must have been full, because Sho dragged me down to the end, where at the last cell on the right side, he punched in a code and, without a word, shoved me inside. The door slithered shut a moment later.

I was alone. I stared at the single bunk with its crisp white sheets and pillowcases, then at the back of the cell, where the toilet sat. The walls were clean—the same whitewash throughout the building, and there was a slender tube of neon light across the ceiling.

There were no windows, no natural light, no noise.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and, shortly, began to arrange my thoughts. Beneath the white ceilings and surrounded by the white walls, my mind filled with the mistakes that led me here and everything that was about to be taken away from me . . .

"With the gravitas of a Margaret Atwood or Kazuo Ishiguro, Peek, in his debut novel, Black Sheep, crafts a quietly horrifying world displaced from ours by a century of time and an implosion of globalist attitudes."




"There’s a clear critique operating here of contemporary Australian society, with its expectation that newcomers leave their cultural background at the door on entry... Black Sheep is one of the more interesting novels I’ve read in recent times."




"This is an angry young book... it blazes across the page with absolute intensity. It’s also one of the most interesting and politically challenging science fiction novels to come out of Australia in a very long time. It’s a novel that has something to say."




Buy it from Amazon and Galaxy Bookstore.

Jeff VanderMeer writes about Black Sheep over on Amazon:

Ben Peek, one of Australia's rising stars of experimental and hard-to-classify speculative fiction, has a first novel out, Black Sheep, from Prime Books. It was released in March, but now is being relaunched with a new push, along with a new cover. Black Sheep belongs to the same "genre" as novels like 1984 and Brave New World, except that it's much closer to home in its details. Peek tells the story of a Japanese immigrant to Australia in the near-future. Living in a segregated ghetto, forbidden to travel to other zones, Peek's protagonist is "charged with the crime of multiculturalism". His name is taken from him and he must struggle through a world of increasingly invasive government bureaucracy and mistreatment.

There's more, so follow the link, and buy the book, if you haven't.

Today is the final day before the English exam in the HSC. The first exam is tomorrow, the second on Monday. Everything not related to this has pretty much ground to a halt for the moment, and likely will do so for a few days after, since I'm that tired.

I didn't work this hard for my HSC.

But then, y'know, I had nowhere I wanted to be after High School, except out. Life was sure simple in those days.

This week has been pretty review heavy on the blog, I've noted, and I figure I'm going to close the week out this way, because it's Buy A Book For A Friend Week, and all of you should be rushing out to buy my poor books for your friends.

Not, you know, that you should need a week to buy books for someone, or donate money to cancer, or help suffering people.

But, if you do, here's some choices:



"With the gravitas of a Margaret Atwood or Kazuo Ishiguro, Peek, in his debut novel, Black Sheep, crafts a quietly horrifying world displaced from ours by a century of time and an implosion of globalist attitudes."



"There’s a clear critique operating here of contemporary Australian society, with its expectation that newcomers leave their cultural background at the door on entry... Black Sheep is one of the more interesting novels I’ve read in recent times."



"This is an angry young book... it blazes across the page with absolute intensity. It’s also one of the most interesting and politically challenging science fiction novels to come out of Australia in a very long time. It’s a novel that has something to say."



Buy it from Amazon and Galaxy Bookstore.



"Ben Peek is a writer I fully expect to blunder out into the scene like a run-away brontosaurus one of these days. He has titanic talent generally leashed to micro-detail projects when his true canvas is probably something much wider and deeper. Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth is a gently experimental text that uses a glossary of terms from A to Z to create vignettes, one-liners, and other supports for loosely connected narratives. Some are funny, some are most definitely not funny. All are lively and deserve your attention."



"I emerged from the book feeling somewhat dazed and exhausted (having read it from beginning to end within a 24 hour period), and I’m not entirely sure what I feel about it. Impressed, certainly. Curious, definitely. A little pissed off... well, maybe."



"What I got from it is this: that truth matters when it matters, and doesn’t when it doesn’t. And that each of us must find our own path as to where that distinction lies. 26 Lies, 1 Truth is an intelligent, playful, funny, challenging, thoughtful and deeply moving work. It is a book filled with outrageous lies. And it is a book filled with truth."



"It ought to fail miserably. But, curse his eyes, Mr Peek has written a fantastic book. And despite its structure, Twenty-Six Lies has a powerful narrative drive. Mr Peek as deftly woven a story into his encyclopedia, complete with character development, unfolding themes, and a hard shock of an ending."



"Quite extraordinary."



"Ben Peek's Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth is a memoir in the form of alphabetical entries, ten or so entries for each letter. The book is also semiotic, social commentary, a meditation on the truth-telling responsibilities of a writer, a part-time comic book, funny as hell, profane, and melancholy. Like the best memoirs it's deeply personal yet engaging and universal. Peek lays out the truths and lies and is smart enough to trust the reader to fit everything together. Powerful stuff. Highly recommended."



"This is a clever, moving, funny and insightful book. I laughed, and I would have cried, but I'm too fucking hard for that sort of shit. See, I understand, relate and empathise with a lot of the truth in this book, the truths I know are true."



"This book is an autobiography. At least some of it is true, for whatever value you like for 'true.' It tells me (or you, or whoever the reader) over and over again not to trust writers. Writers lie. Words, by their very nature, lie.

I know better than to trust this book. I know not to let it seep into my mind, not to take too much too heart what I think it tells me about Ben Peek.

The only trouble is, I don't know how."



"I find myself unable to call it a brilliant book, although there are certainly brilliant bits, and I am instead left to describe it as an interesting book, which is certainly is - through and through."



"Recently I read Ben Peek's Twenty Six Lies/ One Truth. Yes it's full of bluff and bluster, Peek coming across as a hard-ass, and yes, it's very fucking good. There are moments, in fact, of brilliance."



"A bit too clever."



And

"Ben Peek’s Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth is inebriating, an absinthe of self-deception, a smoke-filled room of conflicted emotion, a hall of mirrors, each of them distorting both perception and reality. Ben Peek dances on the stepping stones of Ben Peek’s supposed life, leaping from philosophy to pop culture, from insight to angst. As one reads this remarkable work, the question arises, “what is the line between the art and the artist”? Peek knows. I know. But you cannot know, for certain, until you pick out the lies. Do you trust your judgement that much? Do you trust Ben Peek? What makes you so certain that you can crack the code of Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth? I’d be careful if I were you. Deception awaits."



Buy it from Amazon, Wheatland Press, and Agog.

Clearly, these are your only choices for Pimp Bang!

Er, I mean, Buy A Book for a Friend Week.

Also, they're good for kindling for people in countries currently under military control or suffering from natural disasters.

Tansy Rayner Roberts (cassiphone) reviews Black Sheep on ASif:

I loathed Black Sheep. It’s a long time since a book has made me this angry and frustrated. This is not to say it is a bad book, which it patently is not. Black Sheep is a very good book, which I found utterly horrifying to read.

...

The core event of the novel is Isao’s trial, in which he is convicted of multi-culturalism (ie of being Japanese while living in Australia) and is removed from his life and family. The concept of bring arrested for multiculturalism is quite brilliant, not to mention terrifying, and it is this that makes the novel feel so relevant. It’s just not hard to see Peek’s awful, Phillip-K-Dick-meets-1984 Australia being a natural extrapolation of our current government policies.

This week, the infamous “citizenship test” was officially introduced in Australia, and it seems like Black Sheep is particularly topical right now. I was raised in an Australia that promoted and celebrated multiculturalism (I remember writing an essay on the topic for a national competition at primary school) and I’m just baffled and appalled by the current Government attitude to - well, everything, quite frankly. But particularly our migration policies, which hark back to the old, shameful White Australia policy of decades ago. This is not the 21st century I want to be living in.

So, yes. Peek is pressing all the right buttons with Black Sheep, and reading it made me want to hit things.

The novel falls into three distinct acts: the sinister build up to Isao’s trial, the post-trial years, during which Isao receives a long course of brutal and intrusive mental conditioning, and the final act in which he finds a kind of peace with the country that has treated him so abominably. While the opening act is particularly chilling and evocative, and the third act a little flat and depressing, it is the more experimental prose of the middle act that really made this book stand out for me. We leave Phillip K Dick territory here and end up squarely in Brazil (with shades of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) as Isao suffers a complete mental and identity breakdown. Peek does not shy away from the intensity of this horrific experience, and it is here that his writing really comes into its own. I found it quite emotionally torturous to read, even as I was impressed with the effect of the language. This is not a book for the faint of heart, nor the mentally squeamish.

She sounds angry, doesn't she?

Well, she should, because like Tansy, I remember when multiculturalism was a thing promoted in this country, too, and diversity was something to be celebrated. These days, I don't feel that, and everything feels as if it's retreating into corners, and erecting walls, so that everyone is cut off from the other. Fear the other--some days I think that's what the world says to you.

Anyhow, with yesterday's name checking of of Atwood and Ishiguro, and today's with Dick and Gilliam, I'm not doing to bad with reviews, huh? I keep thinking people are going to miss what the book is about, what with the time it's taken to be released, and all of that, but it looks like that's not happening, at least if the last three reviews from it are to be taken as any indication. Which means we're all good, at least for the moment.

Buy it from Amazon, buy it from Galaxy.

Paul DiFilippo (theinferior4) has written about Black Sheep very nicely:

...[A] lot of this dark-and-dismal literary forecasting is often just atmospheric, setting up dictatorial straw men for the hero to rebel against. Every Luke Skywalker needs his Darth Vader. Only a minority of science fiction dystopias attempt to plumb the real existential roots of oppression, the flaws in humanity's nature that undermine our best attempts at organizing ourselves into social units.

One such arrives now from newcomer Ben Peek. With the gravitas of a Margaret Atwood or Kazuo Ishiguro, Peek, in his debut novel, Black Sheep, crafts a quietly horrifying world displaced from ours by a century of time and an implosion of globalist attitudes. After worldwide racial wars wreak massive devastation, the UN asserts transnational supremacy and divides every major metropolitan area into separate-but-equal enclaves for Asian, African, and Caucasian peoples. No mixing allowed. Multiculturalism is a crime, with transgressors apprehended by the dreaded Segregators. Punishment is Assimilation: the literal bleaching of the offender to a ghost and the implantation of mind-control devices, creating a slave for society's scut work.

It's an ever-potent trope -- Rupert Thomson plumbed a similar schema in his

Divided Kingdom

(2005) -- and Peek puts his anomie-driven hero Isao Dazai, reluctant immigrant to Asian-Sydney, through a Kafkaesque ordeal, carrying the reader along through multiple milieus of this warped world, where the laudable attempt to gain stability has been perverted by totalitarian means.

Never heard of Divided Kingdom, though, so I'm going to go check that in a second. You, on the other hand, should buy the book from Amazon or Galaxy Bookshop or even Barnes and Noble, which is where the review comes from.

Link.

From Jennifer Pelland (jenwrites):

I just finished reading Black Sheep, by Ben Peek, and holy crap, does this book bring introspection and depression to new heights (or lows, depending on how you look at it). I think I'm going to pitch Machine at Prime Books in case they're looking to print something more uplifting.

Beautiful, isn't it?

This might be my favourite comment ever about a book of mine.

(See the things you find when you ego-google.)

From Brendan Connell, who tells you that the poster says, "Create Security."

(Maybe I'll use this and make up some alternate covers that you can put over the book. I quite like the cover for Black Sheep, but you have to admit, this is appalling, and perfect.)

(EDIT: Actually, Brendan is quoting the Italian poster. This one means For More Security. Yes, I know what I'm doing here.)

Black Sheep is author Ben Peek’s first full-length work, following on from his novella-length 26 Lies, One Truth, published earlier this year. Black Sheep, written before the shorter work but published later, deals with some of the same themes, notably racial conflict and questions of identity and individuality. It’s a more traditional work in form and narrative, focusing around the life and troubles of one man, Isao Dazai, as he struggles to come to terms with his place in the world.

...

There’s a clear critique operating here of contemporary Australian society, with its expectation that newcomers leave their cultural background at the door on entry. At the same time, the society presented in Black Sheep is a dystopia in its own right, and gives the feeling of a society which started in the author’s mind as a metaphor, but which burst into something broader and deeper when populated with real people.

This is a good thing, because rather than a black-and-white critique, which might have struggled to sustain interest at novel length, Peek uses the concepts to explore the grey areas, to present us with genuine moral and personal conflicts. The political metaphors are, perhaps, complicated and diluted by this greyness, but the complications give the novel a greater tension and momentum than it might have held as a simpler piece. The conflicts explored are sharpened and given focus by the conflicts within Isao’s own family, and consequently within himself.

...

Despite these reservations, Black Sheep is one of the more interesting novels I’ve read in recent times. The issues it touches on are very relevant, and explored intelligently and thoughtfully throughout. When Peek brings opposing ideologies into conflict via the various characters, he displays the ability to empathise and explore each side of the debate with care and insight. Equally, if not more interesting, are the conflicts the author explores within the protagonist himself. There are no easy answers given, no cheap tickets out of the personal moral dilemmas. It is perhaps the author’s courage to confront rather than shirk complication which ultimately makes the novel work.

As a novel, Black Sheep is flawed but insightful. If you would rather read a book which tackles difficult questions than one which delivers a safe format and subject matter, then you should pick up a copy, and check out a promising debut. There is food for thought contained in Black Sheep which will keep the reader occupied long after the book is done.

Link.

Pretty pleased with that review, since it was what I was going for when I wrote the book, and you can't ask for much more, really, when a reviewer is on the same page as you (so thanks, Ben Payne (benpayne)). Not that I don't mind reviewers on other pages. Anyhow, you can buy the book from Amazon or Galaxy Bookshop.

I did an interview with Brendan Connell (brendanconnell), the author of The Translation of Father Torturo and the Dr. Black stories (well, actually, it's probably more fair to say he did an interview with me).

It's a different interview than the others I've done, in that Brendan and I did it over msn, mostly. Time differences meant we did a bit over email as well, but still, the overall result is that it's much more like a conversation than me getting a set of questions and answering them, which is what usually happens. Also, we cover a lot of different things. It's about Black Sheep, but we talk about 26Lies, A Year in the City, and America, oddly enough. Brendan's blog is pretty cool, too, so you ought to click, and spend some time there. In fact, to help you lazy livejournal people, I created a feed for you all, since I've got it running through my bloglines account and don't need it. I do this because I am magnificent and beautiful.

Link.

Here's an entry on K's Bookcrossing Blog about Black Sheep:

This is not a happy book, but I think it is realistic - not because of the events it portrays but the way it portrays them. For most of the part we see only what Isaao Dazai sees and he creeps to understanding very slowly; the ending is largely unresolved. But - Yo! Dystopian! When was it ever gonna be happy? On the surface 'Black Sheep' is a story about racial segregation, with each city split into three - asian (where most of the action happens), african and caucasian. However in Asian Sydney, caucasians and africans are so remote that they might as well be aliens. Thus segregation occurs on a much finer scale - Asian Tokyo versus Asian Sydney. I think this probably illustrates that people will always look to find differences between each other, no matter how alike they apparently are. In 'Black Sheep' the only people who are truly the same are the 'Assimilated', bleached of all colour and self will.

...

Isaao Desai, a history teacher, is ambivalent about his home city, Asian Tokyo, and even more so about his adopted city Asian Sydney. He's a pawn in lots of games. The government uses him to test out new entrapment laws, his wife uses him to assuage her own guilt, while Peek uses him to explore the rights of the individual versus the benefit to society...

In summary: well written and prose flows nicely. It's not as accomplished as 26 Lies/One Truth but, given 26 Lies is the more recent book, that's probably a good thing.

Still waiting to see official like reviews, but here's this, until they appear, stripped of what might be spoilers.

The book has been fixed, incidentally, and Sean Wallace is waiting for new copies to arrive. All looks good. There might be a few dodge ones in circulation, but, if you want to risk it, you can by the book here, at Amazon, or here at Galaxy Bookshop.

A review for Black Sheep:

Set in a dystopian future, Black Sheep chronicles the downfall of narrator Isao Dazai, who is "convicted of being Japanese" in Asian-Sydney. Multiculturialism is now considered a disease for which the only cure is ruthless segregation. We're in Orwellian territory here, with routine surveillance of citizens by cameras, microphones, and powerful masked Segregators, and a history and culture that's tailored to your ethnic origin, which in turn dictates where you can live.

...

Peek's writing is tolerable but not stellar, and is plagued by repeated homophone errors--"too" for "to" being perhaps the most egregious. The future world is well imagined, if implausible--who watches all the footage? listens to all the tapes?--and there's excellent irony here and there, but the plot relies on at least one far-fetched coincidence and the characterisations are not strong. Isao's character in particular can't carry the narrative.

If you're a fan of dystopias, you'll probably want to add this to your collection; otherwise, it's a suitable read for a train journey or rainy night.

Link.

(The review does have spoilers, though not much, since it's not that big a review. It's a lukewarm one, yeah, but that happens. I guess we can say it didn't work for her.)

Okay.

Now, this post here, this is about the drama around Black Sheep, my novel. Take a pen and note pad. There'll be a test at the end.

Firstly, it is not, generally speaking, my kind of thing to delete posts, but I've done it over the last twenty four hours. Three times, in fact. I did it because the comments were getting a little shit fight like, and my primary concern is not the fight, but getting the book fixed. About twenty minutes ago, I sent a pdf back to Sean Wallace (oldcharliebrown), which noted a few space corrections, but which also noted that everything was looking cool to me. There'll be some fiddling, maybe a bit of time before new books are made--in this case, being POD is a help, since there's no print run to worry about--and then nice, perfectly white spaced books will appear, in a week or so (I have a vague memory of being told Monday, but can't remember for sure). At any rate, this has happened in twenty four hours, across two countries and two time zones. You can't argue with that and I'm not.

Near as both Sean and I can figure, a block of white spacing jumped in some time after I read the last proof. Yes, I did check the proof last time, and yes it was good--baring the comments I made--except for an acknowledgment page, which was missing. Thanking people, it seems, is not one of those things that goes well for me, since after that was inserted, somehow the book got good and messed up. And, of course, after that, when the final version of the pdf came through to me, I checked the acknowledgments page, confident that the rest was fine and it slipped through. It was stupid, but that's how a mistake like this comes through and fucks up the contents of your book. In checking that same pdf yesterday, I could see the mistakes were there, and felt pretty shitty for not proofing that it all over again. Sean missed it to, though, so we'll share an equal bit of blame for it, and ask for you patience, once again, while we fix things quickly. I'm sure when you read the book it will now deliver your children, do your taxes, and give you an orgasm. It's also written on plates of gold, because, frankly, after all the hassle its been for you, me, and the publisher, if its not a gold plated book that gives you orgasms, you might be feeling a little exasperated.

At any rate, it's my hope that we'll be able to organise some kind of compensation for the books that people bought, and which were fucked up.

So, there you go. Drama in day, started and solved, and no bodies, and a book fixed. We're good here.

I did an interview with Vera Nazarian (norilana) about Black Sheep on her blog:

Bright, intellectual, and outspoken, Ben Peek is a Sydney-based author with an attitude. His knife's-edge provocative fiction has appeared in the Leviathan, Agog, and Polyphony anthology series, as well as the Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy. He is the author of the award winning Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth which was published by Wheatland Press. Ben says "The cover won the award." :-)

One thing's sure -- Ben's got a helluva distinctive voice. Be sure to check out his stylish and opinionated blog and his MySpace page.

Sweet introduction, huh?

It's all downhill after that, because I begin talking, but still, be sure to check it out. I talk about this book, the new book, what actors I think should be in the film...

Also, if you've got a blog or website out there, and you want to do an interview thing with me for the book, email me. If you want a review copy, you'll have to hassle the publisher for it, but by all means do so. Make him feel your love.

You can by the book here, at Amazon, or here at Galaxy Bookshop. Buying the book is showing me love. You want to show me love because you all love me.

Remember?

From Kathryn Linge (kathrynlinge):